Re-evaluating the effect of bonding social capital on the quality of
local representation.
Social capital is widely viewed as the cornerstone of functioning
democratic governance. Countering this consensus, Hill and
Matsubayashi (2005) argues that membership in voluntary organizations
which foster 'bonding relations' is negatively associated with the
quality of democratic representation in a community. Our paper
examines these findings by simulating the sampling variability
inherent in the community-level indices that Hill and Matsubayashi
(2005) aggregate from individual-level data. We find that when taking
into account this measurement error of the community level
information, the models do not allow conclusive findings as claimed.