Ways to make people active: The role of place attachment, cultural capital, and neighborhood ties

Abstract

This paper tries to reconcile two sets of apparently contradictory results. One is the positive link, postulated in literature, between place attachment and civic activity, the other is the sociological claim that there is a negative relationship between place attachment and a person's social and cultural status (cultural capital), which in turn is known to be the strongest positive predictor of civic involvement. In order to resolve this inconsistency, I postulated two alternative paths leading to civic activity: the social–emotional path, in which the relationship between place attachment and civic activity is mediated by local social capital (neighborhoods ties), and cultural path, consisting of cultural capital and interest in own roots. I also postulated a negative link between place attachment and cultural capital. A representative sample of 1328 subjects, coming from three regions of Poland, differing in historical heritage and objective rootedness of inhabitants, was used for analysis. In a series of structural equations, the two-path model was confirmed both in the whole sample and in each of the three regions separately. Similar results were obtained from a separate analysis run on data clustered into 114 communes.