Abstract
Using regression and factor analysis with prefecture-level data, I ask whether Japanese in communities with high levels of “social capital” more readily settle their disputes out of court. Although studies of litigation rates often measure suits per capita, the more appropriate measure may involve suits per “dispute.” We lack information about the number of disputes in many fields, but we do have it for Japanese divorces and traffic accidents—and I focus on those two sets of disputes. Disputes over divorce and traffic accidents differ fundamentally, and social capital does not lower litigation rates among either. I find that: (1) couples in communities with low social capital are more apt to divorce; (2) couples in low-social-capital communities are not more likely to litigate their disputes; (3) couples in communities with more lawyers are not more likely to litigate their divorces; and (4) parties in communities with low social capital are not more likely to litigate their disputes over traffic accidents; but (5) parties in communities with more lawyers are indeed more likely to litigate their disputes over those accidents.
Highlights
Neither the rate at which high school graduates advance to university nor the amount that a prefecture invests in high schools is significantly associated with litigation rates
I take the decision to divorce as given, and ask whether the level of social capital in a community is correlated with an ability to negotiate that divorce privately
In other words, whether the level of social capital in a community is correlated with the decision about whether to divorce at all: are couples in some communities more likely to divorce than couples elsewhere?
Summary
-- According to several prominent scholars, where social capital is high people trust each other to cooperate and keep their word -- Lieberman (1983, 186) put the tie between social capital and litigation most starkly: Litigiousness is not a legal but a social phenomenon It is born of a breakdown in community, a breakdown that exacerbates and is exacerbated by the growth of law. Resort to the legal system tends to be tolerated more in industrialized than in preindustrial cultures, and more in large cities than in small towns In his controversial Coming Apart, Charles Murray (2012) argues that social capital is not disappearing in the U.S across the board. If people do not know what their neighbors do, norms are less secure
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