Social Capital and European Democracy

Marco Maraffi, Kenneth Newton, Jan Van Deth, Paul Whiteley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415186308
• eBook ISBN: 9781134664269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The authors of this work examine the dominant view that voluntary activity promotes social capital and hence good government, but also explore alternative models for the creation of social capital. Theoretical discussion is combined with detailed case studies to provide a new explanation of:
* the origins and nature of social capital
* its effects on political participation and policy-making
* the role of the voluntary sector
Contributors go on to examine the possibility that current changes in the voluntary sector may in fact undermine social capital and consider the consequences.
This book is an important step forward in this rapidly growing field of research and adds a unique European perspective to a debate which has been largely US-focussed.

Part I
Theoretical perspectives on
social capital

1
Social capital and democracy in modern
Europe

Kenneth Newton

those, who liked one another so well as to joy n into Society, cannot but be supposed to have some Acquaintance and Friendship together, and some Trust one in another.

(John Locke, Second Treatise on Government)

THE NATURE AND ORIGINS OF SOCIAL CAPITAL

The creator and main exponent of social capital theory, Robert Putnam (1993:167), defines the concept as follows: ‘Social capital here refers to features of social organisation, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions’ A little later (1995b:664–5) he uses virtually the same words: ‘by “social capital” I mean features of social life—networks, norms, and trust—that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives’ In this way Putnam treats social capital as a mixture or blend of subjective social norms (trust), objective features of society (social networks), and outcomes (effectiveness, efficiency). The advantage of such an approach is that it combines different aspects of the concept in a very interesting way which gives them an explanatory power of enormous potential. Equally, the disadvantage is that it runs together, perhaps even confuses, different things whose relationships are properly the subjects of empirical investigation. Are norms of trust generated by social networks and social organisations? Do these, in their turn, improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions? Norms, networks, and collective goods may well be intimately related, but there again, they may not. Whether they are or not is not a matter of definition, but a question for empirical research.

Rather than treating all three as part and parcel of the same thing, and putting them altogether in the same definition, they should be kept apart and the relations between them treated as a matter for investigation. If we do this, then a whole series of further questions arise about the nature, the causes, and the consequences of social capital. The first section of this chapter, therefore, will examine the problem of defining social capital. It will do so not because there is any intrinsic merit in unpacking definitions, splitting conceptual hairs, or bandying words. Rather the job of defining social capital is seen as a useful exercise which leads directly to building hypotheses about social capital and conducting empirical research into its causes and consequences.

SOCIAL CAPITAL AS NORMS AND VALUES: HABITS OF THE
HEART

According to this approach, social capital consists of a set of values and attitudes of citizens relating primarily to trust, reciprocity, and cooperation. Seen in this way, social capital is a subjective phenomenon of social and political culture, which refers to the collective attitudes people have about their fellow citizens, and therefore to the way that citizens relate. Crucial to this treatment are those features of a subjective, world-view which predisposes individuals to cooperate with each other, to trust, to understand, and to empathise. These are the ‘habits of the heart’ upon which de Tocqueville concentrates in Democracy in America, and which are the centre of concern for Robert Bellah and his colleagues (1985) in their analysis of community life in America. High levels of social capital are associated with treating others as fellow citizens, rather than as (potential) strangers, competitors, or enemies. The concepts of reciprocity and trust are central to the concept used in this sense; social capital constitutes the social cement which binds society together by turning individuals from self-seeking and egocentric calculators, with little social conscience and little sense of social obligation, into members of a community with shared interests, shared assumptions about social relations, and a sense of the common good. Trust, wrote Simmel (1950:326), is ‘one of the most important synthetic forces within society’.

Reciprocity, it should be noted, does not entail tit-for-tat calculations, or strict rules about taking turns, in which one action is almost automatically paid for by a compensatory action of equal value. Rather the most important form of reciprocity, so far as social capital is concerned, is a generalised feature of society and its citizens in which good turns go round, and come around. That is, individuals do not do others a good turn because they expect to be rewarded immediately and in kind by those who have benefited. Rather good turns will be repaid, as necessary, at some unspecified time, and by some unspecified person (quite possibly a complete stranger) at some unspecified time in the future (see Sahlins, 1972). Generalised reciprocity, therefore, involves a degree of uncertainty, risk, and vulnerability (Misztal, 1996:18; Kollock, 1994:319). It is therefore built upon trust: reciprocity involves risk, and taking risks in society requires trust in others (Luhmann, 1988). It also involves a measure of optimism about both individuals and about future outcomes. Lastly, it may (and often does) have a close connection with religious beliefs about good neighbourliness, doing unto others that which you would have them do unto you, and ‘casting one’s bread upon the waters for it will be returned unto you after many days’.

Social capital is, thereby, responsible for converting the Hobbesian state of nature in which life (like the British summer) is nasty, brutish, and short, to something that is more pleasant, less dangerous, and longer lived. At a minimum it makes it possible to establish a cooperative and stable social and political order which permits collective behaviour and cooperation without recourse to the ultimate coercive power of the Leviathan. More positively than this, it is associated with the goodwill and understanding which enables citizens to resolve their conflicts peacefully without resorting to violence.

In many ways the concept of trust and social capital fulfils the same function in modern social and political theory as the concept of ‘fraternity’ in nineteenth-century political discussion. In previous times it was generally believed that a troika of political values— liberty, equality, and fraternity—was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of democ- racy. Each was important, but all three were essential. Democracy without fraternity was no more possible than democracy without liberty. A sense of fraternity is what turns an overweening and self-destructive interest in individual liberty into a sustainable concern for collective liberty. A more or less exclusive interest in individual or atomised liberty—the liberty of each individual irrespective of the liberty of others—is as harmful for democracy as an exclusive attention to equality.

Some of the political polemic of the 1980s and the 1990s has, however, fallen into this precise trap. It has tended to concentrate on the notion of liberty in an atomised form, to the exclusion of both equality and fraternity. Moreover, it has tended to concentrate attention on market freedom, which is only a particular form of atomised liberty. This is excessively narrow. It does not even suffice for an understanding of the impersonal transactions of the market economy, for as Arrow (1972:357) writes, ‘Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time’ (see also Fukuyama, 1995; Barber, 1995). Even less does an exclusive concentration on market economic liberty help towards an understanding of the broad foundations of social and political stability and integration. This point is well made in the recent literature on communitarianism, as it is in the parallel work which recognises the crucial importance of civil society, civic virtue, and social and political trust (see, for example, Cohen and Rogers, 1992; Shils, 1991; Duncan, 1995; Burtt, 1993, 1995; Mulhall and Swift, 1992; Etzioni, 1993). The terms civic society, communitarianism, and social capital are certainly not identical—on the contrary, each carries its own theoretical and political baggage— but they all represent a welcome widening of horizons beyond a narrow concern with individualism and individual freedom.

Social capital, defined as subjective norms of trust and reciprocity, is the functional equivalent of fraternity which complements rather than confounds the values of freedom and equality. It is a way of smuggling fraternity back into the modern social science analysis of democracy. At any rate, social capital is an empirical concept which offers us a cutting edge by which we can start to dissect the workings of modern democracy. In other words, it is the social science analogue of the classical view of fraternity as the cement which forms the foundations of economic activity, and which binds society and the political system together. And trust, in turn, is an essential part of social capital—the essential part, according to Goleman (1990:306).

SOCIAL CAPITAL AS NETWORKS: INFORMAL GROUPS AND
FORMAL ORGANISATIONS

Some writers focus on social networks of individuals, groups, and organisations, as the crucial component of social capital. The ability to mobilise trustworthy social contacts is seen as a crucial resource, not just in social and political life, but even in supposedly impersonal market relations. In the western world, the importance of social networks is recognised in the process of assembling financial capital in rational-legal market economies. Trust is a necessary link between supply and demand; it puts consumers and producers into contact with each other, it speeds up deals, it turns rational fools into effective cooperators, and it avoids the need to sew up everything by means of expensive and time-consuming contracts which are legally watertight.

Besides being crucial in the market relations of capitalist societies, social networks are also said to be crucial in shortage-ridden Communist societies (Kolankiewcz, 1994:149–51). They allowed people with different skills or commodities to trade or barter with each other the better to get by in daily life. This placed a premium on families having a wide-ranging network of people with different things to trade.

Viewed in this way, the main features of social capital are to be found in these personal networks which link friends, family, community, work, and both public and private life. Some of these networks are loosely constructed, constantly changing, amorphous, and informal. They take the shape of overlapping and interlocking networks of friends, colleagues, and neighbours. These are the loose-knit and informal networks of people who meet irregularly in their local pub, who participate in the local football supporters club, groups of housewives and neighbours who meet outside schools when collecting their children, or in the supermarket, or at church. At the other extreme, social networks may be highly formalised and tight-knit groups bound together by clubs, associations, and organisations—any form of voluntary association, intermediary organisation, or secondary association which has a formal organisational basis compared with the ad hoc and random collection of friends and acquaintances who bump into each other in a local bar on Friday night. In some cases such formal organisations simply institutionalise highly personal and informal networks—the exclusive gentlemen’s clubs which are basically old-boy networks—but in other cases they are more inclusive and impersonal—political parties, trade unions, or business organisations.

There is nothing wrong with defining social capital in terms of social networks. At the same time, it may be that the normative and subjective definition is logically prior in the sense that social networks, formal or informal, are necessarily built upon the norms of reciprocity and trust. Without the subjective capacity to empathise, to trust, and to reciprocate in social relations, strong and extensive networks would not be created and formal and informal associations would not proliferate. Or is it, perhaps, the other way round? Do formal and informal networks instil or create citizen capacity to trust and reciprocate? ‘Networks of civic engagement’, writes Elinor Ostrom, ‘foster robust norms of reciprocity’ (Ostrom: 1990:206). There is an obvious chicken-and-egg problem in deciding which comes first: norms of trust and reciprocity without which networks cannot be created; or networks which help to create norms of trust and reciprocity.

The chapter will return to this problem later, but meanwhile, it should be noted that the subjective dimension of social capital—trust and reciprocity—is conceptually different from the objective existence of social networks and formal organisations, even if the two are empirically closely related. However, the connection between the two is properly an empirical question: Under what sorts of social and political circumstances will high levels of interpersonal trust result in close and extensive social networks involving what sorts of people? Attempts to define and conceptualise social capital might do well to take account of the difference between norms and values, on the one hand, and networks, on the other, and keep them distinct so their empirical relations may be studied.

One good reason for following this research strategy lies in the fact that dense and elaborate networks of informal relations and formal organisations may undermine social capital. Under certain circumstances they may generate ‘unsocial capital’ (Levi, 1996), by fostering conflict, division, and anti-democratic tendencies. Both Putnam and Ostrom have emphasised this ‘dark’ side of associational life. One of the best examples is the Weimar Republic where a strong, dense, and vibrant associational life was used by the Nazis to infiltrate society and gain control of it (Berman, 1997). In Northern Ireland the rigid separation of Catholic and Protestant clubs, associations, and voluntary organisations succeeds in reinforcing division and conflict, rather than tying society together by its own internal divisions (Simmel, 1955). In other words, different networks and associations have different capacities to produce social capital, just as they have a different capacity to produce unsocial capital, and the relationships remain an empirical question.

SOCIAL CAPITAL AS AN OUTCOME: GETTING THINGS DONE

Social capital may be defined in terms of the collective goods, facilities, and services which are produced in the voluntary sector, as opposed to being produced by families, markets, or governments. ‘Social capital’, wrote James Coleman (1988:98), ‘is defined by its function… Like other forms of capital, social capital is productive, making possible the achievemen...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• PART I: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIAL CAPITAL
• PART II: VOLUNTARY ACTIVITY, PARTICIPATION AND SOCIAL CAPITAL—CASE STUDIES OF DIFFERENT COUNTRIES
• PART III: THE POLITICAL EFFECTS OF SOCIAL CAPITAL