The issue addressed in this Fellowship has been to study how a country’s quality of Institutions affects the form, function and societal returns of Social Capital (SC). SC refers to features of social life, such as social trust, norms of reciprocity, and mutual aid that give value to social networks. SC is expected to contribute to a country’s welfare by making citizens collaborate towards society’s desirable goals. If people of a country trust each other, they are more prone to contribute to the public goods, by paying their taxes for example. The basic hypothesis set out to be tested here was whether, when the formal institutions “fail” their citizens in either a political (political instability), economic (unemployment, depression) societal (corruption, political scandals), executional (inefficiency in provision of public good) or administrative (high bureaucratic procedures) level, SC takes a form that work as a substitute rather as a complement to the formal Institutions. Under this hypothesis, trustful citizens in countries with low quality of Institutions, will be less inclined to be civic citizens (i.e. social via the formal channels of the State). More technically, the Fellow tried to test whether the quality of Institutions moderate the effect SC has on civic cooperation.
This is an important and a very timely topic. European governments and the public institutions were proved not ready to handle the challenges brought by the 2008 budget crisis and the large refugees waves, leaving their citizens largely unprotected in many cases. As a response a large number of social movements were founded in order to face the challenges that the formal institutions could not address. However, these movements did not always coordinate with the established forms of public goods provision of the governments. For example, local markets were organized where people traded basic goods in low, affordable prices, but without paying taxes. What is more, these movements, adopted in many cases a more general anti-government character, like the “I do not pay” movement in Greece, were citizens are refusing pay taxes or the fees for public transportation. Therefore, while SC has evidently increased, it took an ostensibly “un-civic” form in the traditional sense. In other words, people seem to be social but not civic. Apart from the short-term consequences of these form of SC (such as lowering tax revenues), they might also be contributing to long term anti-government attitudes which might have a severe effect for the proper function of modern States.
Therefore, the objective of the Fellowship was to study and quantify the effects of institutional quality in shaping the SC-civic behaviour relationship. The ultimate goal of is to inform policy makers regarding the potential backfire of policies aimed to enhance Social Capital, and how such an effect can be avoided.
