What Determines Social Capital? Evidence from Slavery’s Legacy in the United States and Brazil

Abstract

What determines social capital? Prior scholarship has examined what causes social capital to change contemporaneously but has yet to assess how history influenced social capital’s development. Building on previous research, which posits that former slaveholding regions exhibit lower levels of social capital, I test two competing explanations of how social capital developed. The inequality hypothesis argues that a reliance on plantation slavery created economic inequality, which in turn diminished modern social capital; the attitudinal hypothesis argues that the abolition of slavery influenced mass political attitudes, which have transmitted over generations and diminished modern social capital. To test which is correct, I examine slavery’s impact on social capital, measured as interpersonal trust, in two countries—the United States and Brazil. I find evidence that slavery is negatively associated with social capital; an individual’s support for interpersonal trust can decrease by as much as 18 percent in regions with high levels of former slavery. Moreover, it is the attitudinal hypothesis—not economic inequality—which associates with social capital’s decline.

Capital Punishment and the Legacies of Slavery and Lynching in the United States

“…For example, Africans whose ancestors were more heavily raided during the slave trade are less trusting today (Nunn and Wantchekon 2011). Both Brazil and the United States, areas with a greater extent of slavery historically, have lower social capital today (Uttermark 2019). Globally, slavery and related colonialist practices have inhibited contemporary economic development in the areas where they were practiced by producing and replicating extractive political/economic institutions (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001).…”

The Legacy of Slavery and Contemporary Racial Disparities in Arrest Rates

“…William Levernier and John White (1998) document a negative association between slavery and contemporary county poverty rates. And Matthew Uttermark (2020) observes a negative association between slave dependence and aggregate levels of interpersonal trust or social capital.…”

“…1 More recently, researchers have expanded the scope of this work by using quantitative methods to investigate slavery's legacy, particularly in the South. This "legacy of slavery" scholarship finds slavery exacerbates contemporary economic racial inequalities (Bertocchi and Dimico 2012;Curtis and O'Connell 2017;O'Connell 2012O'Connell , 2020O'Connell, Curtis, and DeWaard 2020), political racial inequalities (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen 2018), and racial inequalities in education and health (Bertocchi and Dimico 2012;Gabriel et al 2021;Kramer et al 2017;Reece and O'Connell 2016), and is negatively associated with aggregate interpersonal trust levels (Uttermark 2020).…”