The multiple facets of social capital

This paper examines whether Putnam's claim that social capital is a unitary concept has support in cross-country data. The findings suggest that social capital consists of three orthogonal components corresponding to social trust, social norms and associational activity. To demonstrate the importance of separating the elements of social capital, two results from the social capital literature are re-estimated with the components. The results indicate that the trust component alone underlies the effects on governance and life satisfaction.