Working-class adults are less vocal and visible in many political processes. To find out why this is the case, this paper contributes to research on class and politics by focusing on socialisation during youth. Previous research highlights how lower social class origins decrease electoral participation, with societal individualisation lowering social capital and social control, as well as by decreasing resources. We focus specifically on the role played by volunteering: existing research articulates that volunteering increases political engagement. In this paper, we bring together these bodies of research, and assess whether volunteering mitigates the social origins gradient. We expect that volunteering may do so by compensating the lower social resources of those born from working class parents. To test this hypothesis, we rely on panel data from Germany (German Socio-Economic Panel), and use longitudinal analysis approaches to examine the gradient in electoral participation driven by parental social origins and political socialization, how volunteering during the "impressionable years" affects electoral participation on its own, and how they interact together. We find that (1) working-class children are less likely to vote as adults than children from higher classes of origin, (2) volunteering increases electoral participation overall and (3) volunteering during youth leads to more electoral participation of working-class children, almost fully compensating for the social origins gradient. Propensity score matching and several robustness checks corroborate these results. This pattern highlights that these De-Tocquevillian schools of democracy may mitigate inequalities in the political domain determined by social origins.
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