Social Capital, Welfare State, and Political Legitimacy

Abstract

In this article, the authors use the concept of negative social capital to address the contextual impact of micro mechanisms explaining political legitimacy. They first illustrate the effect of social capital with regard to its negative consequences. Then they select four countries, each one a case study of a different welfare regime, and measure the distribution of “time given helping others.” The helping behavior is interpreted as a credit slip in social capital vocabulary, and its effect on the confidence in democracy in different welfare regimes is measured. The research findings suggest that helping behavior in weaker welfare regimes has detrimental consequences for political legitimacy. The results are consistent both in a cross-country and in a within-country comparison.