http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5317-8561
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Abstract
Inequalities in social capital are accepted today as important aspects of social and economic prosperity. This analysis utilizes global comparative data from the International Social Survey Program and finds substantial variation in the three types of social capital across social classes, in a cross-country perspective as well as among two types of societies, 10 high-trust and 13 low-trust societies. Social capitals show significant correlation with economic and social prosperity outcomes as well. The authors find that in more prosperous countries there is an abundance of bridging and linking social capital, whereas people in economically and socially less prosperous societies rely more on bonding social capital. The authors also present evidence on the class-related inequalities of social capitals: More advantageous class positions are associated with higher levels of bridging and linking social capital, whereas the lower classes hold higher levels of bonding social capital. Based on a multilevel analysis that brings together all of these aspects as well as a number of individual-level predictors, they conclude that their initial findings are reinforced with only minor exceptions.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Our analysis uses the 2001 social networks and the 2004 citizenship ISSP data sets.
2 ISSP Research Group (2003): International Social Survey Programme: Social Relations and Support Systems/Social Networks II-ISSP 2001. GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA3680 Data file Version 1.0.0, doi:10.4232/1.3680.
3 ISSP Research Group (2012): International Social Survey Programme: Citizenship-ISSP 2004. GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA3950 Data file Version 1.3.0, doi:10.4232/1.11372.
4 The original program and its detailed documentation is available here: https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/archives/esec/user-guide.
5 The literature on multilevel analysis gives varying rules of thumb, ranging from just 8 or 10 to 30, 50, or even 100 groups as minimal number of cases on the second level (cf. the overview of Stegmueller Citation2013, Maas and Hox Citation2004). The consequences of a smaller number of groups in which individuals are nested is known to us (standard errors are biased downward and researchers who rely on “levels of significance” greatly overstate the level of their tests, which can lead to spurious significant effects). Despite the limitation caused by the small number of groups, most comparative survey data sets use much lower number of countries as second-level observations. As we cannot extend the number of countries, we indicate this problem as a limitation to our empirical evidence form the present multilevel analysis.
6 It has to be noted that some of our indicators are not independent: One of the components of HDI, standard of living, is calculated using PPP as expressed in GDP per capita. GEI and HDI both include measures on the level of education.
7 Bonding: Welch = 380.9; p < .001. Bridging: Welch = 263.8; p < .001. Linking: Welch = 608.7; p < .001.
8 According to the post-hoc test (Games-Howell) there is significant difference among all categories.
9 According to the post-hoc test (Games-Howell) there is significant difference among all categories.
10 According to the post-hoc test (Games-Howell) there is no significant difference between "lower" and "unemployed and inactive," whereas there is significant differences among the other categories.
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Notes on contributors
Katalin Füzér
Katalin Füzér is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pécs. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania and previously studied sociology at Beloit College and Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her research interest covers social capitals, class formation, projectification and development policies. She currently leads a research group which studies the role of social capital in the economy.
Ákos Huszár
Ákos Huszár is research fellow at the Institute for Sociology, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His main research interests include the history of sociology, social stratification and mobility research, class analysis.
Ákos Bodor
Ákos Bodor received his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Pécs in 2015 where he also studied sociology (MA) previously. He works at the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies of Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His main research fields are trust and social capital.
Lajos Bálint
Lajos Bálint graduated in sociology and social policy and received his Ph.D in Human Geography at University of Pécs. He has been working for almost 10 years at the Demographic Research Institute, Budapest first as research fellow, then as senior researcher and is recently also Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pécs. His research focuses on spatial demography, social inequalities of mortality and various aspects of suicide analysis.
Attila Pirmajer
Attila Pirmajer is a Ph.D. student at the Doctoral School of Demography and Sociology, University of Pécs, Hungary. His Ph.D. thesis deals with “Differences in Entrepreneurial Values and Roles in Europe” and is based on S. H. Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Values. He studied sociology (BA and MA) previously at University of Szeged, Hungary. His research interest includes methodology, statistics, quantitative data analysis, and the analysis of political cleavages, values, culture, spatial social inequalities and trust.