This paper examines patterns of volunteering during COVID-19 in different areas of civil society and demographic groups in Denmark. The aim is to understand how differences in the areas of civil society's political resources and organizational settings, and different barriers to volunteering of demographic groups, relate to variation in the levels of volunteering in periods of the pandemic with different lockdown measures. Using two cross-sectional surveys from spring 2020 (n = 3,497), and spring 2021 (n = 1,692), and a four-round panel dataset (n = 1,340), we measure changes in volunteer participation during the first year of the pandemic. We find significant drops in volunteering within most areas. While the level of lockdown correlates strongly with changes in volunteering, differences between areas of civil society point to the importance of variations in political resources and organizational settings for explaining which areas recovered fastest in the re-opening of society. Additionally, declines in volunteering did not differ significantly across demographic groups.

This article systematically analyses the inner circle of the coalition that governed Chile between 1990 and 2010. To this end, it takes the notion of ‘technopol’ and transforms it into a sociological category by clearly identifying the nature of the ‘technical’ and ‘political’ resources of 20 agents who served as ministers and undersecretaries in key government posts. Over two decades these agents provided the governing coalition, the Concertación, with a form of collective leadership. The article thus shows that only this small group of powerful agents can be termed technopols since only they exhibited ‘tech’ and ‘pol’ resources as well as a particular form of political competence, making it possible to differentiate them from technocrats and politicians.