Civic Virtues, Family Ties, and Political Participation

Abstract Are family ties a complement to or a substitute for social capital? We establish a positive relationship between family ties and civic virtues, as captured by disapproval of tax and benefit cheating, corruption, and a range of other dimensions of exploiting others for personal gain. We find that family ties are a complement to social capital, using within and across country evidence from 83 nations spanning a quarter of a century, as well as data on second generation immigrants. Our results contrast with earlier findings that family ties are negatively related to political participation, and hence a substitute for social capital. Furthermore, we find that those who are engaged in political activities, like demonstrators, are not necessarily those with the highest civic virtues. Our results indicate that political participation may, on the margin, be motivated by personal gain