Building Social Capital: Civic Attitudes and Behavior of Public Servants

Abstract

This study compares public servants and other citizens with regard to several important civic attitudes and behaviors that are closely related to social capital. These attributes include social trust, social altruism, equality, tolerance, humanitarianism, and civic participation. The first five attributes provide soft evidence of social capital, but the last attribute—civic participation—is hard behavioral evidence. Finally, a rigorous test is applied: a multivariate model estimates the strength of public employment as a predictor of civic participation while it holds other theoretically important variables constant. The results show that public employment is a substantively important and highly significant predictor of civic participation. Overall, public servants are far more active in civic affairs than are other citizens, and they appear to be catalysts for the building of social capital in society at large.

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