Socialt kapital och samhällets miniatyrisering

Abstract

Social capital and the miniaturisation of community. Social capital has been conceptualized both as a contextual property of communities and as a property of individuals. Two of the building blocks of the notion of social capital are social participation and trust. High levels of social participation and trust are reciprocally reinforcing with two-way causality, according to the literature. However, this mutual relationship is highly dependant on the quality of the social participation. During the last decades, membership and activity levels have decreased in traditional political parties, unions, and other organizations, while social participation in the form of Internet chats, single-issue movements, etc. probably has increased. At the same time the number of persons with a high level of generalized trust has sharply decreased in many Western countries, even though the trend is not apparent in Sweden. A high level of social participation in programmatically smaller networks and organizations with low trust has been called ";miniaturization of community"; by Fukuyama. The miniaturization of community and its implications for political science research are discussed, as well as the institutionalism perspective as an approach to study the causes of the miniaturization of community.