The Relationship between International Development and Social Capital: A Multilevel and Cross-national Study of Trust, Civic Engagement, and Neighbor Acceptance
Open Access
- Author:
- Parks, Michael Jeffrey
- Graduate Program:
- Sociology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 23, 2012
- Committee Members:
- Barrett Alan Lee, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
D Wayne Osgood, Committee Member
Glenn A Firebaugh, Committee Member
Kevin J Thomas, Committee Member
David Shapiro, Committee Member - Keywords:
- International Development
Social Capital
Urbanization
Institutions
Democracy - Abstract:
- This project considers social capital in a global context, focusing on how social capital is associated with international development. The World Bank once hailed social capital as the “missing link” in development practice and research. However, after an initial rush of popularity, it has become more of a fad than a fundamental concept in the field, attracting only a limited amount of research. Among the issues still to be addressed are the multifaceted and multilevel nature of social capital, how it relates to development across a number of developed and developing nations, and how societal characteristics influence levels of social capital. My project offers a theoretical and methodological framework within which to examine these issues. Specifically, I investigate how development is related to trust, civic engagement, and neighbor acceptance at both the national and individual levels. National characteristics beyond development are evaluated, such as urbanization, human capital, institutional characteristics, ethnic diversity, and religion. My multilevel approach to social capital also takes into account individual-level characteristics such as education, sex, age, and income. Using a sample of over 67 nations from all major regions of the world, I describe the distribution of social capital across the globe and estimate nation-level OLS regression models. As a final analytic step, I run hierarchical linear models, with countries and individuals as nested levels of data. The primary data source is the World Values Survey; other sources for country-level characteristics include the World Bank, Transparency International, and Polity IV. Results generally show that trust, civic engagement, and neighbor acceptance are highest in more developed and urbanized nations. However, the different components of social capital have idiosyncratic associations with development. In particular, civic engagement and outcast neighbor acceptance exhibit curvilinear relationships with development, supporting the hypothesis from the modernization perspective that less and more developed nations have higher levels of social capital while nations in the midst of development have lower levels. But trust and diverse neighbor acceptance are positively and linearly related to development, supporting the notion that development leads to a stronger sense of community (i.e., the industrialization perspective). These findings are based on a single-level, aggregate approach to social capital. Utilizing a multilevel approach, I find that social capital is largely a matter of formal institutions. That is, the origin of legal institutions and extent of democracy are the driving forces behind cross-national differences in trust, civic engagement, and neighbor acceptance. These results offer support for treating social capital as a multilevel phenomenon. They also support the claim that the components of social capital should be analyzed separately rather than as a single entity. Finally, more international development research needs to supplement social capital with concepts from research on U.S. communities, such as neighbor acceptance.