Opening the Black Box of Social Capital Formation

Abstract

T his paper introduces a rational choice model for multiple kinds of participation to empirically investigate several theoretical determinants of social capital (SC) formation. The framework is rich enough to investigate the importance of individual variables, social/peer effects, endogenous trust, political-institutional, and inequality factors as sources of participation. We show that the aforementioned contextual factors explain SC formation for Chile, but their relative importance varies for each kind of participation. Our second application compares individual-level determinants of SC formation among the largest democracies in the Americas. Gender, age, education, and race show heterogeneous effects across countries. Overall, negative interpersonal trust shocks generate participation increments, and possibly motivate engagement in trustworthy networks. Idiosyncratic factors behind participation and trust are positively correlated, suggesting a common SC stem that manifests in multiple ways. Hence, our empirical approach to SC formation uncovers factors hidden by assumptions in some previous literature.

Municipal Governance, Environmental Management and Disaster Risk Reduction in Chile

“…Inspired by the literature on consensus democracy and decentralisation (Freitag, ; Andersson and van Laerhoven, ) and the Chilean context (Valdivieso and Villena‐Roldán, ), the third hypothesis states that when mayors win elections by a large majority and enjoy strong support in the municipal council, they are less likely to prioritise expenditure on EMDRR. There are no visible results of such expenditure; they do not attract further funding and they are unlikely to affect electoral support for the incumbent mayor.…”

“…Social participation and relationships between local governments and society represent another source of different outcomes. Although there is disagreement about how social capital should be defined and measured and on how it is formed (Woolcock and Narayan, ; Pelling and High, ; Valdivieso and Villena‐Roldán, ), it is widely believed to have a positive influence on development and EMDRR at the local level (Adger, ; UNDP, ). Many scholars (e.g.…”

Race, inequality, and social capital in the U.S. counties

“…Due to its wide utility and implications, researchers of various fields have extensively explored the effects of social capital. Relatively speaking, however, less scholarly attention has been paid to what accounts for the formation of social capital with a few exceptions (e.g., Brehm & Rahn, 1997;Freitag, 2006;Kumlin & Rothstein, 2005;Valdivieso & Villena-Roldan, 2014).…”

Do victims of crime trust less but participate more in social organizations?

“…Indeed, the paper by Glaeser et al (2002) is a prominent study. For Chile, Valdivieso and Villena (2014) provided an interesting analysis of the formation of social capital.…”