Falling youth turnout – particularly among those from the poorest backgrounds – has renewed interest in policies that promote engagement with democratic politics among children living through the formative years of their political socialisation. Childhood volunteering has long been viewed as a way of encouraging young people to vote, but evidence supporting that claim was very limited until greater use was made of panel and household data to account for selection effects arising from primary political socialisation (e.g., Taylor 2023; Fox 2023). The limited availability of household panel surveys with data on volunteering and political participation in childhood and early adulthood, however, means that research in this area remains in short supply. The applicability of findings from the US and UK to other political contexts has not been verified, and existing studies have not examined the impact of childhood volunteering on non-electoral political participation; an area of increasing importance given claims that the political engagement of today’s young people is increasingly manifested outside the electoral arena (Dalton 2021; Pickard 2021).

This research uses the Swiss Household Panel to address this gap in the literature. It examines the effects of volunteering in childhood on electoral and non-electoral political activity in Switzerland, while account for selection effects arising from the politicisation of one’s parents. It also examines how the effect of volunteering interacts with primary political socialisation, providing insights as to whether volunteering can reduce inequalities in participation that stem from socio-economic status among current generations of young citizens.