Social Capital and Subjective Well-Being trends: Evidence from 11 European countries

Discovering whether social capital endowments in modern societies have been subjected or not to a process of gradual erosion is one of the most debated topics in recent economic literature. This new stream of research has been inaugurated by Putnam’s pioneering studies about social capital trends in the United States. Recently, a considerable work by Stevenson andWolfers (2008) put a new emphasis on this topic contending Easterlin’s assessment. Present work is aimed at analyzing the relationship between changes in social capital and subjective well-being in Europe considering 11 different countries. In particular, we would like to answer questions such as: 1) is social capital in Europe declining? Is such erosion a general trend of modern societies or is it a characteristic feature of only some of them? 2) social capital trend can help to explain subjective well-being trend? In so doing, our research considers three different set of proxies of social capital controlling for time and socio-demographic aspects in eleven different European countries using WVS data between 1980 and 2000.Our results are encouraging, showing evidence of a probable relationship between social capital and happiness. Furthermore, our results show that during last twenty years European citizens have persistently lost confidence in the judicial system, in the church, in armed forces and the police. Finally, considering single countries, we discover that United Kingdom is the only European country with a clear and negative pattern for social capital: quite every proxy of social capital in UK declined over the considered period