In this issue we feature 7 current papers on the theme of social capital, chosen by Fabio Sabatini [1] (Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”):
1. Broadband Internet and Social Capital Andrea Geraci; Mattia Nardotto; Tommaso Reggiani; Fabio Sabatini
2. The Institutional Foundations of Religious Politics: Evidence from Indonesia Samuel Bazzi; Gabriel Koehler-Derrick; Benjamin Marx
3. The Heritability of Trust and Trustworthiness Depends on the Measure of Trust Kettlewell, Nathan; Tymula, Agnieszka
4. Harmful norms: Can social convention theory explain the persistence of female genital cutting in Africa? Congdon Fors, Heather; Isaksson, Ann-Sofie; Lindskog, Annika
5. Religious practice and student performance: Evidence from Ramadan fasting Hornung, Erik; Schwerdt, Guido; Strazzeri, Maurizio
6. The Roots of Cooperation Zvonimir Bašic; Parampreet Christopher Bindra; Daniela Glätzle-Rützler; Angelo Romano; Matthias Sutter; Claudia Zoller
7. Moral awareness polarizes people's fairness judgments Michael Kurschilgen
1. Broadband Internet and Social Capital Andrea Geraci; Mattia Nardotto; Tommaso Reggiani; Fabio Sabatini We study the impact of broadband penetration on social capital in the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits a technological feature of the telecommunication infrastructure that generated substantial variation in the quality of Internet access across households. The speed of a domestic connection rapidly decays with the distance of a user's line from the network's node serving the area. Merging information on the topology of the network with geocoded longitudinal data about individual social capital from 1997 to 2017, we show that access to fast Internet caused a significant decline in civic and political engagement. Overall, our results suggest that broadband penetration crowded out several dimensions of social capital. JEL: D91 L82 Z13 Keywords: ICT; broadband infrastructure; networks; Internet; social capital; civic capital Date: 2021–11 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sap:wpaper:wp210&r=&r=soc [2]
2. The Institutional Foundations of Religious Politics: Evidence from Indonesia Samuel Bazzi (BU - Boston University [Boston]); Gabriel Koehler-Derrick (Harvard University [Cambridge]); Benjamin Marx (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) Why do religious politics thrive in some societies but not others? This paper explores the institutional foundations of this process in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim democracy. We show that a major Islamic institution, the waqf, fostered the entrenchment of political Islam at a critical historical juncture. In the early 1960s, rural elites transferred large amounts of land into waqf —a type of inalienable charitable trust—to avoid expropriation by the government as part of a major land reform effort. Although the land reform was later undone, the waqf properties remained. We show that greater intensity of the planned reform led to more prevalent waqf land and Islamic institutions endowed as such, including religious schools, which are strongholds of the Islamist movement. We identify lasting effects of the reform on electoral support for Islamist parties, preferences for religious candidates, and the adoption of Islamic legal regulations (sharia). Overall, the land reform contributed to the resilience and eventual rise of political Islam by helping to spread religious institutions, thereby solidifying the alliance between local elites and Islamist groups. These findings shed new light on how religious institutions may shape politics in modern democracies. Keywords: Religion,Institutions,Land reform,Islam,Sharia Law Date: 2020–05 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03391857&r=&r=soc [3]
3. The Heritability of Trust and Trustworthiness Depends on the Measure of Trust Kettlewell, Nathan (University of Technology, Sydney); Tymula, Agnieszka (University of Sydney) Using a large sample of 1,120 twins, we estimated the heritability of trust using four distinct measures of trust – domain-specific political trust, general self-reported trust, and incentivized behavioral trust and trustworthiness. Our results highlight the importance of measuring trust in a context because its heritability differs substantially across the four measures, from 0% to 37%. Moreover, we provide the first evidence on the heritability of political trust which we estimate to be 37%. Furthermore, like the heritability, the environmental correlates of trust also vary across the different measures with political trust having the largest set of environmental covariates. The perceptions of COVID-19 health and income risks are among the unique correlates of political trust, with participants who are more worried about financial and health consequences of COVID-19, trusting politicians less, stressing the importance of trust in political leaders during a health crisis. JEL: D91 Z13 Keywords: trust, heritability, genetics, twin study Date: 2021–09 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14734&r=&r=soc [4]
4. Harmful norms: Can social convention theory explain the persistence of female genital cutting in Africa? Congdon Fors, Heather (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University); Isaksson, Ann-Sofie (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University); Lindskog, Annika (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University) This paper investigates the explanatory power of social convention theory for explaining the persistence of female genital cutting (FGC) in a broad sample of African countries. While influential in policy circles, the idea that FGC is best described as a bad equilibrium in a social coordination game has recently been challenged by quantitative evidence from selected countries. These studies have pointed towards the importance of private preferences. We use novel approaches to test whether FGC is social interdependent when decisions also depend on private preferences. We test implications of the simple fact that according to social convention theory mothers will sometimes cut their daughters even if they do not support the practice. The substantial regional variation in FGC practices warrants investigation in a broad sample. Empirical results drawing on Demographic and Health Survey data from 34 surveys performed between 1992-2018 in 11 African countries suggest that cutting behavior is indeed often socially interdependent, and hence that it can be understood as a social convention. Our findings indicate that even if social convention theory does not provide the full picture, it should not be dismissed. Accordingly, interventions that acknowledge the social interdependence of cutting behavior are likely to be more successful than interventions that do not. JEL: D71 D91 I15 O55 Keywords: Female genital cutting; social convention theory; norms; Africa Date: 2021–11 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0814&r=&r=soc [5]
5. Religious practice and student performance: Evidence from Ramadan fasting Hornung, Erik; Schwerdt, Guido; Strazzeri, Maurizio We investigate how the intensity of Ramadan affects educational outcomes by exploiting spatio-temporal variation in annual fasting hours. Longer fasting hours are related to increases in student performance in a panel of TIMMS test scores (1995-2019) across Muslim countries but not other countries. Results are confirmed in a panel of PISA test scores (2003-2018) allowing within country-wave comparisons of Muslim to non-Muslim students across Europe. We provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that a demanding Ramadan during adolescence affects educational performance by facilitating formation of social capital and social identity via increased religious participation and shared experiences among students. JEL: I21 Z12 J24 O15 Keywords: Education,Religion,Religious Participation,Ramadan,Social Identity,Social Capital,PISA,TIMMS Date: 2021 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cexwps:06&r=&r=soc [6]
6. The Roots of Cooperation Zvonimir Bašic; Parampreet Christopher Bindra; Daniela Glätzle-Rützler; Angelo Romano; Matthias Sutter; Claudia Zoller We study the development of cooperation in 929 young children, aged 3 to 6. In a unified experimental framework, we examine pre-registered hypotheses about which of three fundamental pillars of human cooperation – direct and indirect reciprocity, and third-party punishment – emerges earliest as a means to increase cooperation in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma game. We find that third-party punishment doubles cooperation rates in comparison to a control condition. Children also reciprocate others’ behavior, yet direct and indirect reciprocity do not increase overall cooperation rates. We also examine the influence of children’s cognitive skills and parents’ socioeconomic background on cooperation. JEL: C91 C93 D01 D91 H41 Keywords: cooperation, reciprocity, third-party punishment, reputation, children, parents, cognitive abilities, socioeconomic status, prisoner’s dilemma game, experiment Date: 2021 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9404&r=&r=soc [7]
7. Moral awareness polarizes people's fairness judgments Michael Kurschilgen (Technical University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods) How does moral awareness affect people's fairness judgments? Models of identity utility predict that if individuals differ in their personal fairness ideals (equality versus effciency), higher moral awareness should not only make people's choices less selfish but also more polarized. On the other hand, people's desire for conforming with the behavior of their peers should help mitigate polarization. I test these conjectures in a laboratory experiment, in which participants can pursue different fairness ideals. I exogenously vary (i) whether participants are prompted to state their moral opinions behind the veil of ignorance, and (ii) whether they are informed about the behavior of their peers. I find that moral introspection makes choices more polarized, reflecting even more divergent moral opinions. The increase in polarization coincides largely with a widening of revealed gender differences as introspection makes men's choices more welfarist and women's more egalitarian. Disclosing the descriptive norm of the situation is not capable of mitigating the polarization. JEL: C91 D63 Keywords: Moral Introspection; Social Information; Identity; Normative Ambivalence; Equality; Efficiency; Polarization; Experiment. Date: 2021–11 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aiw:wpaper:17&r=&r=soc [8]
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