Family Ties and Political Participation

Alberto Alesina () and Paola Giuliano ()

No 15415, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We establish an inverse relationship between family ties and political participation, such that the more individuals rely on the family as a provider of services, insurance, transfer of resources, the lower is one’s civic engagment and political participation. We also show that strong family ties appear to be a substitute for generalized trust, rather than a complement to it. These three constructs-civic engagement, political participation, and trust- are part of what is known as social capital; therefore, in this paper, we contribute to the investigation of the origin and evolution of social capital. We establish these results using within-country evidence and looking at the behavior of immigrants from various countries in 32 different destination places.

JEL-codes: P16 Z10 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mig, nep-pol and nep-soc
Date: 2009-10
Note: POL
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Working Paper: Family Ties and Political Participation (2009)
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