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Conducive contexts: The impact of collective and individual social capital on democratic citizenship

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Abstract

Social capital is considered to be crucial for democratic politics. Its benevolent consequences can be attributed to two substantively different modes of social capital. Understood as an individual property the impact of social capital will be mainly restricted to those who command these resources. A much less researched approach depicts social capital as a collective good; that is, as a property of distinct societies whose impact everybody will feel. The main question of this study is: How do these individual and collective modes of social capital influence democratic citizenship in Western democracies? Multi-level modeling is used to test the impact of the two distinct modes of social capital, as well as their interactions using survey data for 28 democracies extended with indicators for collective social capital. The analyses show that living in a country rich on social capital contributes to democratic citizenship beyond the positive effects of individual social capital. Moreover, especially environments richer on collective social capital activate citizens with high levels of individual social capital are more to be politically active than less equipped environments. Apparently, those who are already privileged in terms of individual social capital will profit most from a social capital rich environment.

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Notes

  1. Obviously, distinct characterizations of social capital can also be based on the presumed directions of potential effects (bonding versus bridging, positive versus negative, connected versus isolated, good versus bad forms). Since our interest here is on the impact of different modes of social capital we do not distinguish between specific forms.

  2. Data and questionnaire of the ISSP (2004) study are available at: zacat.gesis.org/webview/index.jsp?object=zacat.gesis.org/obj/fStudy/ZA3950.

  3. For instance, analyses based on data on social capital used by Freitag and Kirchner (2011) from 134 regions in 14 European countries shows that 83 per cent of the variation exists across countries and only 17 per cent can be found across regions.

  4. Data and questionnaire of the third wave of the WVS are available at: www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/articles/folder_published/survey_2000.

  5. Other studies of the contextual effects of political culture (for example, Welzel and Deutsch, 2012; Welzel, 2013) use a national average of the individual-level composite measure of cultural values. However, the collective aspect of social capital consists in its spread across the country, rather than in the country’s central tendency that does not need to indicate the level of prevalence of such culture among the public. Moreover, social capital does not have a single-peak distribution clustered around the mean (see Welzel and Deutsch, 2012). The analyses run with the country averages of the individual-level indicator of social capital from the ISSP citizenship data show substantively the same results as presented in this study.

  6. Obviously, these four indicators of democratic citizenship are positively but modestly correlated (bivariate correlations are for most combinations are lower than 0.17), which indicates that the indicators selected are not redundant but cover different aspects of democratic citizenship. Although political opinion leadership and non-electoral participation correlate stronger (r=0.33), we keep them as separate concepts because other literature has emphasized differences between them and, more importantly, because our study also shows different effects of collective social capital on the two outcomes.

  7. Data are obtained from the International Monetary Fund available at: www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2011/02/weodata/index.aspx.

  8. Data are obtained from the ‘Democracy Timeseries Data’ available at: www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Data/Data.htm.

  9. As in other nonlinear probability models the variance of the residual variance at the individual level is fixed at a constant. The residual variance at the individual level signifies a scale factor 1 (i.e. that the model is assumed to hold precisely), which in case of a binomial distribution translates into π 2/3=3.29 (Hox, 2002, Chapter 6).

  10. The likelihood-ratio tests comparing the log-likelihood of the models show that, with the exception of Model I for political opinion leadership, Model III are significantly better than Models I and II. Specifically, the statistics testing Model I nested in Models III are for political satisfaction 31.60***, for voting 31.11***, for non-electoral participation 29.87***, and for political opinion leadership 0.0617. The statistics testing Model II nested in Model III are for political satisfaction 712.77***, for voting 154.40***, for non-electoral participation 1110.80*** and for political opinion leadership 182.27***.

  11. The likelihood-ratio tests comparing the log-likelihood of the models show that Model IV are significantly better than Models I, II and III. Specifically, the statistics testing Model I nested in Model IV are for political satisfaction 104.69***, for voting 53.80***, for non-electoral participation 226.82*** and for political opinion leadership 28.57***. The statistics testing Model II nested in Model IV are for political satisfaction 785.86***, for voting 177.09***, for non-electoral participation 1307.75*** and for political opinion leadership 198.83***. The statistics testing Model III nested in Model IV are for political satisfaction 73.09***, for voting 22.69***, for non-electoral participation 196.95*** and for political opinion leadership 16.56***.

  12. Figure 1 is hence constructed on the basis of a different model than Model IV presented in Table 1. Model IV includes both individual and collective social capital as quantitative variables, which cannot be graphed as predicted values (only marginal effects can be graphed; figures of all marginal effects can be obtained from the first author). From this reason, a modified model using individual social capital as a categorical variable was run (not displayed) and used to create Figure 1.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. In undertaking some parts of this research, the first author gratefully acknowledges funding from the Czech Grant Agency (Grant ‘Protestors in Context: An Integrated and Comparative Analysis of Democratic Citizenship in the Czech Republic’, code GA13-29032S).

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  1. Mannheim University, A 5, Mannheim, 68159, Germany

    Kateřina Vráblíková & Jan W van Deth

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  1. Kateřina Vráblíková
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Correspondence to Kateřina Vráblíková.

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Vráblíková, K., van Deth, J. Conducive contexts: The impact of collective and individual social capital on democratic citizenship. Acta Polit 52, 23–42 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2015.25

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