Social Capital and the Quality of Government : Evidence from the United States
Social capital - in the form of general trust and strong civi norms that call for cooperation when large-scale collective action is needed - can improve government performance in three ways: 1) It can broaden government accountability, making gover...
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2000/12/828289/social-capital-quality-government-evidence-states http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19750 |
| Summary: | Social capital - in the form of general
trust and strong civi norms that call for cooperation when
large-scale collective action is needed - can improve
government performance in three ways: 1) It can broaden
government accountability, making government responsive to
citizens at large, rather than to narrow interests. 2) It
can facilitate agreement where political preferences are
polarized. 3) It is associated with greater innovation when
policymakers face new challenges. Consistent with these
arguments, Putnam (1993) has shown that regional governments
in the more trusting, more civic-minded northern, and
central parts of Italy provide public services more
effectively than do those in the less trusting, less
civic-minded southern regions. Using cross-country data, La
Porta and others (1997), and Knack and Keefer (1997),
obtained findings consistent with Putnam's evidence.
For samples of about thirty nations (represented in the
World Value Surveys), they found that societies with greater
trust tended to have governments that performed
significantly better. The authors used survey measures of
citizen confidence in government as well as subjective
indicators of bureaucratic inefficiency. The author further
analyzes links between social capital and government
performance, using data for the United States. In states
with more social capital (as measured by an index of trust,
volunteering, and census response), government performance
is rated higher, based on ratings constructed by the
Government Performance Project. This result is highly robust
to including a variety of control variables, considering the
possibility of influential outlying values, treating the
performance ratings as ordinal, rather than cardinal, and
correcting for possible endogeneity. |
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