Manufacturing Trust: Community Currencies and the Creation of Social Capital

In this study I examine whether an innovative government program in Ichikawa, Japan has been successful in increasing the level of generalized interpersonal trust in the community by rewarding civic participation by local citizens. Japan has sponsored the development of a number of “community currency” programs at the local level that are designed to create social capital. A community currency is a local “money” that is only useable within a neighborhood or town. In a typical community currency program, a town rewards civic volunteers with credits to barter with other citizens, use at participating stores, or pay for town services. These programs are specifically designed to stimulate generalized trust by rewarding civic engagement and encouraging social interaction. I evaluate whether the new Tekona community currency program in Ichikawa, Japan has been successful in raising levels of trust among participants, as compared to a randomly selected control group of town residents. I find that community currency involvement increases general trust, which demonstrates that it is possible to institute government programs that create social capital.

社会资本与社会组织运转——以甘东用水协会为例

促进人们之间相互合作有三种机制——科层、市场和自组织.三种机制在官僚成本、交易成本与结社成本低的情况下都能很好地促进民众之间的合作,但是在缺少社会资本的地方,随着三种成本的上升,合作机制可能都会导致不合作行为的发生.根据对中国目前唯一的整体实行参与式灌溉管理改革并取得成功的中型灌区——甘东用水协会进行实地调研,从协会在现实中所遇到的用水户合作困境出发,针对甘东用水协会内用水户为什么不积极参与和自己利益密切相关的社会组织的建设这个问题,从科层影子、扭曲市场和公民社会缺乏三个方面对甘东用水协会困境进行了分析.得出:政府或者其他外部机构在社会资本缺乏、市场机制难以奏效的地方建立用水协会这类社会组织,要想实现其可持续发展,必须使其脱离科层控制;而且政府或者外部机构在投资方向上也要更加侧重于促进地方社会资本增加的项目,而不是用时髦的、现代的、复杂的组织或者设备来简单代替原来的基础设施.     

社会资本理论与社会公正问题

社会资本理论的兴起为社会公正实现的研究提供了新思路。社会资本与社会公正之间存在着结构性依赖和制约的关系。目前,我国的社会资本存在诸多缺陷,制约着社会公正的普遍形成。为此,通过转变政府职能、界定政府权力,加强制度整合、推动法治化进程,培育公民社会的公民意识和公共精神以及促进民间组织的健康发展,进而实现社会资本从传统到现代的转型,是实现社会公正的重要前提和题中应有之义。     

Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice

The paper contrasts the liberal conception of democracy as the aggregation of individual preferences with the deliberative conception of democracy as a process of open discussion leading to an agreed judgement on policy. Social choice theory has identified problems - the arbitrariness of decision rules, vulnerability to strategic voting - which are often held to undermine democratic ideals. Contrary to common opinion, I argue that deliberative democracy is less vulnerable to these difficulties than liberal democracy. The process of discussion tends to produce sets of policy preferences that are 'single peaked'; and within a deliberative setting it may be possible to vary the decision rule according to the nature of the issue to be decided.     

The Logic of the Survey Experiment Reexamined

Paul J. Quirk Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, 2329 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z4 e-mail: quirk{at}politics.ubc.ca e-mail: bjgaines{at}uiuc.edu (corresponding author) e-mail: kuklinsk{at}ad.uiuc.edu Scholars of political behavior increasingly embed experimentaldesigns in opinion surveys by randomly assigning respondentsalternative versions of questionnaire items. Such experimentshave major advantages: they are simple to implement and theydodge some of the difficulties of making inferences from conventionalsurvey data. But survey experiments are no panacea. We identifyproblems of inference associated with typical uses of surveyexperiments in political science and highlight a range of difficulties,some of which have straightforward solutions within the survey-experimentalapproach and some of which can be dealt with only by exercisinggreater caution in interpreting findings and bringing to bearalternative strategies of research.     

Economic Growth and Social Capital

Recent interdisciplinary theoretical work has suggested that social capital, or the interpersonal trust of citizens, plays an important role in explaining both the efficiency of political institutions, and in the economic performance of contemporary societies. This paper examines the relationship between social capital and economic growth in a sample of thirty-four countries over the period 1970 to 1992, within the framework of a modified neo-classical model of economic growth. The findings suggest that social capital has an impact on growth which is at least as strong as that of human capital or education, which has been the focus of much of the recent work on endogenous growth theory. It appears to have about the same impact on growth as catch-up or the ability of poorer nations to adopt technological innovations pioneered by their richer counterparts.     

Social Capital and Endogenous Preferences

In this paper we analyze whether social capital can emerge endogenously from a process of preference evolution. We define social capital as preferences that promote voluntary cooperation in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We investigate how the endogenous preferences depend on the amount of information individuals have about each other’s preferences. When there is sufficiently much information, maximal social capital emerges. In general, the level of social capital varies positively with the amount of information. Our results may add to an understanding of the factors that determine a society’s ability to generate cooperative outcomes.     

Social Choice and the Grammar of Rights and Freedoms

The techniques of social choice and game theory are increasingly being used to analyse concepts in political theory. Although these techniques may prove invaluable for teasing out contradictory formulations, puzzles and problems with traditional concepts, formal writers often begin their analysis with simplistic intuitive accounts rather than building on earlier traditions in analytic political theory. This is no more obvious than with the social-choice and game-theory analysis of rights and freedoms. This paper reviews these approaches and demonstrates that by ignoring the grammar of rights and freedoms, social-choice and game-theory analysis goes wrong from the very beginning. Formal writers need to take more account of the history of their subject, as developed in the analytic theory tradition.     

Social Trust, Social Capital and Perceptions of Immigration

Analyses of social capital and immigration have stressed the negative impact that culturally diverse societies have for the development of social trust. Ethnic heterogeneity, according to these studies, is associated with lower levels of social trust. However, social trust has not been studied as an independent variable in order to explain attitudes towards immigration. This article argues that societies with high levels of social capital facilitate the integration of immigrants because those members with high levels of social trust will tend to have more positive attitudes towards immigration. This hypothesis is empirically tested in a cross-country multi-level empirical analysis for sixteen European countries, drawing on the 2002–3 European Social Survey. This analysis shows that, regardless of the impact of other individual-level variables and contextual variables such as levels of unemployment or percentage of foreign population, those with high social capital do exhibit more positive attitudes towards immigration than the rest of the population.     

社会资本、社会和谐与我国社会主义和谐社会建设

社会资本的培育能够提升公民的宽容和妥协精神、提升公民对制度的认同感、增强公民的合作参与的品质。在转型时期,我国社会资本存在着严重缺失现象,制约着社会的良性运行和协调发展。因此,通过增强政民之间的信任、引入"善治"的社会治理范式、完善规范等社会资本的培育应当成为构建和谐社会的一个重要视角。     

Choice in Public Services: Crying 'Wolf' in the School Choice Debate

Choice, diversity and personalisation have been key to the New Labour project in public services. With the emergence of a reinvigorated Conservative party as a credible electoral threat, and the end of the Blair era, it seems appropriate to consider the continuing viability and longevity of the New Labour public service project. In this article, I approach the issue of choice in public services through an examination of the long-running controversy over choice in the English secondary school system. I argue that the opponents of choice have been reluctant to engage with the notion of choice in public services due to concerns over the supposed negative effect that consumer choice has on the equity and quality of service provision. This paper aims to challenge the claim that any element of choice in education necessarily has deleterious effects on social justice. I argue that the case against school choice has not been decisively made and that school choice can, in principle, form part of a socially progressive educational project by redistributing power to service users and helping to maintain popular support for public provision of education.     

Social Capital and Local Government Capacity

Local authorities vary considerably in their capacity for governance. The dimensions of this capacity can only be developed by drawing on local stocks of social capital. The seminal theories of social capital tend to conceive it as a community resource that is built up through a long tradition of civic engagement. We take issue with the laissez–faire implications of these theories, highlighting ways in which local governments can positively contribute to social capital formation by opening their 'political opportunity structure' and engaging voluntary organisations and community groups in trust–based partnership arrangements.     

Social Capital and the Dynamics of Trust in Government

It is well understood that trust in government responds to the performance of the president, Congress, and the economy. Despite improved government performance, however, trust has never returned to the levels witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s. Social capital may be the force that has kept trust low. If so, we need to assess the relative contributions of both government performance and social capital at the macro level. Using macrolevel data, the analysis, here, is designed to capture the variation over time in both social capital and government performance and let them compete to explain the macro variation in trust. The empirical results demonstrate that both government performance and social capital matter, but that social capital appears to be the force which accounts for the decline in trust over the last 40 years.     

Macro Measures and Mechanics of Social Capital

Interest in social capital has grown as it has become apparentthat it is an important predictor of collective well-being.Recently, attention has shifted to how levels of social capitalhave changed over time. But better measures are required totest even basic hypotheses such as establishing the directionof causality between the two components of social capital. Inthe following analysis, I develop macro measures of social capitalthrough the development of longitudinal measures of civic engagementand interpersonal trust. I use these measures to test basicassumptions about social capital. The result is not only thefirst over time measures of social capital, but also an increasein our understanding of social capital as a macro process withcomplex causes and effects.     

Local School Choice Policies in Sweden

More choice for parents and students is a major recent change in school policies in most Western countries. In Sweden, these changes coincided with the decentralization of power and responsibilities within primary and secondary education from central to local government. This gave municipalities an important role in the actual implementation of choice policies. The question addressed here is how and why local authorities vary with regard to their promotion of choice in schooling. A theory of local government school choice policies is developed, focusing on the social and political composition of the locality. Four factors are seen as likely to be particularly important: the strength of liberal conservatism, the size of the middle class, ethnic diversity and urban location. The empirical investigation is based on data from the 288 municipalities in Sweden. All four factors turn out to be important, but contrary to previous assumptions, choice policies are not primarily linked to the success of the Moderate (Conservative) Party. Instead, the strength of the middle class is the major explanation. In Sweden, but also in other Western societies, the middle class has emerged as the dominant social stratum. Middle class parents, who themselves are well educated, take a keen interest in their children's education and are more likely to demand greater opportunities for choice. In the final analysis, this is linked to the changing position of the Social Democratic Party and its aim to broaden its electoral basis by appealing to middle class voters.     

Social Capital and Regional Economies in Britain

Is social capital a prerequisite for prosperity? This paper analyzes social capital and economic performance in the British regions. Like Italy, Britain has a north–south economic divide. Are these differences caused by unequal stocks of social capital? This paper provides limited support for the hypothesized relationship between some indicators of social capital (especially trust and civic associations) and economic performance. Economic associations, however, are negatively correlated. This highlights shortcomings in social capital theory in terms of transferring the concept to new settings, the mechanisms linking social capital to production and the translation of social capital into public policy.     

Democracy,the Market,and the Logic of Social Choice

This article compares the types of knowledge democracy and the market require to rationally allocate resources. I argue that high levels of public ignorance and voters’ inability to compare the effects of different parties’ policies make it difficult for parties and elections to rationally allocate resources. Markets mitigate these problems because the simultaneous existence of multiple firms’ products facilitates comparisons that mimic the conditions of scientific experimentation. The economy of knowledge involved in such comparisons indicates there are epistemic advantages to using firms and markets, instead of political parties and elections, to allocate scarce resources. However, in contrast to arguments that markets merely provide better information than political decisions, I argue markets’ epistemic advantages are derived from the way they facilitate comparisons that minimize decision makers’ need for knowledge or understanding.