SOCIAL CAPITAL AND CIVIC PARTICIPATION

Year 2010, Volume: 2 Issue: 2, 81 - 88, 01.12.2010

Melike Erdogan

Abstract

The concept of social capital has a long intellectual history in the field of social sciences. In recent
years, interest of scholars from sociology, political science, economics and public administration
is rapidly increasing. The reason for this increasing interest is that it has been aware of the
importance of social capital in communities’ administrative, social, economic and political
development. In this sense, the concept of social capital is an issue to be discussed with solution of
current problems of public administration, subjects of governance, civil society, and participation.
Social capital has a lot of definitions which are completely different from each other. Common
point of these different definitions is that social capital is a resource at both individual and
community level. We will use Robert Putnam’s definition about social capital in this paper.
Putnam (1993) defines social capital as “features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and
networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated action”. In his
book; Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community, Putnam describes
declining social capital in America. He analyzes relationship between social capital and civic
participation and assumes that there is a positive relationship between social capital and civic
participation.
The paper aims to reveal how there is a relationship between social capital and civic participation
in Central Florida. We will use “The Central Florida Social Capital Community Benchmark
Survey that is made by The Survey Research Laboratory in the Institute for Social and Behavior
Sciences at the University of Central Florida among central Florida residents. We use notion of
civic participation not only as voting but also as concern of politics, volunteering, attending a
political meeting, participating in any demonstrations, protests or boycotts, cooperating to solve
problems and involvement local action. In addition, we analyze relationship between civic
participation and trust level that citizens have about government and people because of the fact
that trust is social capital’s important element

Keywords

Social Capital, Civic Participation, Trust, Volunteering

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