Making Democracy Work More? Exploring the Linkage between Social Capital and Government Performance

Abstract

This study considers the linkage between social capital and government performance. The latter concept is disaggregated into two dimensions: policy activism and administrative efficiency. Social capital may be related to government performance either because it increases the level of political sophistication and facilitates the cooperation within society, helping people to voice their policy demands better, or because social capital, being shared also by the bureaucratic elites of a polity, facilitates cooperation and helps to overcome the agency problem within the bureaucratic organization. The former argument links social capital to policy activism while the latter links it to administrative efficiency. Empirical tests with data from the German and American subnational governments provide support for the former but not for the latter argument.