Trends in Civic Engagement in Australia

Abstract

A longstanding debate concerns whether civic engagement is in decline in the advanced democracies and whether this forms part of a crisis of democracy. This paper situates Australia within this debate by providing a broad overview of the state of civic engagement in Australia. To do so, this paper analyses data from the World Values Survey with a focus on voluntary association memberships. The results show that civic engagement in Australia is high in comparison to other democracies around the world. Although civic engagement is relatively high, it has declined to some degree over the past few decades. There is considerable variation in who participates in civic life, with the university-educated and those on higher incomes more likely to be members of associations. This suggests that the benefits of civic engagement are not distributed evenly across the population. Ongoing data collection is needed to continue to track Australia’s civic engagement over time, in comparison to other countries, and across different indicators of engagement.