The utility of bonding social capital

Abstract

In most studies of social capital, bridging social capital is emphasized as ‘good’ for democracy and economic performance. It is rarer to find studies showing that bonding social capital can bring positive effects. Mostly, bonding social capital is either overlooked or depicted as the ‘villain’ that leads to ethnic conflict, intolerant behaviour and poor economic and democratic development. In this article, it is argued that this picture needs to be revised. If we assume that bonding trust is a negative force for development and democracy, we ignore a substantial portion of the political history of the West. Also, new empirical evidence from India suggests that bonding social capital is related to good governance. High levels of bonding trust cannot only facilitate political cooperation. They may also work as a shield against public sector employees who attempt to exploit citizens in a corrupt or clientelistic manner. The conclusion drawn in the article is that the view of social capital as a prime mover with inherent normatively attractive qualities should give way to a perspective where social capital is more properly regarded as an intermediate variable where the way it is combined with, or interacts with, other factors determines outcomes.

Keywords:

• Social capital
• governance
• democracy
• community
• social development

Acknowledgements

This paper has been written as part of a research project that is supported by Sida/Sarec and the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University. The research has been carried out in cooperation with the Department of Government, Uppsala University, the Institute of Social Sciences in New Delhi, Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) in New Delhi, Debate in Bhopal, the Madhya Pradesh Institute of Social Science Research in Ujjain, Samarthan in Bhopal, Health Action by People (HAP) in Thiruvanantapuram, and the University of Kerala in Thiruvanantapuram. I am very grateful for the support and help I have received in this project from all my colleagues in Sweden and India. In Sweden I am in particular grateful to Johan Carlberg for his work as research assistant in the project. I wish to thank Hans Blomkvist for putting me on the right track of investigating the bridging and bonding dimensions at an early phase of the project. Also, I also wish to thank Sven Oskarsson, Kåre Vernby, Axel Hadenius, Jan Teorell, Per-Ola Öberg and Anders Westholm. In India I have received invaluable help from George Mathew, Satinder Singh Sahni, Yogesh Kumar, R.S. Gautam, R. Gopalakrishnan, Anand Inbanathan, Jacob Kattakayam, Raman Kutty, Surendra Kumar Jena, Dinesh C. Sah, and Yogesh Kumar.

Notes

1. For example Putnam (2002) and Dasgupta and Serageldin (2000) contain contributions from some of the world's leading scholars on the topic but they show surprisingly little agreement about what we should call social capital. Kenneth Arrow also adds in the introduction to “Social Capital”: “… I would urge the abandonment of the metaphor of capital and the term, ‘social capital’” (Arrow, 2000, p. 4). Also see Smith and Kulynych (2002), where arguments along similar lines to Arrow's are presented.

2. For a good overview of the social capital debate, see Blomkvist (2003).

3. See Hadenius and Uggla (1996) for an example of how Putnam's perspectives on ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ organizations are incorporated in policy recommendations for development.

4. In Putnam (2002), Putnam presents one of the most useful summaries of various dimensions of social capital that is commonly in use (see pp. 9–11).

5. There are, however, a number of interesting studies that do not find a clear relationship between generalized trust and democratic performance measured in various ways. One study by Liu and Besser (2003), conducted in Iowa, showed that “generalized trust is not significantly related to elderly community involvement” (Liu & Besser, 2003, p. 343). In another study of social capital in India Blomkvist shows that generalized trust was negatively correlated to government responsiveness (Blomkvist, 2003). If we look at networks, Teorell (2003) shows that in Sweden the number of memberships in voluntary associations per citizen mattered more for political activity than “the extent to which one's membership cut across social cleavages” (Teorell, 2003, p. 49).

6. In Putnam and Feldstein (2003) it is mentioned that “both bonding and bridging social networks have their uses”, but then the texts that follow focus entirely on bridging social capital because “a pluralist democracy requires lots of bridging social capital, not just the bonding variety” (Putnam & Feldstein, 2003, p. 2). In Putnam and Goss (2002) Putnam states that “Bonding social capital brings together people who are like one another in important respects (ethnicity, age, gender, social class, and so on), whereas bridging social capital refers to social networks that bring together people who are unlike one another. This is an important distinction, because the external effects of bridging networks are likely to be positive, while bonding networks (limited within particular social niches) are at greater risk of producing negative externalities. This is not to say that bonding groups are necessarily bad; indeed evidence suggests that most of us get our social support from bonding rather than bridging social ties. It is true, however, that without the natural restraints imposed by members' crosscutting allegiances and diverse perspectives, tightly knit and homogeneous groups can rather easily combine for sinister ends. In other words, bonding without bridging equals Bosnia” (pp. 11–12). Also it should be mentioned that, in a policy recommendation document commissioned by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, James Manor (2003) claims that both bonding and bridging social capital can help facilitate poverty reduction (Manor, 2003, p. 18).

7. The interviews were carried out as a part of the project described in footnote one.

8. In an influential World Bank publication the economist Partha Dasgupta makes a strong argument for the absolutely central role of trust for economic growth—a factor which he claims was only previously rarely considered by economists. See Dasgupta and Serageldin (2000, pp. 329–330) and in particular Dasgupta (2000). Also see Helliwell and Putnam (2000, pp. 265–266) and La Porta et al. (2000, pp. 315–317).

9. In Putnam (1992), one thousand years of Italy's history is taken into account.

10. Compare with l'histoire événementielle as described by François Simiand (1903). See Braudel (1980, p. 27).

11. See Wuthnow (2002, p. 86) for more information about trust among blacks in America and how it has declined from the 1960s to the 1990s.

12. Robert Wuthnow adds an interesting observation that is relevant in connection with that problem. In the US the decline of civic involvement has “been concentrated most heavily among the socially and economically marginalized, not among the more privileged segments of the middle class” (Wuthnow, 2002, p. 60). Peter Hall (1999, 2002) makes a similar observation about Great Britain where social capital has not declined in anything like the way that Putnam observes in Bowling Alone. However, like Wuthnow, he observes a “nation divided between a well-connected and highly-active group of citizens with generally prosperous lives and another set of citizens whose associational life and involvement in politics are very limited” (Hall, 1999, p. 455).

13. Although such criticism is most often politically motivated.

14. The main reason for using these questions about whom one would consider helping in times of sickness is that we found in previous studies in India (see Blomkvist, 2003) and in the pilot survey for this study that respondents in several different contexts found it easy to respond and express their opinions about this topic. Although the responses to these questions may not reveal to what extent people are more or less helpful in a variety of different situation, it can at least be seen as a rudimentary indicator of how different groups relate to each other in terms of trust. However, this way of pursuing research on trust and how far beyond the individual it extends naturally raises many new questions. There were several reasons for drawing the line here between ‘anyone’ and the individual's ‘own religious community’. One practical reason was simply that almost everyone participating in the survey, and equally in both states, could easily relate to this distinction. However, the most important reason was that trust across and within religious communities, especially between Hindus and Muslims, in India is widely seen as crucial for both democratic and economic development in the country.

15. For an in-depth look at the results regarding corruption, see Widmalm (2005a).

16. We should be cautious in assuming a causal relationship here. Although most of the research assumes that it is trusting citizens that create a well-performing state, several other authors have pointed out the possibility of the opposite order of causality—that a well functioning state creates trust among the citizens. (Chhibber, 2000; Rothstein, 2003a; Wuthnow, 2002, fn. 75).

17. Widmalm (2005a). This result was unexpected even if we consider the line of thinking of those quoted above (footnote 16) who stress that a well governed state creates trusting citizens.

18. In particular, this result does not fit the conclusions drawn in Uslaner (2004).

19. The results for bonding social capital and bridging social capital: N = 1155, R ² = .305, S.E. of B = .021, B = .483 (significant at 99 per cent level of confidence) (Widmalm, forthcoming).

20. Both are five-point scales.

21. Also see Dahl (1971, 1982).

22. Here, I agree with Narayan and Pritchett (2000, p. 281) that “functional definitions run the risk of becoming circular”.