Is Social Capital a Good Concept?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore whether the concept of social capital as popularized by Robert Putnam is a good social science concept. Taken 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 capital perform on these criteria. Afterwards, an empirical section explores the validity of the unidimensionality assumption of most definitions of social capital. This assumption is rejected in four separate tests at both the individual and aggregate level. A final section therefore discusses the results and their implications for the evaluation of the concept and future research within its paradigm.