Introduction

The study of civic and political engagement has often been addressed in the social sciences within altruistic perspectives encompassing prosocial behaviour beyond the narrowed approach of self-interested individualism (Giugni and Passy 2001). Altruism refers to actions and attitudes on social issues revolving around another persons’ well-being. These can be aligned with solidarity beyond one’s own group membership (interpersonal relationships), as individuals or collective acts in defence of the interests, rights and identities of others. Altruism is a freely chosen behaviour that benefits others, a group or a cause. It is typically proactive, requiring resources—time, effort or money—from individuals (Brady et al. 1995; Butcher 2010). Nowadays, this kind of behaviour accounts for a fair share of goods and services provided in modern societies, in form of volunteering or engagement in communities and associations and through the participation in community service programmes. Solidarity practices relate to altruism by underscoring individuals’ willingness to help others in need but also through the contribution to collective endeavours. In addition, the range of solidarity practices include various forms of actions (e.g. donated money, donated time, engage as passive or active member of an organisation, engage in lobbying and advocacy). These actions might be explicitly political when directed to social and political change or civic when directed to social goods and involvement. Societies rely heavily on these forms of solidarity, but how can we account for differences between the solidarity practices (civic and political)? Which types of factors (e.g. socio-economic characteristics, attitudes, networks and resources) promote and trigger these forms of civic and political engagement?

Scholarship has frequently examined volunteering as a form of solidarity-based behaviour. Individuals enact in solidarity towards each other, as a form of prosocial behaviour based on norms of reciprocity and altruism (Manatschal and Freitag 2014). Building upon the analysis of the individual factors that promote this kind of behaviour, researchers have examined: education level, gender, age, race, income, free time and citizenship as “human capital” determinants of volunteering (Wilson 2012; Wilson and Musick 1997). In addition, social capital and cultural factors have been also considered as explanatory resources for volunteering. In the social capital perspective, this is often seen as deriving from embeddedness in social networks, trust and social identification (Stadelmann-Steffen and Freitag 2010; van Deth et al. 2007; Wilson 2000; Putnam 2000). The 2014 Swiss Volunteering Survey showed that at least 33% of the resident population in Switzerland aged 15 and older was involved in at least one form of formal or informal voluntary work. Volunteering has been defined as “any activity in which time is given freely to benefit another person, group or organisation” (Gundelach et al. 2010; Wilson 2000, p. 215). Recent research on the interaction between micro and macro factors has examined cross-country variations or in the case of Switzerland to the expected variance between volunteering cultures and interactions between cantons’ welfare regimes effects—crowding-in and crowding-out (Manatschal and Freitag 2014; Gundelach et al. 2010). Likewise, in Switzerland, the analysis of regional and cantonal associational cultures has been examined through manifestations of direct democracy that are expected to impact the type of organisations within the civil society (Baglioni 2004). It has also confirmed that the propensity to volunteer is highest in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, followed by the French-speaking and Italian-speaking regions (Manatschal and Freitag 2014). Volunteering as a civic form of solidarity practice produces sustained social and community involvement enhancing social networks based on relationships of trust and reciprocity (Putnam 2000; van Deth 1997). Interestingly, in Switzerland, the densities of these networks differ substantially through linguistic and cultural regions.

Besides, people engage socially in a number of ways within and outside of the political domain. A substantial body of research examines citizenship behaviours and emphasises the importance of solidarity practices to respond individually or collectively to social problems and to common goods dilemma. Particularly interesting for our present purposes are the sociological and psychological perspectives on prosocial behaviour. These studies have centred the attention on the individual interpersonal orientations, traits and motivation explaining why and when individuals act prosocially as well as which social mechanisms, as norms, induce towards reciprocal and altruistic behaviour (Fetchenhauer et al. 2006; Simpson and Willer 2015). The analysis on the interpersonal orientations and emotions underscores the importance of empathic concerns when proving assistance to others (Batson 1998; Batson et al. 1983; Flam and King 2005; Flam 1990). In addition, individual traits as general dispositions of personality are presumably fundamental to engage in collective endeavours showing that extrovert people tend to involve more in collective forms of social participation (Omoto et al. 2010). Much of research on prosocial behaviour motivations conclude that actions as volunteering enhance psychological well-being which is associated with a sense of effectiveness and the expression of personal values (Piliavin and Siegl 2007). Motivation refers to the process that determines the initiation, intensity, direction and persistence of a behaviour (Vallerand and Thill 1993). In the following analysis of solidarity practices, individual factors (socio-economic characteristics and attitudes) and social capital factors are coupled with motivations. We inspire on the Volunteer Function Inventory (VFI) by Clary et al. (1998) to assess the function and the orientation of the motivations of the solidarity practices, as self-regarding or other-regarding and to stress the distinction between altruistic and egoistic behaviour. This motivational orientation investigation might shed some light on the “why” and “how” of the solidarity-based behaviour.

As mentioned before the venues for citizens’ participation in collective endeavours are multiple. Given the objectives of this chapter, we will use a simple binary typology to characterise citizens’ solidarity-based engagements as civic or political. Under our study and following Brady’s (1999) definition of political participation, political solidarity practices are actions carried by ordinary citizens to influence some political outcomes that could benefit others, a group or a common cause. On the other hand, civic solidarity practices refer to a wide variety of activities ranging from informal and formal voluntary work to organisational involvement. This definition of civic engagement underscores citizens’ participation collectively or individually to help or to improve the conditions for others or of a community (Ekman and Amna 2012; Adler and Goggin 2005). Obviously, several aspects of this typology are controversial and non-exhaustive. For instance, associational involvement could be characterised as political when referring to activism, however it is characterised as civic when referring to active engagement in charity organisations. We will use this twofold typology for an empirical analysis of citizens’ solidarity practices, focusing on behaviours directed by an intention to influence and assert political demands, to validate the distinction between the two types (Teorell et al. 2007).

Broadly, this chapter analyses the motivational orientations of the solidarity practices and seeks to unveil if these are primarily motivated by other-regarding orientations. Conceptually, it links solidarity practices to civic and political forms of participation following previous research on volunteerism and activism (Omoto et al. 2010; Fraser et al. 2009; Caputo 2009; Caputo 1997). More precisely, it aims to analyse solidarity practices in Switzerland beyond volunteering behaviour. We first identify the forms of solidarity and examine the socio-demographic characteristics, attitudes, social capital and motives of the people engaged in these forms of action. Secondly, we examine whether solidarity is based on interpersonal relationships and social proximity, differing from altruistic concerns. For this purpose, we seek to unveil whether political and civic forms of solidarity-based behaviour are similar across three vulnerable groups, migrants, unemployed and people with disability, or whether we observe differences between forms of solidaristic engagement when targeting one group or another. That is, which factors tend to promote or inhibit generalised forms of solidarity across groups at the individual level? Finally, we investigate regional variations in solidarity practices by comparing the major linguistic regions of the country, namely, the German-speaking, French-speaking and Italian-speaking regions. We therefore also take into account the country’s cultural diversity. We control if belonging to a particular language community impacts civic and political forms of solidarity practices as for volunteering behaviour (Gundelach et al. 2010). We contribute to the literature by inspiring in the Volunteer Function Inventory (VFI) model to understand variations on forms of solidaristic individual engagement when targeting three different beneficiary groups in Switzerland.

Measuring Solidarity Practices: Between Voluntarism and Activism

The conceptual link between solidarity and civic and political engagement has been mainly developed through the lenses of political activism or the study of acts of compassion. Still, these analyses depict solidarity-based behaviour as a connection with others, enhanced by the membership to a group that presupposes some specific duties (Rochon 1998; Wilson 2012). This presupposition of belonging is expected to impact the relationship between the actor and the recipient. As a result, the degree of social proximity and attachment also affects individual motivations and consequently the form of individual or collective engagement (van der Zee 2006). In addition to these factors, social tolerance also plays a fundamental role. Tolerance (social and political) is not limited to the acceptance of diversity but also to the acceptance on equal terms of certain unpopular and target groups (Leite Viegas 2007). Thus, social tolerance as a covariate for explaining solidarity practices (civic and political) relates to individuals’ distance to social groups which is then to be peered to social identification as attachment.

The experimental design of the dictator game implemented by Fowler and Kam (2007) showed that social identification and altruism both trigger political participation. However social identification enhances particularised forms of solidarity, as the norms of reciprocity are stronger within groups than between groups. Still, generosity and unilateral giving behaviours have been shown from other experimental research to cascade individual contributions to public goods (Simpson and Willer 2015; Fehr and Schmidt 2006; Fehr and Fischbacher 2003). The perspective of solidarity as prosocial behaviour based on a sole membership/connection (social identification ) suggests that additional acts of support or compassion that target the well-being of others are mainly driven by an altruistic concern. In line with these two perspectives, we use social identification and social tolerance to better understand in-bond (within-group) and out-bond (outer-group) solidarity. We assume that solidarity practices are related to both particularised concerns (within-group) and to more general altruistic concerns (outer-group).

Hypothesis 1a

Individuals reporting higher levels of social group identification are more likely to engage in activities aimed at enhancing within-group well-being.

Hypothesis 1b

Individuals reporting higher levels of social tolerance are more likely to engage in unilateral giving activities enhancing out-group well-being.

Besides, we argue that social dispositions and attitudes are key to understand prosocial behaviour. The analysis of individual social dispositions allows us to explain how solidarity practices are conditioned to interpersonal relationships of proximity and common experiences or to target-oriented projects beyond interpersonal ties to the immediate community (Rippe 1998). Prior research showed that cosmopolitanism and altruism are associated with redistributional attitudes and political participation beyond interpersonal solidaristic ties (Bechtel et al. 2014). Cosmopolitanism and altruism , as covariates to solidarity practices, are means to other forms of belongings at the margins of the groups, communities and nation-states’ boundaries. Cosmopolitanism refers to an interest towards groups or individuals that are distant culturally or geographically in opposition to localised and interpersonal interest, while altruism refers to the willingness to incur in personal loss to support distant others’ welfare (Elster 2006). We complement the analysis of the in-bond and out-bond solidarity practices by examining how social dispositions explain the possible variance between forms of solidarity-based behaviour across three vulnerable groups (migrants, unemployed and people with disability).

Hypothesis 2a

Individuals reporting higher levels of cosmopolitanism are more likely to engage in activities foreseeing the well-being of undistinguished vulnerable groups.

Hypothesis 2b

Strong communitarian attachment and cultural proximity decrease target-oriented solidarity towards migrants and refugees.

Since we are also interested in the underlying motivations of the solidarity practices, we build upon the behavioural psychological perspective on prosocial behaviour to examine the “why” and “how” of the solidarity-based behaviour (for review, see Fetchenhauer et al. 2006). We follow the argument that the motivational and functional assessment of the action are key to understand how diverse motivations converge into the same form of behaviour. In this sense, the Volunteer Function Inventory (VFI) developed by Clary et al. (1998) showed that individual behaviour embodies various types of motivations and that the distinction between motivational orientations (self- or other-regarding) is associated with the psychological function of the action. For instance, two persons could do the same volunteering work for an association; however, for one individual, the motivation orienting his/her behaviour is mainly the enhancement of his/her professional skills. While for the other individual, the motivation orienting his/her behaviour is primarily the interest in his/her community. As a result, one same action fulfils two contrasting functions related to two distinct motivational orientations at the individual level. In addition, we use the analysis of the solidarity practices’ motivational orientations to examine the distinction between forms of solidarity practices: civic and political. First, in line with Rippe (1998) definition of non-interpersonal solidaristic ties, we argue that solidarity as “acts carried out in order to support others, or at the very least to describe a disposition to help and assist” (Bayertz 1996, p. 308; Bayertz 1999) relates to interpersonal and non-interpersonal relationships. This definition captures a solidaristic behaviour based on generalised and particularised concerns, capturing both communitarian loyalties and altruism . However, it is mainly related to civic engagement as it responds to societal problems, and it does not assert political demands. On the other hand, solidarity as a political practice refers to “a moral relation formed when individuals or groups unite around some mutually recognized political need or goal in order to bring about social change” (Scholz 2015, p. 732). Consequently, the grounded commitment to enhance social change is key to differentiating between solidarity forms, which primarily tend to provide help, services and relief to others or to upraise political voicing—advocacy, products’ boycotting and activism (Stjernø 2012; Scholz 2008). As a result, when assessing the motivational orientations of the solidaristic engagements, we first identify the form, as political or civic, and then we analyse its motivational orientation. The motivational orientations of the solidaristic practices in this chapter are defined within three categories: self-regarding , based on individualistic concerns; community-regarding , based on interpersonal and community concerns; and other-regarding —based on generalised concerns. Previous literature on the motivational orientations assessment has served to distinguish civic forms of volunteerism from political forms of volunteerism as activism . Omoto et al. (2010) showed that other-regarding orientations are a strong covariate to civic and political engagement but that community-regarding orientations are more correlated to civic volunteerism than to activism . In addition, various studies have shown that self-regarding orientations are still important to understand prosocial behaviour because individual motivations are multifaceted. “It appears that many volunteers’ motivations cannot be neatly classified as either altruistic or egoistic, both because some specific motives combine other-interested and self-interested considerations and because many people indicate that they have both kinds of reasons for volunteering” (Clary and Snyder 1999, p. 157). In this chapter, we expect to explain the maximum amount of variance between civic and political solidarity practices based on the distinction between community-regarding and other-regarding orientations while loosely associating both to individual concerns. Additionally, we examine how the motivational orientations account for the variation between the forms of solidaristic individual engagement when targeting three different vulnerable groups. We underscore the importance of the motivational orientations to unveil the support or lack of support to migrants and refugees’ populations confronted to unemployed and disabled populations.

Hypothesis 3a

Individual solidarity practices, civic and political, are partly associated with self-regarding orientations and strongly related to other-regarding and community-regarding concerns independently of the beneficiaries’ populations.

Hypothesis 3b

Differences on solidarity actions across groups are likely to be more associated with community-regarding orientations than with other-regarding orientations.

Also as part of our analysis of solidarity practices, we will control for human and social capital factors. Scholars have tended to confirm the importance of socio-demographic factors and social traits (e.g. age, gender, education, religion, social class) as covariates to assess the conditions for civic and political engagement. Previous research on political participation has identified factors such as income and education as important socio-economic predictors of political attitudes and actions (Dalton 2008). In addition to these, the research on volunteering behaviour have underscored the importance of gender when assessing woman’s role in caring activities; thus we will control for the cultural allocation of women’s role as more emphatic and mainly deploying higher solidaristic behaviour than men (Wilson and Musick 1997; Gallagher 1994). Since Almond and Verba (1963; Verba et al. 1995), survey evidence has generally confirmed that education is linked to civic and political engagement. Likewise, we will control for the covariations related to the impact of people’s social embeddedness and religiosity on solidaristic practices. In this sense, social capital approaches are also of crucial importance, as it is understood to enhance social trust and tolerance (Putnam 2000; van Deth et al. 2007). A large part of the literature has measured social capital through the proxy of trust closely related to social cohesion and solidarity. Social capital has been also related to the establishment of bonds and norms for cooperative endeavours, as shown in studies of the impact of the social capital of migrants on their political participation (Eggert and Giugni 2010; Morales and Giugni 2011; Smith 1999). In this perspective, solidarity practices are mainly seen as norms of reciprocity which link citizens together (Stolle and Rochon 1998).

Data and Methods

Our analysis draws upon a comprehensive eight-country dataset, collected in 2016, within the EU project “European paths to transnational solidarity at times of crisis: Conditions, forms, role models and policy responses” (TransSOL) which aims to measure individual forms and conditioning factors enhancing transnational solidarity in Europe. The dataset sample contains 2221 observations for Switzerland, with its corresponding weights. It matches national quotas on age, gender, region and education. Appendix 1 to this chapter contains all the variables recordings, used in our models. The statistical procedures applied first give a descriptive overview of the dependent variables—civic and political solidarity practices. Secondly, we propose a logistic regression model to assess the effects of the covariates on solidarity practices by target group: unemployed, migrants/refugees and people with disability.

The study examines six binary dependent variables, one for each kind of solidarity behaviour (civic and political) and per target group (unemployed, migrants/refuges and people with disability). We used three questions to measure civic and political solidarity practices (see Table 8.1):

—Have you ever done any of the following in order to support migrant or refugees’ rights?—Have you ever done any of the following in order to support disable people rights?—Have you ever done any of the following in order to support unemployed people rights? (each of the questions had the same seven possible options: “Attended a march, protest or demonstration” and/or “Bought or refused to buy products in support to the goals” and/or “Donated money” and/or “Donated time” and/or “Engaged as passive member of an organisation” and/or “Engaged as active member of an organisation” or “None of the above”).

Table 8.1 Proportions of solidarity practices towards vulnerable groups in Switzerland (in %)
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From these questions, we operationalised three binary civic solidarity practices variables (one per group), in which respondents have stated to engage in at least one of the following actions: “Donated money” and/or “Donated time” and/or “Engaged as passive member of an organisation” and/or “Engaged as active member of an organisation” or “None of the above”, and three binary political solidarity variables (one per group), in which respondents have stated to engage in at least one of the following actions: “Attended a march, protest or demonstration” and/or “Bought or refused to buy products in support to the goals” or “None of the above.” Political solidarity practices clearly refer to unconventional and consumerism political behaviour as defined in the literature (for a review, see Teorell et al. 2007) while civic solidarity practices refer to passive and active forms of social involvement (Morales and Geurts 2007). As mentioned previously in the introduction of the chapter, several aspects of this typology are controversial and non-exhaustive as some forms of social involvement could be considered to have different weights with respect to the extent of the civic involvement. Still, the key distinction for the typology is the intention to influence and assert political demands through the engaged action. These actions might be explicitly political when directed to social and political change or civic when directed to social goods and involvement.

In addition, two key blocks of independent covariates were used to examine civic and political solidarity practices : motivational orientations covariates (self-regarding, other-regarding and community-regarding orientations) and social dispositions covariates (social distance and cosmopolitanism). With respect to the motivational covariates, we used the following question:

People do unpaid work or give help to all kinds of groups for all kinds of reasons. Thinking about all the groups, clubs or organisations you have helped over the last 12 months, did you start helping them for any of the reasons on this list? Choose up to 5 reasons that were most important to you. Please select at least 1 and a maximum of 5 answers (seventeen possible options).

Then we performed factormat, a factor analysis of a correlation matrix, using a tetrachoric matrix of correlation of the 17 items, to group the items within three categories: self-regarding, other-regarding and community-regarding concerns. As a result, self-regarding motivational orientations refer to: “I wanted to meet people/make friends”; “I thought it would give me a chance to learn new skills”; “I thought it would give me a chance to use my existing skills”; “It helps me get on in my career”; “I had spare time to do it”; “It gave me a chance to get a recognised qualification”. Other-regarding motivational orientations refer to: “I felt that it was a moral duty to help others in need”; “I felt that it was important to help because I might be in a similar situation sometime”; “It’s part of my philosophy of life to help people”; “It’s part of my religious belief to help people”; “It’s part of my philosophy of life to help people”; “I wanted to improve things/help people”; “The cause was really important to me”. Community-regarding motivational orientations refer to: “I felt there was no one else to do it”; “My friends/family did it”; “It was connected with the needs of my family/friends”; “I felt there was a need in my community”.

With respect to the social disposition covariates block, we focused in two key measures. First is social distance, an 18-item additive scale, measured with the following question:

Please say whether you would mind or not having each of the following as neighbours? (items correspond to 18 target groups, e.g. migrants, people suffering from AIDS, left wing extremist, right wing extremist etc. in which the higher score corresponds to large social distance and low social tolerance)

Secondly, we used two questions to capture two dimensions of cosmopolitanism, cultural openness and attachment to humanity. We operationalised cosmopolitanism as cultural openness referring to multicultural appraisal:

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: It is a good thing to live in a multicultural society. (5—item answer: 1—Strongly disagree, 2—Disagree, 3—Neither, 4—Agree and 5—Strongly agree)

And we operationalised cosmopolitanism as attachment to humanity using the following question:

Please tell me how attached you feel to the world/humanity? (5-item answer: 1—Not at all attached, 2—Not very attached, 3—Neither, 4—Quite attached, 5—Very attached).

Besides, we used several other measures to capture the factors that may predict the probability of engaging in solidarity practices. These predictors include a battery of socio-demographic covariates and attitudinal covariates defined in the Appendices (1 and 2) and discussed in the regression model session. Finally a descriptive overview of the proportion and distribution of civic and political solidarity practices (see Table 8.1) shows that two thirds of the individuals have engaged to support the rights of people with disability, while only a third have engaged to support migrant or unemployed people’s rights. The disability field is the most ‘crowded’ field in terms of solidarity engagement. It has the largest share of social capital (as membership to organisation) doubling the other fields. Also within the disability field, we observe that the most frequent form of engagement is donating money (42%). Conversely, this field seem to be the least contentious; protest-oriented practices are the lowest for disability. Still political solidarity practices are higher than in the other two fields. With regards to solidarity practices, donating money and political consumerism are the most relevant practices. These results are in line with previous analysis on volunteering and associational involvement. Pay-check involvement seems to be very strong in Switzerland where people tend to donated money to more than two associations on average (Morales and Geurts 2007).

Civic Versus Political Solidarity Practices : Explanatory Logistic Model

In this section, we propose six logistic regression models to assess the effects of human, social, motivational and contextual covariates on civic and political solidarity practices by target group. We regress six binary dependent variables, one for each kind of solidaristic form per target group: unemployed people, migrants and refugees’ groups and people with disability. Custom to all models are a block to control for socio-demographic covariates effects, which include (age, education, gender, income and living with children); a block of social and political covariates (discuss politics and meet with friends) to account for the effects of interpersonal ties on the solidarity practices; a block of motivational orientations covariates (self-regarding, other-regarding and community-regarding motivations) to investigate the process that facilitates the initiation and orientation of the solidarity behaviour; a block of attitudinal and social dispositions covariates (social distance, social trust, fairness, attachment to country and to humanity, religiosity, multicultural appraisal and xenophobic attitudes) to account for the variation in social dispositions of the individuals engaging in solidarity practices; and lastly we also included a block of contextual covariates for the three main linguistic regions of the country to control for the linguistic cultures effect in the solidarity behaviour.

In general terms, the three civic dependent variables refer to 1 when in engaging in at least one form of civic action per target group—for example, “Donated money” and/or “Donated time” and/or “Engaged as passive member of an organisation” and/or “Engaged as active member of an organisation.” Equally the three political dependent variables refer to 1 when engaging in at least one form of political action per each target group—for example, “Attended a march, protest or demonstration” and/or “Bought or refused to buy products in support to the goals.” For interpretative purposes, the six logistic models are presented as odds ratios instead of log odds, which express the odds variation of the dependent variable for each unit of change in the covariates. With respect to the overall explained variance, the civic models of solidarity have the highest explanatory power, more specifically the model explaining the civic support to migrants and refugees counts for 15% of the overall variance, while the other two are limited to 9% (see Pseudo-R 2 in Tables 8.2 and 8.3). Similarly, the political model concerning migrants and refugees’ support counts for 12% of the overall variance, while the political unemployment support model counts for almost the 9% and the political support model towards people with disability explains 5% of the overall variance.

Table 8.2 Logistic regression models on civic solidarity engagement strength (odds ratios)
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Table 8.3 Logistic regression models on political solidarity engagement strength (odds ratios)
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The models concerning the civic practices of solidarity per target group show that the socio-demographic covariates have mainly a positive effect on the dependent variables, but the odds are scarcely relevant (see Table 8.2). However, being a woman has a significant and negative effect on civic support practices towards unemployed people. Also individuals with high income tend to engage 1.5 times more than low-income individuals when supporting migrant and refugees’ groups. The social and political covariates are positive and fairly significant when explaining civic support towards unemployed people and people with disability, but still their odds coefficients are less revealing. With respect to the motivational covariates as presupposed in our Hypothesis 3a, self-regarding and other-regarding motivations are relevant to explain civic forms of engagement through all the groups, nevertheless the other-regarding motivations have a stronger explanatory power and positive statistical significance. Likewise as assumed in Hypothesis 3b, community-regarding motivations are positive and statistically significant when explaining civic support towards unemployed people and people with disability, but against our expectations these are still somehow relevant to explain civic support towards migrants. Within the block of attitudinal and social dispositions covariates, we have two types of significant effects: negative effects concerning strong communitarian attachment and xenophobic attitudes towards other cultures and positive effects related to cosmopolitanism and religiosity. More in detail, in line with our Hypothesis 2b, communitarian attachment and xenophobic attitudes negatively impact solidaristic behaviour to support migrant and refugees. Likewise, as partly presupposed in Hypothesis 2a, cosmopolitanism (as multicultural appraisal and attachment to humanity) is positively associated with civic forms of solidarity. Still this is only relevant to explain civic solidaristic behaviour towards migrants/refugees and people with disability. The cosmopolitanism variables were unable to capture the well-being of vulnerable groups as undistinguishable, as they did not have a significant effect across all three groups. Also religiosity, as expected and tested in other research, is positively related to civic practices. In addition, we can confirm Hypothesis 1b when describing civic solidarity practices across the three beneficiary groups, social distance does have a negative and significant impact on civic forms of engagement towards migrants. Finally, with regard to the contextual covariates, these are significant and negatively associated with civic support towards migrant and refugees. On an average, people in Swiss-French regions tend to engage 0.6 times less than in Swiss-German region when supporting migrants; within the same field, people in the Swiss-Italian region tend to engage 0.5 times less than in the Swiss-German region. These contextual results are particularly interesting as they show that the linguistic cultures in Switzerland impact solidarity practices negatively when target oriented to migrants as solidarity recipients.

As for the civic models, the socio-demographic covariates have significant effect in predicting political solidarity practices , but these are scarcely relevant (see Table 8.3). Only gender and income have a significant and relevant effect to explain political solidarity practices. Being a woman has a significant and positive effect when supporting migrants and refugees—women engage 1.3 times more than men in this kind of actions. In comparison to civic models, the high-income covariate has a reverse effect; individuals with high income tend to engage less when politically supporting migrant and refugees’ groups. This suggests that income has undistinguishable positive effect across groups when examining civic solidarity practices . However, income affects negatively the particularised political solidarity support toward migrants. Previous literature results on political consumerism underscored income as a key variable to explain forms of consumerism (Stolle and Micheletti 2013) and some approaches on protesting behaviour considered income to be no longer a preoccupation because of post-materialist values (Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Yet, with these results we could advance that unconventional and political consumerism practices are negatively dependent on income when describing internal variations between generalised and particularised forms of political solidarity.

The political covariates are positive and statistically significant when explaining political support towards migrant, and social covariates are only relevant to explain political support towards people with disability. With respect to the motivational covariates, Hypothesis 3a is confirmed; other-regarding motivations are the most relevant to explain political forms of engagement through all the groups. The other-regarding motivations have a stronger explanatory power and statistical significance. Additionally as presupposed in Hypothesis 3b, community-regarding motivations are positive and statistically significant when explaining political support toward unemployed people and people with disability, but these are not relevant to explain political support towards migrants. Within the block of attitudinal and social dispositions covariates, we continue to have two types of significant effects, negative effects concerning strong communitarian attachment and positive effects related to social trust and religiosity. Also as presupposed in Hypothesis 2b, attachment to the country negatively impacts solidaristic behaviour to support migrants and refugees. Yet, country attachment is still negatively associated with political support to unemployed people. On the other hand, religiosity continues to have a positive effect when supporting politically vulnerable people. For both types of actions civic and political, religiosity patterns are clearly consistent with the volunteering literature. Lastly, Hypothesis 1a and 1b are confirmed, as social distance has a significant negative impact when explaining political forms of solidarity towards migrants and refugees and not across all three beneficiary groups. Finally, with regard to the contextual covariates, in contrast to the civic engagement models, contextual covariates have no significant impact on political solidarity practices .

Findings

Differentiating Civic and Political Solidarity Practices

The results reported in Tables 8.2 and 8.3 show that motivational orientations account for the variation between civic and political solidarity practices . The psychological perspectives on prosocial behaviour have allowed us to evaluate the function and orientation of the solidarity behaviours. We have showed that solidarity practices are primarily motivated by other-regarding orientations even though individual motivations are multifaceted (Clary and Snyder 1999). Hypothesis 3a suggested that civic and political solidarity practices are associated with other-regarding and with community-regarding concerns independently of the beneficiaries’ populations. However, our analysis shows that this is the case only for civic solidarity practices . Political solidarity practices with respect to motivational orientations are more complex. First, all political solidarity practices presuppose a strong dependence on other-regarding concerns, while the other two motivational orientations are dependent on the target group (beneficiaries). Second, we were expecting to confront political solidarity practices against civic solidarity practices through the analysis on community-regarding orientations. To our surprise the models showed that community-regarding concerns do not explain the variation between political and civic solidarity-based behaviours as for volunteerism and activisms (Kleres 2017; Omoto et al. 2010; Miller and Krosnick 2004; Caputo 1997) but the variation of political solidarity engagements between the groups as partially suggested in Hypothesis 3b. Thus, we underscore the importance of the motivational orientations to unveil the support or lack of support to migrants and refugees’ populations confronted to unemployed people and to people with disability. In our particular case, we could suggest that the differences on political solidarity actions across these three groups are associated with interpersonal ties to the community. More precisely, the marginal effects on the civic and political forms of solidarity (see Figs. 8.1 and 8.2) corroborate that the motivational orientations effects are relevant to both kinds of practices independently of the reference group. However, with respect to this block of covariates, the other-regarding orientations have the strongest marginal effect, while the other two orientations covariates translate into differentiated solidaristic support across groups.

Fig. 8.1
figure 1

Marginal effects on civic solidarity practices by target group. Note: Marginal effects for each model in Table 8.2. The horizontal lines indicate 0.95 confidence intervals

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Fig. 8.2
figure 2

Marginal effects on political solidarity practices by target group. Note: Marginal effects for each model in Table 8.3. The horizontal lines indicate 0.95 confidence intervals

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In addition, the marginal effects in Figs. 8.1 and 8.2 also highlighted the relevance of the social dispositions covariates to examine civic and political solidarity practices , especially with regard to the support to migrants and refugees’ populations. The social dispositions were used to understand how the degree of social identification and attachment to a group affect forms of individual engagement, because the membership to a group presupposes some specific duties. In our models when controlling for social distance, attachment to country and cosmopolitanism, we confirmed Hypothesis 1b and showed that social distance relates negatively to civic and political solidarity practices almost independently of the beneficiary group. Still, the model also confirmed that social identification is strongly significant only to solidarity-based behaviours towards migrants and refugees’ groups. As a result, civic and political forms of solidarity unveiled that high levels of social identification enhance within-group well-being concerns, while decreasing out-bond solidarity towards other vulnerable groups specially migrants.

Finally, our analysis showed that general altruistic concerns are negatively correlated to social identification and attachment to a group. Yet, cosmopolitanism as covariate to solidarity practices in opposition to localised and interpersonal ties showed that other forms of belonging at the margins of groups, communities and nation-states boundaries are only relevant to understand civic solidarity practices towards migrants (Hypothesis 2b). Against Hypothesis 2a cosmopolitanism captured important variation across the support to the well-being of our three target groups. So how should one interpret the strong association between cosmopolitanism and solidarity-based behaviour only towards migrants and refugees? One possibility is to argue that communitarians forms of belonging are robust in the other two cases, so the civic or political mobilisation to support unemployed or people with disability is rooted in strong interpersonal ties of reciprocity within the community which give little place to cosmopolitan forms of belonging.

Concluding Remarks

People engage socially in numerous ways within and outside of the political domain. Solidarity practices are ways to respond individually or collectively to social problems. Substantial body of research have examined citizenship behaviours and emphasised the importance of prosocial behaviour to contribute to collective endeavours. Through the chapter, we have argued that these actions might be explicitly political when directed to social and political change or civic when directed to social goods and involvement. The study of civic and political solidarity practices in Switzerland has allowed us to analyse solidaristic behaviour in a twofold process within and at the margins of group membership perspectives. Our analysis refers to the impact of social dispositions and motivations to understand prosocial behaviour, beyond the narrow scope of self-interest. We have confirmed that socio-demographic factors as well as socio-political attitudes are relevant to explain various forms of prosocial behaviour but that social dispositions and motivational orientations seem to be the key triggers for civic and political solidarity practices. More precisely, following the motivational and functional assessment proposed by the VFI model, we have corroborated that the motivational orientation effects are multifaceted. In this sense, we have shown that solidarity practices are not only motivated by other-regarding concerns but strongly driven by these. And we have shown that in contrast to one of the major distinctions between volunteerism and activism , political solidarity practices are also driven by community-regarding orientations. Precisely, the community-regarding orientations seem only to account for the variations in political solidarity-based engagements across groups.

In addition and pertinent to our analysis was the differentiation between civic and political forms of solidaristic behaviour. They have shed some light on the covariation between other-regarding and community-regarding orientations to explain target-oriented support to groups which embodied spatial referencing (migrants). Variations between civic and political solidarity actions across the three vulnerable groups, unemployed people, people with disability and migrant and refugees’ groups, have been associated with interpersonal ties to the community, which increase social identification and decrease out-bond solidarity towards other vulnerable groups specially migrants. Finally, the chapter results also point toward complementary research venues. We could investigate the role of interpersonal ties, altruistic and emphatic concerns on solidarity practices. This particular analysis will robust the community-regarding orientations taking into account interpersonal measurements of community ties. Secondly, we might need to complement our analysis of cosmopolitanism by analysing other forms of social identification and belonging—for example, ethnic- or gender-driven identities, regional identities and/or European identities—to show how these could enhance solidarity practices beyond the prescribed duties to a specific national community.