ABSTRACT
One of the most intriguing issues in the social capital debate is civic engagement as a (possible) collective good. The claim is that in social contexts with dense networks of voluntary associations, there is an externality effect from membership which contributes to the development of generalized trust that cannot be reduced to individual effects. How exactly this externality occurs – the causal mechanism behind this relationship – is still largely a puzzle. The aim of the present chapter is to offer a way to disentangle individual and aggregate effects of civic engagement from both a theoretical and a statistical point of view. Theoretically, we will introduce a game of incomplete information where the beliefs of the players about the type of actor they are expecting to face matter for producing different kinds of equilibria. Empirically, we will use a multilevel model to link the micro- and the macro-levels of analysis. Our aim is to test three hypotheses. First: are members of associations more trusting than nonmembers? Second and third: are members (and similarly, non-members) of associations more trusting when they live in areas with dense associational networks? A selection of data from the database of the World Values Survey of 1990 is examined: the micro-level is constituted by individuals; the macro-level by regions of different (European) countries.
