Does social capital matter? An analysis of its micro- and macro-level-relationships with democratic knowledge

In recent decades, studies have shown that social capital relates to various dimensions of political culture, such as trust in political institutions, support for or satisfaction with democracy. Regarding citizens’ democratic knowledge, which refers to the cognitive dimension of attitudes towards democracy, only few studies examine the influence of social capital. Most of these studies include indicators such as social trust or civic participation as control variables, rather than theorizing more deeply why social capital should matter. Thus, our study aims to contribute to this research by focusing on the relationship between variations of social capital and democratic knowledge. On the micro-level, we distinguish between bridging and bonding social capital. Bridging social capital is related to open social networks, generalized trust and can be seen as more inclusive. Bonding social capital is related to closed social networks, particularized trust and can be seen as more exclusive. We expect, that bridging social capital will relate positively to democratic knowledge while bonding social capital should have a negative relationship to citizen´s democratic knowledge. In addition, we expect that these effects depend on three macrolevel variables: the regime type (democratic vs. authoritarian regimes), the age of the democratic regime and the degree of civil society. For our analysis, we combine data from the World Values Survey and the V-Dem-Project and apply multi-level-modelling to test our hypothesis.