What drives charitable donations of time and money? The roles of political ideology, religiosity, and involvement

• A sample selection system of charitable giving of time and money is estimated.
• Roles of political ideology, religiosity, political and social involvement are highlighted.
• We find no evidence that political conservatives are more charitable than political liberals.
• Adverse impacts of political conservatism are exacerbated by increasing importance of religion.
• Charitable actions are found to be both practice-driven and ideology-driven.

We use data from the first wave of the Panel Study on American Religion and Ethnicity to estimate a multivariate sample selection model of charitable giving of time and money highlighting the roles of political ideology, religiosity, political and social involvement, and diversity in personal relationships while controlling for other factors commonly identified in the scholarly work on philanthropic behavior. Our findings provide no evidence that political conservatives are more charitable than political liberals as advanced by Brooks (2006). To the contrary, our results suggest that at least in terms of volunteering, political conservatives are less charitable than political liberals. We also find evidence that the adverse impacts of political conservatism on charitable behavior are exacerbated by the increasing importance of religion/religious faith in one's life. These results, together with robust findings of significant and positive independent effects of other participation, involvement, and diversity variables, imply that charitable actions are both practice-driven and ideology-driven and somewhat at odds with the findings of Vaidyanathan et al. (2011).