Human Capital, Social Capital and Voting Participation: A Racial Perspective.

Voting participation has long been a focus of American democratic theories. Putnam (2000) provided a sociological perspective, while Verba et. al. (1995) and traditional literature on political participation emphasized the political and economic perspectives. Based on Putnam's social capital thesis, it is important to look at an individual's social network. If the network is broken, so is the individual's drive to participate. From the traditional voting literature, however, one needs to focus more on "human capital" (SES) and "political capital" (e.g., parties and interest groups, and racial group as mobilizing political units). We test these hypotheses based on human capital variables and social capital variables, in addition to other controls such as age, internet usage, gender and immigration status. We test both between group differences and within-group differences with GSS data which provides a national sample for racial groups. We use the Bayesian approach to solve some of the methodological problems, especially the issue of missing data and under sampling for minority groups. The most important finding is that while both social capital and human capital are important for white voting participation, for blacks only bonding social capital measured by church attendance is the most important factor in enhancing political participation. SES, on the other hand, does not explain black voting participation. We conclude that social capital does explain voting participation. The utility of social capital theory, however, must be put in a racial context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]