Social capital and political participation

This paper analyzes the determinants of social capital, as generalized trust, from a microeconomic perspective. We review previous results at the aggregate level and test their significance in our setup. Specifically we aim at testing the role of political participation and the quality of institutions. The empirical work relies on microeconomic data from the 2008 wave of the European Social Survey, including 21 European countries and roughly 41,000 observations on a wide set of socio-economic and political variables. Preliminary results underline the role of political participation in the accumulation of generalized trust, while data are consistent with institutional quality being a consequence and not a cause of trust.