Mary Alice Haddad's Politics and Volunteering in Japan is an ambitious project that builds and empirically tests a model of civic participation that accounts for variation in the types of voluntary organizations and the rates of community participation in them within the same country and cross-nationally. The Community Volunteerism Model posits that patterns and rates of volunteering are products of citizens' ideas about where responsibility for caring for society lies—with government or the individual—and governmental practices that support or inhibit volunteering. Embedded voluntary organizations (e.g., PTAs and neighborhood associations) that work collaboratively with the state prevail in communities where citizens believe that the state bears responsibility for caring for society, while nonembedded voluntary organizations (e.g., Greenpeace) that work independently of the state dominate where citizens believe in individual responsibility. Where governmental and social institutions legitimize volunteers and provide organizational support and funding, community rates of voluntarism will be high; they will be low in communities where these practices are underdeveloped or absent.

Haddad encourages political scientists to readjust the analytical lens through which we view state-society relations. Comparative studies of civil society that use rates of volunteer participation in nonembedded associations as their primary measure of civic engagement are “systematically biased in favor of the types of participation found commonly in the United States and against those commonly found in Japan” (p. 35). By this measure, Japan is a global laggard given its level of economic development and length of democracy. The prevalence of embedded associations in Japan is inconsistent with dominant opinion that civil society should be free of state intervention. By taking embedded organizations seriously, previously overlooked and undervalued patterns of voluntary participation and connections between state and society become visible, and we broaden our range of tools for strengthening civil society and democracy. As a corrective to the static view of civic engagement in existing research, Haddad's model “captures the dynamic interaction between citizen ideals of civic responsibility and the practices of governmental and societal institutions … to uncover developing trends in civic engagement and explain why patterns of volunteer participation are changing” (p. 162).

In the framing chapters, Haddad meticulously defines terms and lays the theoretical groundwork for the Community Volunteerism Model. The book's conceptual clarity makes it a model for how to conduct sound empirical work in comparative politics. Chapter 2 presents data on patterns of volunteer participation around the world to place Japan in context while developing the project's central hypotheses. Communities (countries) where citizens think the government should be a key actor in solving social problems will have more volunteer participation in embedded organizations. Conversely, communities (countries) where citizens think that individuals should solve social problems will have more volunteer participation in nonembedded organizations.

Chapters 3 through 5 develop and test the model with case studies of volunteer fire departments (embedded organizations), volunteer welfare commissioner systems (embedded organizations), and eldercare volunteers (nonembedded groups) in three communities in Japan. In these chapters, Haddad develops another arm of her argument: government practices matter as much as citizens' ideas in determining the rate of participation in volunteer groups. Rates of volunteering are higher when governments use formal tools (legal status and protection, provision of public space and monies) and informal ones (public recognition ceremonies) to support volunteer organizations. Chapter 6, the final content chapter, tests the model cross-nationally, and finds that it captures patterns of volunteering in the United States, Japan, Finland, and Turkey.

When Haddad subjects the Community Volunteerism Model to quantitative tests to achieve generalizability, data limitations emerge. I will provide a specific example of a general problem. In chapter 5, Haddad acknowledges a dearth of subnational data on citizens' ideas about state versus individual responsibility for caring for society (p. 114). Consequently, she uses two NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) survey items as proxies for the WVS (World Values Survey) item used to measure attitudes in national samples earlier in the book (chapter 2). The first item, an individual's desire to volunteer to help the elderly or disabled, is a proxy for support for nonembedded organizations (and individual responsibility). The second item, the desire to participate in local projects or festivals, is a proxy for support for embedded organizations (and state responsibility). Having established a correlation between national distributions of attitudes on responsibility for society's care (A) and membership patterns in embedded/nonembedded organizations (B), Haddad assumes that the NHK survey items measuring individual attitudes (C) are appropriate proxies for B, and uses C to make inferences about A—the underlying attitudes about the role of the state versus the individual. Cracks appear in a central claim—the relationship between citizens' attitudes about volunteering and governmental practices around volunteering is reciprocal (p. 31). Neither B nor C are sufficient to establish A. The presence of embedded/nonembedded associations does not impact citizens' attitudes; the governmental and social institutional practices that surround the associations do. Problems with proxy variables re-emerge in chapter 6 when Haddad uses attitudes about private versus governmental ownership of business and industry and the tradeoff between maintaining social order and protecting individual freedom to determine the proper balance between individual and governmental responsibility for society's care in Finland and Turkey (p. 134).

These methodological flaws are minor compared to the analytical leverage that Haddad's model contributes to the study of state-society relations. Prior work on individual civic participation was unable to explain why communities with highly educated and wealthy individuals do not always have the highest rates of voluntarism while less well-resourced communities have voluntarism rates that exceed the sum of their parts. Haddad urges policy planners to think about how to enrich communities, an easier task than increasing the income and education level of each individual. Haddad's work will guide future endeavors to collect better data and develop better measures to model how the dynamic relationship between state and society shapes patterns of civic and political engagement.