Social Capital in the Fifty States: Measuring State-Level Social Capital 1986-2004

The idea of social capital has had a powerful impact on the study of politics, policy, and social science at large. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention towards understanding what social capital is and exploring the direct and indirect consequences of living in high social capital environments. Much of what we know about the causes and effects of social capital is limited by the nature of data used regularly by scholars.Although the concept of social capital has been applied globally (Callahan 2005; Letki 2006; Putnam 1993; Tavits 2006; Warde et al. 2003), several works have focused on studying its role within in the context of the state and local politics in the United States (Carden, Courtmanche and Meiners 2009; Knack 2002; Hero 2003, 2007; Putnam 2000; Rice 2001; Tavits 2006). Current datasets offer us leverage in the study of social capital over time in the United States (Keele 2005) and on questions regarding static differences in the distribution of social capital across the states (Putnam 2000). The inability of scholars to know how social capital varies over time and across space limits the kinds of questions that can be asked. Static measures also pose a problem because mainly rival explanations of policy change, such as racial/ethnic diversity and political culture, are highly correlated with social capital. While culture is typically treated as a static concept, temporal shifts in racial/ethnic diversity do not always correspond with changes in social capital (see Hawes and Rocha 2011), allowing scholars the opportunity to establish the extent to which social connectedness alone creates shifts in political outcomes.In this paper, we offer a unique measure of social capital which varies by time and space. We rely sample data of over 20,000 individuals conducted biannually in the continuous 48 states by MediaMark Research Inc. (MRI), a marketing research firm. Although limited in some respects, the MediaMark data are able to construct measures that tap the non-attitudinal components of Putnam’s comprehensive social capital index. This data is available at the state level from 1986 through the present, allowing us to explore movement in these elements of social capital across the states over a twenty year time span.