The empirics of social capital and economic development: a critical perspective

This paper provides an introduction to the concept of social capital, and carries out a critical review of the empirical literature on social capital and economic development. The survey points out six main weaknesses affecting the empirics of social capital. Identified weaknesses are then used to analyze, in a critical perspective, some prominent empirical studies and new interesting researches published in last two years. The need emerges to acknowledge, also within the empirical research, the multidimensional, context-dependent and dynamic nature of social capital. The survey also underlines that, although it has gained a certain popularity in the empirical research, the use of “indirect” indicators may be misleading. Such measures do not represent social capital’s key components identified by the theoretical literature, and their use causes a considerable confusion about what social capital is, as distinct from its outcomes, and what the relationship between social capital and its outcomes may be. Research reliant upon an outcome of social capital as an indicator of it will necessarily find social capital to be related to that outcome. This paper suggests to focus the empirical research firstly on the “structural” aspects of the concept, therefore excluding by the measurement toolbox all indicators referring to social capital’s supposed outcomes

Individuelle und kontextuelle Determinanten der Teilhabe an Sozialkapital. Eine Mehrebenenanalyse zu den Bedingungen des Engagements in Freiwilligenorganisationen

In diesem Beitrag fragen wir nach Bedingungen, welche die Beteiligung in Freiwilligenorganisationen als Horte sozialen Kapitals beeinflussen. Neben individuellen Merkmalen stehen dabei vor allem die politischen, gesellschaftlichen und ökonomischen Rahmenbedingungen individueller Wahlhandlungen im Mittelpunkt des analytischen Interesses. Die Einflüsse der Individual-und der Kontextebene werden simultan in unterschiedlichen Mehrebenenmodellen geschätzt. Es wird deutlich, dass sich Mitgliedschaften in Vereinigungen nicht allein auf individuelle Eigenschaften, wie ein ausgeprägtes Vertrauen in andere Menschen, einen hohen Bildungsgrad, eine starke Kirchenbindung, eine innige Verbundenheit mit der Nachbarschaft, ein mittleres Alter oder das männliche Geschlecht zurückführen lassen. Darüber hinaus erleichtern zudem ein katholisches Umfeld sowie insbesondere direktdemokratische Beteiligungsmöglichkeiten das Engagement in Freiwilligenorganisationen

Association membership and generalized trust: are connections between associations losing their value?

Research linking civic engagement to citizens’ democratic values, generalized trust, cooperative norms, and so on often implicitly assumes such connections are stable over time. This article argues that, due to changes in the broader institutional environment, the engagement-values relation is likely to generally lack temporal stability. We investigate this empirically by analysing the engagement-trust relation using World Values Survey (WVS) data from the 1990 and 2000 waves. Overall, our results show that voluntary association memberships remain positively associated with generalized trust in both samples, but evidence that memberships in connected associations are better than in isolated ones appears, at best, scant in more recent years