This paper explores whether the concept of social capital as popularized by Robert Putnam is a good social science concept. Taking Gerring’s work on concept evaluation as the starting point, the paper first presents a set of criteria for conceptual ‘goodness’ and discusses how social...

We look at the effect of importance of religion in daily life on social trust, defined as the share of a population that thinks that people in general can be trusted. We make use of new data from the Gallup World Poll for 109 countries and 43 U.S. states. Our empirical results indicate a robust,...

Martin Paldam is one of the most prominent figures of Danish economics and European public choice. In this introduction to the special issue, we identify five of the areas, where he has made significant contributions: (1) vote and popularity functions and political business cycles; (2)...

We look at the effect of religiosity on social trust, defined as the share of a population that thinks that people in general can be trusted. This is important since social trust is related to many desired outcomes, such as growth, education, democratic stability and subjective well-being. The...

During the last 15 years, the social capital literature has grown rapidly. In particular after Robert Putnam’s (1993) study of regional governments in Italy, the interest among economists and politologists exploded as Putnam showed that the concept could be used in quantitative explanations of...