The Importance of Social Capital for creating a Civil Society

What produces social capital? According to one definition, social capital refers to aspects of the network structure, such as social norms and sanctions, mutual obligations, trust, and information transmission, that encourage collaboration and coordination between friends and strangers alike.

Social capital is thus embodied within specific social settings: what we are calling  ~CulturePlaces~.

According to another definition, it is a person’s social characteristics - including, for example, the watch one wears - that help us reap both market and nonmarket returns from interactions with others, but that cannot be evaluated without knowledge of the social structure in which we operate.

Whether an attribute of an individual or a society, social capital is produced by individuals’ participation decisions. An individual can increase the number and depth of connections with others, but the value of those network connections depends upon the extent (both quality and quantity) of others’ participation. Social capital therefore depends both upon individual socioeconomic and demographic characteristics and upon the characteristics of a given society.

The Threat of Diversity

Over the last 10 years, a number of empirical economic papers have studied the consequences of community heterogeneity, and all of these studies have the same punch line: heterogeneity reduces civic engagement. In more diverse communities, people participate less as measured by how they allocate their time, their money, their voting, and their willingness to take risks to help others.

Data from U.S. cities, metropolitan areas, and urban counties show that the share of spending on such productive public goods as education, roads, sewers, and trash pickup is inversely related to the area’s ethnic fragmentation, even after controlling for other socioeconomic and demographic characteristics.

When interpersonal contact is high, people prefer to be with others like them. Controlling for heterogeneity explains anywhere from one-third to almost all of the declines in volunteering, membership, and trust among people ages 25 to 54. Among older Americans both membership and trust declined, with the largest declines in membership occurring in the late 1980s, which coincides with increases in immigration. This decline in group membership can only be explained by one variable: heterogeneity.

Can diversity ever increase civic engagement in community organizations that cut across ethnic, racial, or income divisions? If people realize that their skills are complements, then they will seek out individuals different from themselves to work together to achieve a common goal more effectively. If a community fair will generate more revenue for the local school when there are diverse food offerings from every culture, instead of endless Apple Betties, then more parents will be pressured to become involved and more will agree to do so.

Social capital, then, is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to involvement in a group.

The most prominent figure in this field, Harvard professor Robert Putnam, has described social capital as: "...features of social life - networks, norms, and trust - that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives... Social capital, in short, refers to social connections and the attendant norms and trust."

The term "social capital" is increasingly used by policymakers as another way of describing "community", but it is important to recognise that a traditional community is just one of many forms of social capital. Work-based networks, diffuse friendships and shared or mutually acknowledged social values can all be seen as forms of social capital.

History and culture

Putnam’s seminal study in 1993 of regional differences in Italy found that large variations in the effectiveness of Italy’s regional governments were explained not by their resources or structures, but by regional differences in social capital. Putnam argued that the success of the Northern Italian regions lay in the rich social fabric of vibrant associational life of those regions in contrast to the "amoral familism" – a distrust of strangers combined with strong family bonds - that typified the more backward southern regions.

Putnam’s analysis linked these very longstanding cultural differences with historical events going back up to a 1,000 years. He saw the vibrant civic life of the North having its roots in the northern city-states of centuries earlier. In contrast, the culture of Southern distrust he saw as rooted in a history of invasion, oppression, in closely related ancient traditions of patronage and in the hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church.

The sense that a community, region or nation’s social capital is stable over time has been reinforced by subsequent work. An illustration of this stability over time is the finding that the large regional differences in social capital across the USA today correspond fairly exactly to the differences in social capital between the nations from which the ancestors of today’s Americans came.

For example, the area around Minneapolis and St. Paul – the area of highest social capital in the USA – was populated with Scandinavians. Something has persisted over more than five generations, and separated by 1,000s of miles and different political structures, to explain why both the residents of Minnesota and the Scandinavian nations today remain so connected and trusting.

A similar stability is seen at the neighborhood level. Sociologists have long noted how the social character of neighborhoods generally remains stable over decades, even though the population is continually changing. This stability over time suggests that a community or nation’s social fabric reaches a stable equilibrium. This is to be expected from theoretical modelling work that shows how it is rational to trust and cooperate in a community of like-minded others, but not in a community of the untrustworthy, and that such equilibria are stable over time.

Social structures and hierarchy

Social structures that are strongly hierarchical or unequal appear to form a poor soil from which to grow social capital, and the consequences of these settlements echo through the generations. Hence one finds that the impact of the relatively hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church is not limited to the South of Italy. Similarly, nations and regions that experienced high levels of slavery are today regions with markedly low levels of social capital and trust (such as the Southern US States).

Ethnic and social heterogeneity.

There is considerable evidence that social and ethnic heterogeneity is associated with lower levels of social capital, not only between groups but within them. Largely unpublished US data suggests that this may be one of the most powerful explanations of local and regional variations in social capital.

This controversial finding is difficult to interpret. After all, the bridging between groups that eventually reduces long-term conflict cannot easily occur if those groups are not in contact. What really needs to be established is what factors facilitate the growth of social capital in contexts where the starting point is characterised by strong ethnic and social fissures.

In our programs, we'll be on the look out for ways that different groups have built those bridges, however fragile...

Steve Sailer has a more up-to-date (July, 2007) overview of the Putnamian perspective on VDare

FURTHER RECOMMENDED READING

E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century

The Third Place way

Social Capital Blog