Trust and Reciprocity: Social Capital and Political Engagement

In this paper we estimate individual-level social capital as a latent attribute using survey questions on personal attitudes by applying a modification of the econometric methodology by Spady (2006). Compared to other measures of social capital, using this technique has several advantages: It makes more efficient use of information by allowing the aggregation of information from several questions and by exploiting additional information from personal and demographic characteristics. It also allows for a multi-dimensional measure of social capital as suggested by theory, and it is free of parametric assumptions. Finally, the measure of the components of social capital that we propose is conceptually cleaner and more consistent with theory than the proxies or demographic characteristics often used in previous work. Having estimated two components of social capital (individuals’ attitudes to trust and reciprocity) using data from the European Social Survey, we analyze their personal, demographic, and regional determinants. Finally we relate these measures to individual-level political engagement.