Rain or Fog? An Empirical Examination of Social Capital’s Rainmaker Effects

Abstract

Building on the work by Robert Putnam (1993, 2000) and others, most authors using the social capital concept assume that civic engagement and generalized trust influence each other and that jointly they influence the functioning of democracy and therefore trust in political institutions. Brehm and Rahn (1997) have examined this theory at the individual level. Their analysis finds reciprocal relationships between civic engagement and generalized trust as well as between these two elements of social capital and trust in political institutions. Other researchers, however, have challenged this conclusion (see Mayer this volume). Stolle (2001) shows that people who belong to voluntary associations for a longer period of time do not trust other people to a greater extent. According to Stolle, self-selection effects explain the observed relationship between civic engagement and generalized trust. Trusting people more often join voluntary associations, rather than the reverse, and she concludes that the main reason we find voluntary associations to accommodate more trusting, more open and more civicly engaged people has to be attributed to self-selection (Stolle 2001). Newton and Norris (2000) reach similar conclusions for the relationship between generalized trust and trust in political institutions. They argue that “people’s confidence in public institutions is only weakly associated with generalized trust, and its associations with voluntary activism is even weaker” (Newton and Norris 2000, 64; cf. Newton 1999).