Social+Capital+and+Politics

FOR: CRS 10/11/10 Summarized by Kate **Main point:** Social capital should be treated as an endogenous variable rather than an exogenous variable, and studies that don’t do this are wrong. In other words, the independent and dependent variables are mixed up: economic and political realities create the current social capital which is subject to change as economic and political conditions change - social capital is not a timeless ‘cultural’ thing that is able to impact political and economic outcomes. **Definitions of social capital:** Coleman (1988, 1990): it is ‘obligations and expectations… the information-flow capability of the social structure, and norms accompanied by sanctions.’ It is characterized by a public good aspect that leads to under-provision. Putnam, Fukuyama, and Inglehart all emphasize the trust and social networks that are a part of social capital. **Recent work on social capital (that Jackman and Miller think have gotten it all wrong):** Putnam – says that social capital ‘improves the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions’ and does studies of how social capital allows for rotating credit associations in Japan, and have led to more or less regional government in other areas. Fukuyama says that trust is necessary in order to have good economic performance and growth. Harrison Inglehart Weber – who says that Protestantism is beneficial to Capitalism Almond and Verba – who claim that certain social attributes are better at creating democracy è Problems: All of these accounts assume that (1) there is such a thing as a ‘coherent value cluster within societies’; (2) culture is durable (doesn’t change); (3) social capital is treated as an exogenous variable, capable of influencing other outcomes. **Jackman and Miller’s argument:** ‘The key limitation of these arguments stems from their attempt to repackage social capital as a cultural phenomenon. ‘ -In contrast, if you treat trust as endogenous, you can ask which institutions would generate social trust, assuming that levels of social trust and capital are amenable to change, and thus you can actually introduce policy prescriptions to influence them. -Indeed, certain political institutions can help create social capital – for example, where the government protects private property, societies will invest more in the economy and there will be more growth. -Look at social capital as resulting from rational cost/benefit analyses of actors – where there are incentives to establishing a long-term reputation for trust, there is an incentive for individuals not to cheat (sort of like how in repeated iterations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, there is a rational incentive to cooperate even where in a single game there wouldn’t be). Jackman and Miller claim that the two approaches cannot be combined because they stem from very different assumptions, and because one of them is just wrong. They then go on to critique the work of authors who see social capital as endogenous. The key faults that they find are: (1) ‘research design problems of temporal ordering’: that often social capital is measured after the period of growth that it is used to explain – so, for example, you say that social capital surveys from 1990 explain the economic growth in a region from 1920-1990. (2) The measures of social capital are biased – authors pick only those questions that support their conclusion, even where equally available evidence points to contradictory conclusions. Specifically, they rip into Putnam’s work, and especially his Bowling Alone thesis from pages 60-65.
 * Jackman, Robert W. and Ross A. Miller (1998), Social Capital and Politics. //Annual Review of Political Science// 1: 47-73.**