What Determines Social Capital? Evidence from Slavery’s Legacy

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics II & State Politics and Policy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Comparative Politics II

Abstract

What determines social capital? Prior scholarship has examined what causes social capital to change contemporaneously but has yet to assess how history influenced social capital’s development. Building off previous research which posits that former slaveholding regions exhibit lower levels of social capital, I test two competing explanations of how social capital developed. The inequality hypothesis argues that a reliance on plantation slavery created economic inequality, which in turn diminished modern social capital; the attitudinal hypothesis, argues that the abolition of slavery influenced mass political attitudes which have transmitted over generations and diminished modern social capital. To test which is correct, I examine slavery’s impact on social capital, measured as interpersonal trust, in two countries – the US and Brazil. I find evidence that slavery is negatively associated with social capital; an individual’s support for interpersonal trust can decrease by as much as 14 percent in regions with high levels of former slavery. Moreover, it is the attitudinal hypothesis—not economic inequality—which predicts social capital’s decline.

Author

• Matthew Joseph Uttermark, Florida State University