6 May
2006
6 May
'06
8:44 a.m.
this is good, but the writing is a bit confusing. i can figure it out,
but i'd try to make it a bit more melifluous. sounds trivial, i know, but
if people stop reading because they get sidetracked by the prose, you
won't get your point across. try reading especially the first sentence
out loud.
Gary
On Sat, 6 May 2006, Thomas Soehl wrote:
The ambivalent effects of bonding social capital for local representation
re-evaluating the effect of civic engagement on mass-elite policy agenda
agreement
Contributing to the debate which forms of social capital are the cornerstone
of functioning democratic governance and which are harmful, Hill and
Matsubayashi (2005) find that membership in 'bonding organizations' is
negatively associated with mass-elite policy agenda agreement in a community
while bridging social capital has no measurable effect. Our paper shows that
the effects are much more ambiguous than the authors claim. Hill and
Matsubayashi (2005) constructs the critical indices for social capital and
participation by aggregating from a small sample (~25 per community) of
individual-level data. Nevertheless the article treats these measures as
?precise?. We demonstrate that when taking into account the sampling
variability of this information, the uncertainty of the estimates does not
allow conclusive findings. Furthermore when we exclude variables that pose
post-treatment bias we find that bridging social capital might actually have
a positive effect on policy concurrence. However a dataset with a
substantially larger sample size per community would be necessary to reliably
assess these relationships.
---
Thomas Soehl
MPA candidate 2007 / McCloy Scholar
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University