The Correlates Of Public Giving

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“THE CORRELATES OF PUBLIC GIVING”
An Analysis of Population Size and Charitable Giving
Through The Lens of 33 Vermont Towns

CONTEXT & THEORY:

A study performed by the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy in 2001 clearly found a relationship between the size of a municipality and the amount of charitable donations made by that municipality. The relationship found illustrates smaller towns as partaking in giving behavior more, but ultimately donating less. However, this particular study defined “small towns” as towns with 15,000 people or less. Clearly, there is gap that needs to be filled. What about towns of 5,000 people or less?
The examination of “democratic possibility” begs the question of whether the data from the Canadian study really says anything about the altruistic behaviors of smaller communities. Do citizens who have the opportunity to participate in direct democracy on a small scale act in a more philanthropic manner than citizens in larger, representative municipalities? Vermont towns immediately come to mind for observing the behavior of giving in smaller communities. More importantly, the real question becomes can ordinary people govern themselves and do they have the ability to better their community through direct democracy.
The starting point of this analysis is the report published by the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy. Starting with their study, it becomes important to define how to measure actual giving and, from there, do small localities really donate less? However, the ultimate goal of this study is to further investigate the relationship between community size and public giving while controlling for possible confounding variables such as median family income and municipal tax rate. Essentially this will be a more concrete, empirical examination of altruistic behavior on a smaller, citizen-driven scale.
The ultimate result will hopefully be an insight into what major variab...