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A study of the recent literature on social capital since Putnam, and a consideration of the links between this literature and the main works of Tocqueville. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social capital theory, particularly the work of Robert Putnam, has received a great deal of scholarly and popular attention. We argue that Putnam?s formulation ignores the ways in which race is fundamental and constitutive to the structure and function of social capital in the United States. We suggest an alternative framework, one that focuses on the effects of social relations. Such a framework: (1) treats race as more than an independent variable; (2) addresses the structural factors underlying social capital development; and (3) includes the role of gatekeepers in the process. This approach would allow us to have a more accurate, and nuanced, understanding of how social capital operates in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between social capital and support for democratic principles, performance and institutions in Japan, with specific focus on the effects of different types of civic associations, as well as urban-rural differences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of social capital and postmaterialist values both have respectable genealogies in the social sciences. They are often seen to covary in particular ways, but these relationships are generally considered spurious, attributable to various intervening or antecedent variables. This paper seeks to specify an independent and direct relationship between generalized trust (akin to "bridging" social capital) and postmaterialism on the one hand, and particularized trust (akin to "bonding" social capital) and materialism on the other. In order to test these claims and properly control for rival hypotheses, a hierarchical generalized linear model is employed using data from the fourth wave of the World Values Survey (released May 2004). The data provide strong support for both posited relationships. In light of these results, opportunities for future research are enumerated and discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to conduct a comprehensive empirical study of the ways in which social capital is present and facilitates the undemocratic ends of organized crime groups in Russia. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines and evaluates arguments about how, and in what way, various societal institutions foster higher levels of social capital across the industrial democracies and the American states. The principal finding is that, contrary to much e [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial patterns of crime and health suggest that neighborhoods matter. Organized neighborhood groups may create social capital, affecting health. We propose and test a theory of such groups' effects on the incidence of violent trauma in Phoenix. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social capital theory holds that the topology of interpersonal relationships---as distinct from anonymous, market-based transactions---can affect societal productivity, broadly defined. Most of the extant literature assumes (or derives) that such rel ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study finds causations between the micro level of individuals' social capital and the macro level of politics, correlations among different tiers of social capital, and combined effects of social capital elements at the macro political life. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While civil society and social capital are so often considered essential to democratic consolidation, in Russia, the emergence of bad civil society and the failure of social capital to adhere are increasingly deterring democratic development. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study shows that consensus types of democracies are more effective than majoritarian democracies in producing bridging social capital in heterogeneous environments. It also incorporates the effects of regime longevity into the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We construct a novel structural model for the purposes of testing for the presence of spillover effects from social capital. There is a disconnect in the social science literature as to whether social capital is an attribute of individuals (as typically modeled in economics and some sociology work) or an attribute of communities (as in the political science, sociology and public health disciplines). However, existing empirical work on coimmunity social capital simply uses aggregations of individual attributes to measure community level social capital (e.g., Putnam 20000); such measures may simply proxy for unobserved individual attributes. Consequently, there is currently no evidence that social capital is an attribute of communities (or groups). We develop a strutural model that allows us to test whether individual trust and membership in voluntary organizations are determined by community level trust and membership (ie, are there spillovers from social capital?). We estimate these equations simultaneously in a SUR framework; we also instrument for community level trust and membership using other community level attributes. Finally, because we are working with mmultilevel data, we correct for the clustering of observations at the community level. This work represents not only a major advance in the methods applied to social capital research, but also the first systematic evidence that community level social capital spills over and influences individual level social capital. The substantive importance of this finding is that it generates plausible instruments for identifying teh treatment effect of social capital on various outcome variables of interest, including voter turnout, trust in government, employment, and health status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common claim made about school choice is that choice leads to an increase in education-related social capital among choosers. A number of studies have shown that social capital is higher among choosers than among nonchoosers. However, there are serious selection bias problems with this claim. Those who choose to choose and generally higher on measures of social capital before the a school choice is made. It is, therefore, difficult to determine if this elevated social capital is is due to select selection or due the choice. Various strategies have been test the alterantive hypothesis of selection bias, such as matching schools, controls for background factors and Heckman type selection statistical models. We propose to test the selection bias hypothesis somewhat differently. We have detailed measures of both general social capital and educated-related soical captial for a charter school parent sample and a traditional school parent sample. Our charter school sample has parents with children in a charter school ranging between one and four years. Using these data, we propose to investigate the extent to which choice increases education based social capital, general soical capital, and what effect, if any, does experience (measured in years a student is in a charter school) impact on social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]