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Conferences
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Conferences
Warsaw 2009: Presentations and short courses
Measuring social capital and its influence on voting behaviour at the aggregate regional level
Session: Measurement of Social Capital
Author:
- Johanna Willmann; University of Vienna, Austria
Abstract:
My approach to social capital stems from a behavioural research question: how to solve collective action problems. The answer I’m arguing for is: social capital helps in overcoming collective action problems.
I conceive social capital as a resource of the collective, not of the individual. My definition of social capital is: ‘Social capital are those assets that increase the skills of a social unit.’ In concrete, I refer to ‘social trust’, ‘norms’ and ‘social contacts’ that constitute social capital. To attribute social capital to the collective and not to the individual makes it necessary to measure it at the collective – the ‘aggregate’ – level. The choice for the regional level has practical reasons as this is the smallest possible unit in the ESS that covers at least 100 interviews within each unit to aggregate and it is the biggest possible unit to allow for the comparison of 140 aggregate units, which allows for better statistical comparison than the usual cross-20-country approach.
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