Measuring Aggregate Social Capital Using Census Response Rates

Abstract

Despite the importance of social capital to political science research, conventional means of measuring it are subject to a range of problems, including nonresponse bias, declining validity over time, and/or a lack of conceptual coherence. We argue that, in the case of the United States, rates of response to the decennial census represent a powerful yet overlooked measure for aggregate social capital. In this research note, we elaborate a theoretical rationale for the measure and empirically validate it, showing across multiple data sets and levels of geographic aggregation that census response rates (CRR) strongly predict various dimensions of social capital. Our findings highlight an important opportunity for social capital scholars to use existing governmental data to better measure geospatial variation in a key social science construct.