Social Capital and Self-Government Under an Authoritarian : A Survey of Rural China

Scholars of social capital are still exploring and debating which type of social capital plays what kind of role in shaping economic development and government performance in different economic and political systems at various levels. To contribute to this important exploration and debate, this paper examines the impacts of two types of social capital - generalized and particularized - on the performance of grassroots self-government institutions in urban China based on an original survey of 144 urban neighborhood communities in China’s three major cities. The findings indicate that the generalized social capital embodied in the indiscriminative trust and inclusive social networks positively affected the performance of the self-government institutions, while the particularized social capital as manifested in discriminative trust and exclusive social networks negatively impacted such performance. These findings help clarify some theoretical issues and shed some light on the prospects of the local self-government system in China