European Philanthropic Behavior Patterns: Charitable Giving, Non-Profit and Welfare Regimes in the European Union

Abstract

The connection that links patterns of phil­anthropic behavior with the organization of state delivery of welfare and the development of civil society has been theorized recently. Off this line of thought we refer to the Esping-Andersen’s well-known welfare regimes: Liberal, Conserva­tive and Social-Democratic (1990), respectively, more recently, to the philanthropic regimes elab­orated by Pennerstorfer and Neumeyr (2017): Liberal, Social-Democratic, Corporatist, Mediter­ranean and Eastern European regimes. In order to test the taxonomy of the non-profit regimes de­veloped by the aforementioned authors, we em­ployed the more recent data of the 2010 74.1 Eu­robarometer. In our approach we classified the 29 countries and territories using the hierarchical clustering technique and identified three main classes of countries, named by us, regimes of philanthropic practices: Regime 1 (Great Givers), Regime 2 (Direct Givers) and Regime 3 (NGO Donors and Volunteers). A comparison of our classification with the one proposed by Penner­storfer and Neumeyr shows similarities as well as the limits of the original taxonomy which can be partly overcome due to the larger and more vari­ate pool of cases. Interpretations of the results in comparison with Esping’s welfare regimes or to the alternative models of Crowding-out and Crowding-in of NGOs by state are also provided.