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Social capital, lobbying and community-based interest groups

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Abstract

Recent discussions of social capital within the public choice literature have tended to focus on its role in solving collective action problems and promoting political accountability. Consequently, two areas of inquiry remain underexplored: (1) the role social capital plays in facilitating lobbying and rent seeking, and (2) the possibility that the availability of government resources can cause community-based groups to re-orient their stocks of social capital away from mutual assistance and toward lobbying and rent seeking. This article examines the relationship between social capital and lobbying in New Orleans’s post-Katrina recovery.

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Correspondence to Emily Chamlee-Wright.

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The authors would like to thank Randall Holcombe, Christopher Coyne and Peter Leeson as well as the participants in the “State and Local Public Choice” conference at Florida State University, February 2011 and the participants in the “Promoting Development (or Not)” session of the 2010 Southern Economic Association Annual Meetings, Atlanta, GA, for useful comments on an earlier draft. The authors would also like to thank the Mercatus Center at George Mason University for generous financial support.

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Chamlee-Wright, E., Storr, V.H. Social capital, lobbying and community-based interest groups. Public Choice 149, 167 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-011-9834-7

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