Social Capital in a Divided America: The Relationship between Economic Bridging and Affective Polarization
David E. Campbell
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2023, vol. 708, issue 1, 102-120
Abstract:
Does political polarization decline as relational bridges are built between people from different social and economic backgrounds? Circumstantial evidence supports the existence of a relationship: social capital has declined during the same period that affective polarization has risen. To date, though, we have lacked data to test whether the two are, in fact, dynamically related. In this article, I measure the extent of bridging social capital among people within zip codes, generated from 21 billion Facebook friendships of 72.2 million Americans. Using two measures of affective polarization—feeling thermometers and partisan traits—the analysis shows that people who live in communities with more economic bridging are less affectively polarized and that conversations among people who have different political views is a possible causal mechanism. These effects are more pronounced for the affluent and for Republicans—and for affluent Republicans most of all.
Keywords: social capital; polarization; economic bridging; political discussion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00027162241228121 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:708:y:2023:i:1:p:102-120
DOI: 10.1177/00027162241228121
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications (sagediscovery@sagepub.com).