From Aristotle to Tocqueville, political and social theorists have stressed the importance of

political culture and civil society. In recent years interest in these themes has revived, in part
because the difficult births of market-oriented democracies in formerly Communist lands have
underscored the cultural and sociological preconditions for such institutions. Ironicallyjust
at the moment of liberal democracys greatest triumph there is also unhappiness about the
performance of major social institutions, including the institutions of representative
government, among the established democracies of Western Europe, North America, and East
Asia.At least in the United States, there is reason to suspect that some fundamental social and
cultural preconditions for effective democracy may have been eroded in recent decades, the
result of a gradual but widespread process of civic disengagement.2 This volume aims to
contribute fundamental theoretical and empirical knowledge to our understanding of social
change in eight advanced democracies: Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan,
Spain, Sweden, and the United States. How has the character of civil society changed over the
past fifty years, and why? This book is about social capitalthat is, social networks and the
norms of reciprocity associated with themand how the profile of social capital is evolving
in contemporary postindustrial societies. Because the concept of social capital may seem
novel and perhaps academic, we begin with a few words about the term itself. Nearly a
century ago, L. Judson Hanifan, a young Progressive educator and social reformer trained at
several of the best universities in America, returned to his native West Virginia, an
impoverished state in Appalachia, to work in its rural school system. A Presbyterian, Rotarian,
and Republican, Hanifan was no radical, but gradually he concluded that the grave social,
economic, and political problems of the communities in which he worked could be solved
only by strengthening the networks of solidarity among their citizens. He observed that older
customs of rural neighborliness and civic engagement, such as debating societies, barn
raisings, and apple cuttings, had fallen into disuse.Gradually these customs became almost
wholly abandoned, the people becoming less neighborly. Community social life gave way to
family isolation and community stagnation.3 Writing in 1916 to urge the importance of
renewed community involvement to sustain democracy and development, Hanifan coined the
term social capital to explain why.
In the use of the phrase social capital I make no reference to the usual acceptation of the term
capital, except in a figurative sense. I do not refer to real estate, or to personal property or to
cold cash, but rather to that in life which tends to make these tangible substances count for
most in the daily lives of people: namely good will, fellowship, sympathy, and social
intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit. . . . The individual
is helpless socially, if left to himself. . . . If he comes into contact with his neighbor, and they
with other neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately
satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the substantial
improvement of living conditions in the whole community.
Hanifan went on to outline both the private and public benefits of social capital.
The community as a whole will benefit by the coperation of all its parts, while the individual
will find in his associations the advantages of the help, the sympathy, and the fellowship of
his neighbors. . . . W hen the people of a given community have become acquainted with one
another and have formed a habit of coming together occasionally for entertainment, social
intercourse, and personal enjoyment, then by skillful leadership this social capital may easily
be directed towards the general improvement of the community well-being.4
Hanifans account of social capital anticipated virtually all of the crucial elements of later
interpretations of this concept, but his conceptual invention apparently attracted no notice
from other social commentators and disappeared without a trace. During the rest of the
twentieth century the concept was independently reinvented at least six more times. In the
1950s Canadian sociologist John Seeley and his colleagues employed the term to point out
that for an upwardly mobile suburbanite, memberships in clubs and associations ...are like
negotiable securities (no less real for being psychological) which he may cash, transfer, or use
as collateral. Urbanist Jane Jacobs used the term in the 1960s to emphasize the collective
value of informal neighborhood ties in the modern metropolis. In the 1970s economist Glenn
C. Loury employed it to highlight the inaccessibility of wider social ties to African Americans
as one of the most insidious legacies of slavery and segregation. French social theorist Pierre
Bourdieu defined it in the 1980s as the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which
are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of
mutual acquaintance and recognitionor in other words, to membership in a group. German
economist Ekkehart Schlicht used it in 1984 to underline the economic value of organizations
and moral order. Sociologist James S. Coleman put the term firmly and finally on the
intellectual agenda in the late 1980s, using it (as Hanifan had originally done) to highlight the
social context of education.5 In recent years scholars in many fields have begun to explore the
multiple sources and manifold consequences of varying stocks of social capital, and this work
has grown exponentially. One search of the international social science literature found 20
articles on social capital prior to 1981, 109 between 1991 and 1995, and 1,003 between 1996
and March 1999.6 One of the most striking features of the development of work on social
capital is the range of disciplines in which the concept has been found usefulnot merely in
sociology and political science, where it originated, but also in economics, public health,
urban planning, criminology, architecture, and social psychology, among others. While the
pace and scope of this explosion of research make it impossible to summarize
comprehensively the social, economic, medical, psychological, and political outcomes that
have been linked to social capital, the very range of the research is impressive. Studies from
Tanzania to Sri Lanka to Italy have found that economic development under some
circumstances can be boosted by adequate stocks of social capital. Studies in the United States
and the United Kingdom have found that social networks, both formal and informal, reduce
crime. Studies from Finland to Japan have reported strikingly consistent evidence of the
powerful effects of social connectedness on physical health. Comparisons of regional
governments in Italy and of state governments in the United States suggest that the quality of
public administration varies with local endowments of social capital. Social capital has been
studied in Andean Ecuador, medieval England, and cyberspace. Especially relevant to our
project is the fact that recent work on social capital has echoed the thesis of classic political
theorists from Alexis de Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill that democracy itself depends on
active engagement by citizens in community affairs.7 Michael Woolcock and Deepa Narayan
usefully synthesize much of this expanding literature:
The basic idea of social capital is that a persons family, friends, and associates constitute an
important asset, one that can be called on in a crisis, enjoyed for its own sake, and leveraged
for material gain. What is true for individuals, moreover, also holds for groups. Those
communities endowed with a diverse stock of social networks and civic associations are in a
stronger position to confront poverty and vulnerability, resolve disputes, and take advantage
of new opportunities.8
In short, there is mounting evidence that the characteristics of civil society affect the health of
our democracies, our communities, and ourselves. There is also every reason to believe that
the relevant characteristics of civil societythe contours of social capitalvary
systematically across time and space. These two broad presumptions provide the starting point
for this volume, though neither is systematically tested here. We begin with the assumption
that social capital matters, and we ask how its characteristics have changed in the last fifty
years or so in the economically advanced democracies. The idea at the core of the theory of
social capital is extremely simple: Social networks matter. Networks have value, first of all,
for the people who are in them. In the language of microeconomics, networks have private or
internal returns. The most familiar examples of this generalization are drawn from the
sociology of labor markets, for a very common finding is that manyperhaps mostof us
find our jobs because of whom we know as much as what we know. Some economic
sociologists have even calculated the cash value of a persons Rolodex or address book, in
the sense that ones income is determined by the range of his or her social connections,
perhaps even more than by educational credentials. In that sense, social capital may rival
human capital as a factor in individual productivity. Similarly, the very large literature on the
effects of social support on physical and mental health refers largely to the private or internal
benefits of social connections. Another large (and growing) branch of literature on social
capital refers, by contrast, to its external or public effects. One such effect is the common
finding that crime rates in a neighborhood are lowered by social connectedness, so that even
residents who do not themselves participate in neighborhood activities benefit from the
deterrent effects of informal social capital. In that sense, social capital can be a public good.
Hanifan (who wrote before the term public good had been coined by economists) described
exactly this feature of social capital, for he argued that the legislators of West Virginia should
in fact subsidize community centers because the benefits of this social interaction would not
be limited to the people who made the direct investment of showing up at evening meetings.9
Dense networks of social interaction appear to foster sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity
Ill do this for you now without expecting anything immediately in return, because down
the road you (or someone else) will reciprocate my goodwill. Social interaction, in other
words, helps to resolve dilemmas of collective action, encouraging people to act in a
trustworthy way when they might not otherwise do so.10 When economic and political
dealing is embedded in dense networks of social interaction, incentives for opportunism and
malfeasance are reduced. A society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient
than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter.
Trustworthiness lubricates social life. If we dont have to balance every exchange instantly,
we can get a lot more accomplished. Social capital can thus be simultaneously a private good
and a public good. In many instances of social capital, some of the benefit goes to bystanders,
while some of the benefits serve the immediate interest of the person making the investment.
For example, local civic clubs mobilize local energies to build a playground or a hospital at
the same time that they provide members with friendships and business connections that pay
off personally.
We describe social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity as social capital, because
like physical and human capital (tools and training), social networks create value, both
individual and collective, and because we can invest in networking. Social networks are,
however, not merely investment goods, for they often provide direct consumption value. In
fact, the very large international literature on the correlates of happiness (subjective well-
being is the accepted jargon) suggests that social capital may actually be more important to
human well-being than material goods. Dozens of studies have shown that human happiness
is much more closely predicted by access to social capital than by access to financial capital.
In fact, the single most common finding from a half centurys research on the correlates of life
satisfaction in countries around the globe is that happiness is best predicted by the breadth and
depth of ones social connections.11 In the 1950s and 1960s a great debate raged in the
discipline of economicsoften termed the debate of the two Cambridges, because it pitted
English and American economists against one anotherabout whether physical capital was
sufficiently homogeneous to be added up in a single ledger. A dentists drill, a carpenters
drill, and an oil riggers drill are all examples of physical capital, but they are hardly
interchangeable. The same is true of social capitalit comes in many forms that are useful in
many different contexts, but the forms are heterogeneous in the sense that they are good only
for certain purposes and not others. Your extended family represents a form of social capital,
as do your Sunday school class, the people you meet regularly on your commuter train, your
college classmates, the neighborhood association to which you belong, the civic organizations
of which you are a member, the Internet chat group in which you participate, and the network
of professional acquaintances recorded in your address book. It is even less clear in the case
of social capital than it was in the debate of the two Cambridges about physical capital that we
can simply add up all these different forms to produce a single, sensible summary of the
social capital in a given community, much less an entire nation. Hence, the chapters in this
volume describe the changing contours of social capital in various advanced democracies
without attempting a simple summary of whether social capital in general is high or low. If
there is one enduring lesson from the early social capital debates, it is that we cannot assume
that social capital is everywhere and always a good thing. Although the phrase social capital
has a felicitous ring to it, we must take care to consider its potential vices, or even just the
possibility that virtuous forms can have unintended consequences that are not socially
desirable. That social capital can have negative externalities does not distinguish it in
principle from other forms of capital. A nuclear power plant represents a massive investment
in physical capital, even though radioactive leakage might mean that its net value for society
is negative. The human capital of biochemists can be used to create lifesaving
pharmaceuticals, but also to create biochemical weapons. In short, we must understand the
purposes and effects of social capital. Networks and norms might, for example, benefit those
who belongto the detriment of those who do not. Social capital might be most prevalent
among groups of people who are already advantaged, thereby widening political and
economic inequalities between those groups and others who are poor in social capital. Thus,
in talking about different manifestations of social capital and changes in social capital over
time, it is worth asking hard questions: Who benefits, and who does not? What kind of society
is this form of social capital encouraging? Is more necessarily better? Moreover, some forms
of social capital are good for democracy and social health; others are (or threaten to be)
destructive. Many cities in all the countries represented in this volume have organized
neighborhoodbased citizens groups that meet regularly to accomplish a wide variety of
purposes. One careful study of such groups in some American cities found that they increased
government responsiveness to the organized neighborhoods and enhanced citizens respect for
government.12 On the other hand, many American localities have had a different sort of
citizens group: the Ku Klux Klan and its less violent cousins, such as neighborhood groups
that resist racial integration. With its century-old tradition of bigotry and racially motivated
violence, the Klan represented a form of social capital that subverted the rules and traditions
of liberal democracy. With its internal norms of trust and reciprocity, reinforced by a shared
self-defensive purpose, the Klanand its counterparts in other countriesremind us that
social capital is not automatically conducive to democratic governance. Since the forms of
social capital vary greatly, social capital theorists have placed a high priority on developing a
theoretically coherent and empirically reliable classification of different types and dimensions
of social capital. Though we are still far from such a canonical account, at least four important
distinctions have emerged from the scholarly debates. These distinctions are not mutually
exclusive. Rather, they represent different yet complementary lenses through which social
capital might be understood and evaluated. Formal versus informal social capital. Some forms
of social capital, such as parents organizations or labor unions, are formally organized, with
recognized officers, membership requirements, dues, regular meetings, and so on. On the
other hand, some, like pickup games of basketball or people who gather at the same pub, are
highly informal. And yet both of those constitute networks in which reciprocity can develop,
and from which there can be both private and public gains. Early research on social capital
concentrated on formal associations for reasons of methodological convenience, so it is worth
emphasizing here that associations constitute merely one form of social capital. Informal
associating (say, family dinners) may be more instrumental than formal associations in
achieving some valued purposes. Many scholars are actively developing new ways of
identifying and measuring informal social capital, and the case studies in this book often
touch on informal social connectedness. However, research on long-term trends in social
capital inevitably depends on what evidence survives from the past, and thus the country case
studies have been forced to emphasize formal (record-keeping) types of social capital. Thick
versus thin social capital. Some forms of social capital are closely interwoven and
multistranded, such as a group of steelworkers who work together every day at the factory, go
out for drinks on Saturday, and go to mass every Sunday. There are also very thin, almost
invisible filaments of social capital, such as the nodding acquaintance you have with the
person you occasionally see waiting in line at the supermarket, or even a chance encounter
with another person in an elevator. Even these very casual forms of social connection have
been shown experimentally to induce a certain form of reciprocity; merely nodding to a
stranger increases the likelihood that he or she will come to your aid if you suddenly are
stricken.13 On the other hand, that tenuous, singlestranded bond is very different from your
ties to members of your immediate family, another example of a thick social network. The
sociologist Mark Granovetter first articulated a closely related distinction between strong
ties and weak ties. Strong ties are defined in terms of the frequency of contact and
closedness. If all of my friends are friends of each other and I spend a lot of time with them,
we have a strong tie. I have a weak tie with someone with whom I have only a passing
acquaintance and have few friends in common. Granovetter pointed out that weak ties are
more important than strong ties when it comes to searching for a job. Youre more likely to
get a job through someone you dont know well than through someone you do know well,
because a close friend of yours is likely to know the same people you know, whereas a casual
acquaintance is likely to lead you to unknown opportunities. Weak ties may also be better for
knitting a society together and for building broad norms of generalized reciprocity. Strong ties
are probably better for other purposes, such as social mobilization and social insurance,
although it is fair to add that social science has only begun to parse the effects, positive and
negative, of various kinds of social capital. Inward-looking versus outward-looking social
capital. Some forms of social capital are, by choice or necessity, inward-looking and tend to
promote the material, social, or political interests of their own members, while others are
outward-looking and concern themselves with public goods. Groups in the first category are
commonly organized along class, gender, or ethnic lines and exist to preserve or strengthen
the bonds of birth and circumstance. Examples include Londons gentlemens clubs, chambers
of commerce, contemporary labor organizations, and informal credit unions created by new
immigrants. In the second category we find charitable groups such as the Red Cross, the U.S.
civil rights movement, and the environmental movements that emerged in all advanced
democracies in the 1970s and 1980s. It is tempting to judge the outwardlooking or altruistic
organizations as socially or morally superior to the inward-looking groups, on the grounds
that the outward-looking groups provide clear public as well as personal benefits. We see the
appeal of such an argument, but we believe it should be viewed with skepticism. Precisely
because social capital is stubbornly resistant to quantification, we cannot say that an outward-
looking youth service corps that clears an urban playground has somehow increased our stock
of social capital more than, say, an inward-looking credit union that has allowed a new
immigrant community to flourish. Bridging versus bonding social capital. Closely related to,
but conceptually distinct from, the inward-outward dichotomy is the bridgingbonding axis.
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.14 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. Ashutosh Varshney has recently shown that violence between Hindus and Muslims in
India is markedly reduced in communities where civic associations bridge this volatile
religious cleavage.15 As a practical matter, most groups blend bridging and bonding, but the
blends differ: They may include people of different socioeconomic classes but the same
ethnicity or religion (many fraternal organizations fit here), or they may include people of
different races but mostly or exclusively the same gender (for example, quilting circles and
sports leagues). Because social capital is multidimensional, and some of those dimensions
themselves are subject to different understandings, we must take care not to frame questions
about change solely in terms of more social capital or less social capital. Rather, we must
describe the changes in qualitative terms. For example, within a given country one could
imagine that the stock of social capital has become more formal but less bridging, more
bridging but less intensive, or more intensive but less public-regarding. Or there could be
truth in all three developments. That is, a nation could simultaneously see growth in ethnically
based social clubs, rainbow coalitions, and government-hating citizens militias. Theories of
change in civil society have been at the core of sociology since its inception as a distinct
discipline in the nineteenth century. Probably the single most dominant view has been that as
society has become more modern, industrial, and urban, community bonds have atrophied.
Industrialization changes the relations of production and provides incentives for people to
leave the country for the city. Those developments, in turn, displace older forms of solidarity
and social organization without replacing them (so the theory goes) with new forms of social
capital befitting the new environment. The thesis that modernization undermines community
was in many respects at the core of the work of the classic founders of sociology Durkheim,
Tnnies, Weber, Simmel, and others. As we have already noted, L. J. Hanifan had the distinct
impression that social capital had eroded in West Virginia in the last decades of the nineteenth
century. This thesis was hardly unique, for as sociologist Barry Wellman observes:
It is likely that pundits have worried about the impact of social change on communities ever
since human beings ventured beyond their caves....In the [past] two centuries many leading
social commentators have been gainfully employed suggesting various ways in which large-
scale social changes associated with the Industrial Revolution may have affected the structure
and operation of communities....This ambivalence about the consequences of largescale
changes continued well into the twentieth century. Analysts have kept asking if things have, in
fact, fallen apart. 16
And as sociologist Pamela Paxton recently noted:
In fact, it could be argued that the birth of sociology occurred in concerns about potential
declines in community due to industrialization and the advent of modernity.17
It became fashionable among academics in the last quarter of the twentieth century to debunk
this so-called modernization theory. We too will find reason to question it, for it fails to
account for important continuities, as well as important changes, in patterns of social capital
in each of our countries. However, we should not gainsay that it is a powerfully parsimonious
attempt at synthesis of the extraordinarily complex changes that swept across much of the
world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The question to which modernization
theory was an answerhow are social relations affected by industrialization and
urbanization?was an intelligent, even inescapable one. It was the great observer of
American society Alexis de Tocqueville who first took up our particular challenge: to examine
changing social mores and bonds with the premise that such changes had implications for the
performance of democracy. Writing in the 1830s, Tocqueville observed how, following the
1789 revolution in his native France, an aristocratic, communally oriented society tended to
give way to a democratic, individualist society. Individualist democracy, Tocqueville
suggested, could take two different forms. The first was a form of atomistic despotism, in
which politically equal citizens, newly freed from aristocracys ties to patrons above and
servants below, tend to their own selfinterest and thereby leave the door open for a few rulers
to grab and centralize their power. The second possible democratic form is liberal,
decentralized, and participatory. Public-spirited mores and institutions of civil society, such as
those Tocqueville saw in the United States, serve as a check on the centrifugal forces of
democratic equality.18 These insights notwithstanding, Tocqueville offered no deep theory of
how changes in civil society either caused or made possible the transition from the aristocratic
state to the democratic state.
Later in the nineteenth century European sociologists reformulated Tocquevilles polarity. Sir
Henry Main distinguished between traditional society, based on status, and modern society,
based on contract. For Ferdinand Tnnies, the fundamental sociopolitical divide was between
Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). Emile Durkheim differentiated
between mechanical solidarity, which characterizes societies of social similars organized in
tightly knit and insular collectives, and organic solidarity, which characterizes societies in
which diverse individuals play different roles, each indispensable to the larger whole. Georg
Simmel compared social relations in the traditional town and in the modern metropolis. Each
of these social theorists captured a different facet of the same fundamental social
transformation: modernization. Each, of course, oversimplified. For example, these theorists
made few attempts to distinguish between different forms of traditional societies and different
forms of modern societies. Likewise, they did a poor job of distinguishing among different
dimensions of change: Was the breakdown of traditional forms of community felt primarily in
the world of work, family relations, civil society, government institutions, or some
combination thereof? Yet for all their vagueness, these theorists did share the general view
that the decay of community bonds is inevitable in modernizing societies and that institutions
must be created to fill the void. Many peoplepolitical leaders, social philosophers, and
ordinary citizensbelieve that the turn from the twentieth century to the twentyfirst century is
witnessing a fundamental social transformation perhaps unmatched since industrialization.
This transformation has many dimensions, with some attracting greater comment and concern
than others. In many advanced democracies, for example, social scientists and others have
documented changes in the performance of democratic institutions, especially the weakening
of political parties, the rise of media- and poll-centered campaigns, and the sharp decline in
public confidence in government. There have also been changes in the structure and
performance of economies, particularly with respect to the welfare state and income
stratification. Although the second half of the 1990s was a time of economic growth for most
Western democracies, that growth has been accompanied by an erosion of many nations
income security and social programs, and in a number of countries by a simultaneous and
probably historically unprecedented growth in the gap between the well-to-do and everyone
else. Changes have occurred in other sectors of society as well. At least since the 1970s, the
Western democracies have seen an overhaul in family many fewer traditional two-parent
families with childrenprompted by divorce, delayed marriages, and more births out of
wedlock.19 At the other end of the scale, globalization is rapidly integrating the worlds
economy, bringing new prosperity to many parts of the world, but also undermining national
autonomy. Even popular culture has undergone major shifts. Fueled by television, the end of
the Cold War, and the opening of global markets, Western commercialism has spread
eastward, from Los Angeles and New York to London, Prague, Moscow, and Shanghai. This
has prompted the beginnings of the homogenization of popular culture. And yet vast
population movements have had an equal and opposite effect. The migrations of Asians and
Latin Americans into the United States and Canada, of North Africans into France, of Turks
and Bosnians into Germany, of Albanians and Iraqis into Italy, and of Koreans and Filipinos
into Japan have diversified the demography and cultures of these democracies and are likely
to do so still more in the future. In some respects the growing ethnic heterogeneity of the
established democracies (as well as the nativist backlash that has often accompanied this
change) is the most striking commonality among the societies represented in this volume. All
of these changesin governmental, economic, social, and cultural normshave had a ripple
effect on civil society. In some cases, these transformations have spurred the growth and spirit
of grassroots institutions, while in other cases, civil society has suffered. Some of these
transformations may be conducive to social trust and harmony, while others may be corrosive
of them. Some of these cultural shifts (for example, the integration of immigrants) might be
intelligently managed to protect or even create social capital, while others (for example,
family breakdown) will prove more difficult to translate into social-capitalbuilding
opportunities. Put another way, some twenty-first-century transformations are amenable to
social-capital-oriented policy interventions, and some are not especially so. Likewise, some of
these transformations are hurtling forward in an irreversible trajectory (for example, the
development of computer technology), while other transformations may prove to be cyclical
(say, the yawning income gap in many Western democracies). With these caveats in mind, this
project aims both to describe social capital and its evolution in eight democracies and to
speculate about how this evolution has, or has not, been influenced by the larger sociopolitical
context. What accounts for change in social capital and civic engagement?
Conventional accounts, of which modernization theory is the most relevant, have described a
trajectory that begins with the industrial revolution and the technological innovations
accompanying it. The mass movement of people from cohesive rural areas to big, anonymous,
atomistic cities translates into an overall decline in community and social capital. This
account clearly captures important common features of social change in Western nations
between 1750 and 1950. And it may offer some inspiration for our efforts to understand the
changes in contemporary postindustrial societies. On the other hand, close research has shown
that a simpleminded interpretation of this theory drastically underestimated the ability of
humans over the longer run to adapt existing forms of social capital and to create new forms
to fit new circumstances. Our self-assigned task here, however, is not to articulate another
linear or one-dimensional theory of change in social capital that would be more carefully
tailored to present conditions. Nor do we aspire to identify a common driving force behind
changing stocks of social capital. Indeed, our studies raise serious questions about whether
either aim would bear fruit. The nations in this study have been buffeted by many of the same
social and economic forces but have seen dramatically different changes in social capital.
Some nations have seen growth in voluntary associationalism, for example, while others have
seen declines. This paradox reminds us of the advantages of comparative analysis. Cross-
national case studies help to rule out, or at least raise questions about, certain conventional
universal theories of causality while opening our minds to the possibility that multiple
factors may be at work in different places to produce similar outcomes. In this volume, we
take an empirically grounded first step toward identifying and analyzing the range of possible
ways in which social capital has changed in the postwar era and the different factors
responsible for instigating or perpetuating those changes. Because each author is attentive to
the peculiarities of his or her national case, each highlights somewhat different causal
processes, but common interpretive threads run through the various chapters. We consider,
and find support for, a number of driving forces. Technological innovation is certainly one of
them. The second half of the twentieth century saw the rapid spread of inventions and
innovations scarcely imagined when the century began. There are new technologies for
entertainment (notably television), for communication (cheap and nearly universal long-
distance phone service, fax machines, electronic mail), and for information (the Internet).
These new technologies have had myriad effects on social capital. On one hand, they have no
doubt enhanced our ability to maintain our social networks even across vast spaces. On the
other hand, they have also facilitated a withdrawal of some people from civic and social life.
It is hardly surprising that technologys effects on social capital building are mixed. Another
force influencing a nations stock of social capital is the social or political entrepreneur.
Leadership matters, because leaders build institutions through which social capital can
germinate and grow. Unions organize because some enterprising workeror enterprising
federationdecides to organize them. Citizens groups form because someone learns, often
from personal experience, that public policy needs to change. Reading groups form because a
couple of friends decide it would be fun to widen their social circle. Granted, entrepreneurs do
not succeed unless the product they are sellingassociationalismis both in demand and
undersupplied. The more interesting question isnt whether leaders affect the stock of social
capital, but rather what affects the stock of leaders. Hovering above individual leaders, and
also influencing social capital, is the state. By that we mean both the institutions of
government and the particular polices that those institutions promulgate. Some states have
provided tax subsidies to voluntary organizations, making it easier for them to form and
attract members, while other states have actively discouraged such associations. Some states
are relatively open, fragmented, and decentralized, providing a political structure conducive to
citizengroup participation in public affairs. Many states, by providing mass public education,
have encouraged the formation not only of human capital but also of social capital, since
education is a powerful predictor of civic engagement. And some states directly involve
associations, such as unions and business organizations, in the making and implementing of
public policy, thereby enhancing their sense of purpose and solidarity. The myriad ways in
which the state encourages or discourages the formation of social capital have been
underresearched. Does trustworthy governmentthat is, a state whose officials are honest and
effective in responding to citizens needsincrease social trust? Do certain types of economic
policiessay, those aimed at mitigating income inequalityfacilitate the building of social
capital across class lines? Does having a state church affect the type or amount of social
capital in the polity? Such questions represent some of the many largely unexplored frontiers
in social capital research, and while not resolved in this volume, each is illuminated by cases
represented here. Another underexplored question is to what extent war contributes to social
capital. At first blush, the possibility that an event defined by violence, destruction, and death
could seed peaceful cooperation for public ends seems illogical. But upon closer inspection,
the connection is less surprising. Durkheim, Simmel, and other founders of the social sciences
understood that shared crises create shared interests and shared identities. War creates social
problems and individual needs that government has neither the infrastructure nor the extra
resources to address. During the U.S. Civil War, for example, voluntary associations and
church networks shuttled thousands of orphaned children to foster homes in the frontier West.
After the Civil War, battleground nurses formed the American Red Cross, whose volunteers
today continue to provide relief services during wartime and peacetime. As the case studies of
Germany and (to a lesser extent) Japan in this volume illustrate, wars also may mark a
transition from one form of government that is inhospitable to social capital to another that
allows social capital to flourish. Finally, of course, sociodemographic changes can influence a
nations types and stock of social capital. Building and maintaining social capital requires
time, energy, and in some cases civic skills. Where individuals choose or are forced to deploy
their resources in other placesin demanding jobs, for examplesocial capital is likely to
suffer. The same is true when growing populations do not have the opportunity to learn civic
dispositions, or when rapid mobility or long-distance commuting undermines social
connectedness. The authors in this study are social theorists in their own right. Several of
them couple their accounts of the dynamics of social capital in their specific country with a
wider account of how social capital should be conceived. Thus, for example, Offe and Fuchs
begin their essay with a broader typology of the dimensions of social capital, while Prez-
Daz emphasizes a distinction between civil and uncivil social capital. At this stage of the
debate about social capital, it seems more productive to encourage those voices, no matter
how dissonant, rather than to force a false theoretical unity. What unites us, above all, is a
shared concern to understand patterns of social change and their implications for our
democracies. This volume will shed light on these various causal factors. But more important,
it will provide for the first time a panoramic view of social capital in advanced postindustrial
nations. As part of a global economy, the nations examined in this volume are influenced by
many of the same economic and social forces. At the same time, they differ across the range
of historical experience, economic organization, and democratic structures. Moreover, even
when similar forces have impinged on all our countriesthe advent of commercial television,
the divorce revolution, urban sprawl, the movement of women into the paid labor force, the
growth of the Internet, and many morethe timing of those changes has varied among our
countries, in some cases by decades. It is not surprising, then, that the features of social
capital in these countries have converged in some ways but diverged in others. In this book
we seek to bring to bear on these questions detailed evidence, both qualitative and
quantitative, from eight different countries, covering roughly the period from the end of World
War II to the end of the twentieth century. Our countries represent a broad sampling of
advanced, postindustrial democracies from Western Europe, North America, and East Asia.
Because of the unique importance that Tocquevilles America has played in theories of what
we now call social capital, we include two essays on the United States, one more directly
comparable to the other national case studies in its focus on the last several decades of the
twentieth century and the second taking a longer historical view. We should warn the reader
now that we render no simple verdict. Indeed, we do not entirely agree among ourselves on
what concepts are best suited for framing questions of change. A collective volume
necessarily lacks the simple clarity that a single-author study can often produce. On the other
hand, in an area such as ours, in which serious research programs are just getting under way,
the diversity of perspectives and insights that a collection of creative scholars can provide is
an even more valuable asset. We hope that the reader will benefit from this diversity in
framing his or her own approach to this complicated but portentous subject.