lated with political participation. Second, there still remains a degree of between-city
variance after controlling for all these variables. Insofar as social capital is conceived
of as a community-level attribute, it may be that it is operating in this remaining
variance. This is entirely possible but unfortunately there do not exist good data to
test this possibility. While an unsatisfactory response to the concern, this will remain
an important area for future research.
6.
Conclusion
While social capital theorists maintain that face-to-face interaction such as partic-
ipation in voluntary associations, volunteering and the like leads to the creation of
generalized trust, both empirical and theoretical evidence points to problems with
this argument. Variables of group participation, volunteering and informal social-
izing have relatively little impact on social trust, the latter two having significant
negative effects. An alternative argument about the importance of life satisfaction
provides more powerful predictors of social trust. However, the problem of endogene-
ity remains in that model also. I have argued that if social capital is doing any work in
explanations of political participation, it is at the aggregate level; social capital, if it
has an effect, should act to decrease the inter-city variance in the different indicators
of political participation. However, the analysis of social capital as it is commonly
measured and operationalized, provides little or no support for this. While social
interaction does have an effect on individuals’ propensity to participate, and general-
ized trust has an effect on voting, none of these measures reduce the variance between
cities appreciably. The analysis finds scant evidence for the hypothesis that social
capital operates to affect political participation through attitudes. The mobilization
hypothesis fares better; but here the concern is that it is not adding anything to the
understanding of political participation that is not already known.
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Convention