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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]

Why are states not able to resolve their disputes short of costly conflict? Fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose to develop and test a theory of opinion formation in which individuals? normative beliefs about equality and hierarchy in economic and social relationships fundamentally affect their preferences for specific government policies. [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]

Boom or Bust: Impact of the EU enlargement on future integration of Europe [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberalism now suffers from excess individualism. Citizens believe they owe nothing that they did not contract to give. I argue that our obligations to our fellow citizens arise not from individual contract, but from systemic commitments. [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]