Does National Social Capital Make Individual Citizens Better Democrats?

Although social capital and its consequences have been widely studied as individual features, a much more challenging approach depicts social capital primarily on the societal level as a collective good characterizing cultural properties of distinct societies. Understood as a macro-level phenomenon, social capital provides a social and cultural environment that influence individual citizen’s attitudes and behaviour. It is considered to be a crucial collective resource that holds societies together and enables effective cooperation among citizens, increases their public involvement, political participation, and political trust. The main question of this study is: How do national levels of social capital influence individual citizens in Western democracies? The study examines a bunch of citizens’ activities and attitudes generally regarded as good for democracy: interest in politics, political discussions, electoral and non-electoral political participation, political tolerance, political trust, and democratic values. The impact of collective social capital on these individual attitudes and behavior using ISSP 2004 data from western democracies is explored. For collective social capital both aggregate data on social trust and group membership in a particular country (WVS) and macro indicators on the level of collective social capital and the quality of civil society (Civicus) is used. Multilevel modelling enables us to disentangle the effects of collective, macro and micro-level determinants. The analyses show that living in a country rich on social capital contributes to democratic attitudes and behaviour. Yet individual features are usually more important.