Can Social Capital Account for Differences in Political Participation Across American Cities?

This paper questions the links between social capital and political engagement, arguing that previous work in the field is characterized by a gap between the theory of social capital and empirical tests of the effects of the concept. The paper outlines how social capital might be more fruitfully measured and operationalized as a community-level attribute and then tests a number of the claims made about the connection between social capital and individual political engagement by analyzing data on participation in American cities. Preliminary results indicate that once we control for political institutions there is relatively little variance in the dependent variable across communities left to be explained by social capital. That is, much of the evidence for a social capital explanation of political participation evaporates once we control for institutional and other contextual factors. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]