| Simultaneous participation in various voluntary organizations in later life has become prevalent all over the world. This study advances knowledge about voluntary engagement by identifying the patterns of participation in voluntary organizations (PVO). Based on the human, social, and cultural capital perceptive and social origins theory, this research also examines the influences of individual capital factors and political context on older adults' PVO across five countries.;Using cross-sectional data from the 2014 World Values Survey, I retrieved information on older participants' involvement in eleven types of voluntary organizations across five countries that represent different nonprofit regimes: the United States (liberal), Japan (statist), Sweden (social-democratic), the Netherlands (corporatist), and China (statist/liberal). Both latent class analysis and data-driven descriptive methods were applied to identify patterns in voluntary participation, and multinomial logistic regression with Huber-white estimators was used to examine both individual and national antecedents across five countries.;Three patterns in PVO were identified: inactive, altruistic, and self-oriented voluntary participation. Findings partially support the capital perspective: education, income, employment, and attending religious service were positively predictive of an active participation profile, whereas self-rated health and marital status were predictive in the opposite direction. Findings also partially support the social origins theory: older adults in the liberal regime (U.S.) did not have the highest likelihood of being in active voluntary participation profiles, either altruistic or self-oriented voluntary participation profile. Instead, older participants in the statist/liberal regime (China), statist regime (Japan), and social-democratic regime (Sweden) were more likely to have altruistic voluntary participation and self-oriented voluntary participation respectively than their counterparts in other regimes. Corporatist regimes (the Netherlands) had the highest likelihood of inactive voluntary participation.;Findings suggest that patterns in PVO are influenced by individual factors and macrolevel societal forces, specifically in the nonprofit regimes. The patterns identified in PVO inform population-level interventions and targeted individual-level interventions. In addition, this study contains implications for conducting cross-national comparative research. |
