This dissertation explores whether institutions can impact civic engagement. Specifically, I look at the impact of families, the paid labor market, state-level civic service education policies, and the military. Most studies of volunteering focus on individual motivations and characteristics that drive volunteering. However, institutions can affect a person's motivations, skills and resources. Institutions like these can help to overcome some of the barriers to volunteering by providing people with the resources and skills necessary for volunteering, socializing people with values and motivations that support volunteering, or providing the social networks where people can be asked to volunteer. The data that I use to examine this question come from two sources—the 2003 Philanthropy Module of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the 2002/2005 September Volunteering Supplement of the Current Population Survey. My methods include logit and tobit regression analysis. The primary findings of this dissertation are that institutions do matter when it comes to volunteering, but that some institutions only have a weak effect on volunteering or that they only impact specific subgroups of the population. Of all the institutions studied, families have the strongest influence on volunteering; people are more likely to volunteer when others in their family also volunteer. For women, being employed was associated with greater volunteering. Some state-level high school volunteering policies impact the volunteering of males. Military service impacts the volunteering of minority veterans, married veterans, and older veterans. The results of this dissertation show that the relationship between institutions and volunteering is very strong for families, but weaker for other institutions. The relationship between participation in institutions other than the family and volunteering is complex because institutions do not impact the volunteering of all people equally.