Social Capital: Summing up the Debate on a Conceptual Tool of Comparative Politics and Public Policy

Social capital, defined as a combination of generalized trust and access to social networks, has become a key concept in the social sciences in recent decades because it correlates with normatively desirable qualitative features of liberal democracy. The academic debate on social capital in the last fifteen years reflects a crucial theoretical dichotomy between the cultural/historical approach, which views social capital as an independent variable embedded in culturally and historically determined networks of civic engagement, and the institutionalist approach, which conceptualizes social capital as an intervening variable influenced by formal institutional structures of the polity, in conjunction with other variables, such as equality and homogeneity. Notwithstanding this controversy, both approaches find strong evidence that social capital contributes to improving the performance of democratic institutions and democracy at large.