Social Capital and the Quality of Government : Evidence from the United States

Knack, Stephen

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: CITIZENS;    CITIZENSHIP;    CIVIC CULTURE;    CLIENT SATISFACTION;    CLINICS;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-2504
RP-ID  :  WPS2504

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Social capital - in the form of generaltrust and strong civi norms that call for cooperation whenlarge-scale collective action is needed - can improvegovernment performance in three ways: 1) It can broadengovernment accountability, making government responsive tocitizens at large, rather than to narrow interests. 2) Itcan facilitate agreement where political preferences arepolarized. 3) It is associated with greater innovation whenpolicymakers face new challenges. Consistent with thesearguments, Putnam (1993) has shown that regional governmentsin the more trusting, more civic-minded northern, andcentral parts of Italy provide public services moreeffectively than do those in the less trusting, lesscivic-minded southern regions. Using cross-country data, LaPorta and others (1997), and Knack and Keefer (1997),obtained findings consistent with Putnam's evidence.For samples of about thirty nations (represented in theWorld Value Surveys), they found that societies with greatertrust tended to have governments that performedsignificantly better. The authors used survey measures ofcitizen confidence in government as well as subjectiveindicators of bureaucratic inefficiency. The author furtheranalyzes links between social capital and governmentperformance, using data for the United States. In stateswith more social capital (as measured by an index of trust,volunteering, and census response), government performanceis rated higher, based on ratings constructed by theGovernment Performance Project. This result is highly robustto including a variety of control variables, considering thepossibility of influential outlying values, treating theperformance ratings as ordinal, rather than cardinal, andcorrecting for possible endogeneity.