Theory: Social capital is the web of cooperative relationships between citizens that facilitates resolution of collection action problems (Coleman 1990; Putnam 1993). Although normally conceived as a property of communities, the reciprocal relationship between community involvement and trust in others is a demonstration of social capital in individual behavior and attitudes. Hypotheses: Variation in social capital can be explained by citizens' psychological involvement with their communities, cognitive abilities, economic resources, and general life satisfaction. This variation affects citizens' confidence in national institutions, beyond specific controls for measures of actual performance. Methods: We analyze the pooled General Social Surveys from 1972 to 1994 in a latent variables framework incorporating aggregate contextual data. Results: Civic engagement and interpersonal trust are in a tight reciprocal relationship, where the connection is stronger from participation to interpersonal trust, rather than the reverse. All human communities confront collective action problems.' Collectively, societies are better off when their members cooperate with one another to achieve common goals. Individuals, however, face incentives to behave selfishly, seeking the benefits of cooperation without paying the costs. Well-known solutions to the "inescapable conflict between the interests and desires of individuals and the requirements of society" (Wrong 1994, 36) include Hobbes' Leviathan, Marx's ruling class, Weber's Protestant ethic, Parson's normative consensus, and Freud's superego (Elster 1989; Wrong 1994). Recently, scholars in sociology, economics, and political science have converged on the concept of "social capital" as a comprehensive explanation for why some communities are able to resolve collec-*Thanks to Dan Lipinski for research assistance. Rahn acknowledges the support of Duke University and NSF grant GER 9450110. We thank John Aldrich, Sam Popkin, Robert Putnam, George Rabinowitz, Tom Smith, and Eric Uslaner for helpful comments, and Jim Stimson for access to his data.
Given the importance that generalized social trust plays in various theories of American society, recent evidence of its low levels among younger people portends ominous changes in American civic life. Using survey data collected from high school seniors over the last 20 years, this paper examines the origins of social trust among young people and the causes of change in beliefs about trust over time. Such changes could not be accounted for by the explanations for declining trust offered in other accounts of social capital. An alternative explanation, based on the theoretical accounts of Alexis de Tocqueville and Emile Durkheim, is that materialistic values may be undermining young people's views about the trustworthiness of others. Both aggregate time series correlations and an individual-level model show that the rapid rise of materialistic value orientations that occurred amongAmerican youth in the 1970s and 1980s severely eroded levels of social trust. The paper concludes with some observations about the likely trajectory of American democracy, given the kinds of trends observed in the youth data.
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