Pluralist theories on democracy tend to favour the view that social capital helps to strengthen the legitimacy of democratic institutions (Putnam 1993; Fukuyama 1995; Newton 1999, 2001; van Deth 2008). Not surprisingly, the concept has been regarded as a remedy for all sort of democratic malaises, including the most pervasive of them all: corruption. Societies displaying higher levels of social capital, so the theory goes, have a greater civic sense (Putnam 1993) and are, therefore, more aware of the way in which democratic power ought to be exercised and less tolerant of corruption (Putnam 2000). There are a growing number of cross-national studies showing that corruption is strongly and negatively associated with social capital (La Porta et al. 1997), measured in terms of ‘generalised trust’ (Uslaner 2002). The causal relationship between social capital and corruption is a little more complex than what has just been described. Corruption as an ‘opaque exchange’ (Della Porta 1992) needs social capital to guarantee safe returns to the parties (Warren 2004). The question is what kind of social capital?
This paper is an attempt to construct a measurement of negative social capital, i.e. social capital that facilitates corruption and causes negative externalities for the performance of democracies (Warren 2004) using for that effect public opinion data drawn from the European Social Survey Round II. This exercise will try to assess the greater or lesser propensity to tolerate corruption in the different democratic societies by analysing indicators of social and political attitudes/practices. The Negative Social Capital index (NSCI) that is proposed in this paper is based on a set of variables that indicate cultural traits and reactions to the performance of institutions, which may be more circumstantial, resulting for example from ongoing political and administrative reforms.
Elsewhere, the criminology literature uses the term criminal (Servadio 1976), perverse (Rubio 1996) or negative (Liu 1999) social capital to describe ‘a form of social capital in that it can make conducting crime easier. […] This criminal capital obviously doesn’t look like much of a good to the rest of society, and it illustrates the point that – like other forms of capital – social capital can be used to facilitate ‘bad’ as well as ‘good’ acts’. Like any other cui bono concepts, the term rests ‘on a post hoc judgement from a particular point of view as to what is negative’ (Halpern 2005). Corruption suffers from the same normative ambiguity. It is a chameleon in the public eye: what may be regarded as improper conduct by a person may be condoled as diligence by another.
This paper is divided into four parts. The first discusses the concepts of corruption and social capital and their relationship in democracy. The second addresses the theoretical assumptions and methods used to construct the Negative Social Capital index, underlining some inconsistencies and care required when reading the indicators. The third describes how the volume of Negative Social Capital was measured comparatively in 24 European countries underlining the need for a deeper analysis of its dimensions. Finally, we evaluate the dynamics between the different components of Negative Social Capital through cluster analysis and advance cautiously some preliminary conclusions.
