Abstract
Feminist political scientists have had a two-track response to Robert Putnam's work on social capital. They have critiqued his original approach for failing to take gender into account, but they have also highlighted the potential of the concept for illuminating mechanisms that reproduce unequal gender relations. In the British case, Peter Hall and Vivien Lowndes have shown how key elements of Putnam's measures are highly gendered. Vivien Lowndes set out a research agenda for assessing the impact of men and women's group memberships upon political participation. This article tests Lowndes’ research questions using British data from the Citizenship Survey 2007. Men and women in Britain do belong to different formal associational networks but these differences do not appear to have a strong impact upon whether they participate in politics. Lowndes’ critique of the social capital literature's failure to incorporate women's informal child-care networks is supported; involvement in child-care networks is positively related to political participation in the form of signing petitions and negatively related to contacting Members of Parliament. Crucially, there are small but statistically significant divergences in the types of activities men and women undertake for organised groups and these roles are associated with variations in political participation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Full details of the Home Office's Citizenship Survey can be found here.
Putnam found a dramatic decline in the number of Americans who attended a club meeting; down from every American to sixty percent in a couple of decades, he also found that even entertaining friends at home had halved between the years of 1975 and 1998.
Generalised trust is a concept that is often measured by asking people whether ‘most people can be trusted’.
There is considerable debate within the social capital literature as to whether traditional forms of civic participation have been substituted by online activity and whether this undermines Putnam’s decline thesis. Stolle, Dietlind, and Marc Hooghe. 2005, ‘Review article: inaccurate, exceptional, one-sided or irrelevant? The debate about the alleged decline of social capital and civic engagement in western societies.’ British Journal of Political Science 35(1):149–167. This paper focuses on the impact of face-to-face memberships and whether their relationship to political participation varies by gender, and as such does not focus on online activity. It seems reasonable to me to sidestep the relative importance of online activity because it pertains mainly to Putnam’s decline thesis of social capital and this paper is more concerned with variation by gender than absolute decline.
The labour market in Britain, and elsewhere to varying extents, is gender segregated both horizontally and vertically. Vertical gender segregation occurs when one group, usually men, dominate the upper reaches of the hierarchy and form the majority of the managerial class whilst the other group, usually women, predominate in other areas of the organisation, perhaps in lower level administrative roles. Horizontal segregation refers to professions or occupations that are disproportionately made up of one sex or the other, for example many self-employed manual jobs such as plumbing and building are overwhelmingly male Guinea-Martin, Daniel, and Jane Elliot. 2008. ‘Trends in Occupational Segregation by Gender in England and Wales: Longitudinal Evidence.’ in Understanding Population Trends and Processes: ESRC.
See endnote i.
A Mokken analysis was also conducted using R software. The analysis suggested that the types of activities undertaken within groups might be conceived of as a uni-dimensional measure, with individual items ranging from ‘easy’ or low cost activities to ‘harder’ or higher cost activities. Principle components factor analysis is designed for interval data and when used on binary variables it might suggest that a scale is muliti-dimensional, when in fact the responses might be better likened to individual marks in a multiple choice test where there is a range of difficulty in individual items. The purpose of this paper is to compare the kinds of activities undertaken by men and women for groups and whether this has an impact on their participation in formal politics. I am not making a broader argument about the multi-dimensionality (or not) of activities undertaking for groups. Conducting a factor analysis on the data would not be appropriate because of the binary nature of the variables, but equally combining them into one scale would involve the loss of the variation in activities by sex which is central to answering the research question at hand. For this reason I believe that it is most appropriate to simply sum the items into sets of types of group activity based on theoretical arguments rather than statistical procedures.
Religiosity was measured using an item which asked whether the respondent was actively practicing a religion.
Operationalised as a binary variable white/not white.
References
Andreoni, J. and Vesterlund, L. (2001) Which is the fair sex: Gender differences in altruism. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 116 (1): 293–312.
Burns, N., Schlozman, K. and Verba, S. (2001) The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality and Political Participation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Campbell, R. (2006) Gender and the Vote in Britain. Colchester, Essex: ECPR Press.
Campbell, R. and Winters, K. (2008) Understanding men and women's political interests: Evidence from a study of gendered political attitudes. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 18 (1): 53–74.
Crenshaw, K. (1991) Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–1299.
Croson, R. and Buchan, N. (1999) Gender and culture: International experimental evidence from trust games. The American Economic Review 89 (2): 386–391.
The EOC. (2007) The Gender Agenda. London: The Equal Opportunities Commission.
Eriksson, M., Dahlgren, L., Janlert, U., Weinehall, L. and Emmelin, M. (2010) Social capital, gender and educational level – Impact on self-rated health. The Open Public Health Journal (3): 1–12.
Everitt, J. (2006) Gender-role orientations and the conversion of social capital into political engagement. In: B. O’Neill and E. Gidengil (eds.) Gender and Social Capital. New York: Routledge.
Ferlander, S. and Mäkinen, H. (2009) Social capital, gender and self-rated health. Evidence from the Moscow Health Survey 2004. Social Science and Medicine 69 (9): 1323–1332.
Gidengil, E. and Harell, A. (2007) Network diversity and vote choice: Women's social ties and left voting in Canada. Politics and Gender 3 (2): 151–177.
Gidengil, E. and O'Neill, B. (2006) Removing rose colored glasses: Examining theories of social capital through a gendered lens. In: B. O’Neill and E. Gidengil (eds.) Gender and Social Capital. New York: Routledge.
Hall, P. (1999) Social capital in Britain. British Journal of Political Science 29 (3): 417–461.
Halpern, D. (2004) Social Capital. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Healy, K., Haynes, M. and Hampshire, A. (2006) Gender, social capital and location: Understanding the interactions. International Journal of Social Welfare 16 (2): 110–118.
Hooks, B. (1982) Ain’t I a Woman? London: Pluto Publishing.
Jarvis, D. (1996) The conservative party and the politics of gender. In: M. Francis and I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska (eds.) The Conservatives and British Society 1880–1990. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press.
La Due Lake, R. and Huckfeldt, R. (1998) Social capital, social networks, and political participation. Political Psychology 19 (3): 567–584.
Lovenduski, J. (2005) Feminizing Politics. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Lowndes, V. (2000) Women and social capital: A comment on Hall's ‘social capital in Britain’. British Journal of Political Science 30 (3): 533–540.
Lowndes, V. (2004) Getting on or getting by? Women, social capital and political participation. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 6 (1): 45–64.
Lowndes, V. (2006) It's not what you’ve got, but what you do with it. In: B. O’Neill and E. Gidengil (eds.) Gender and Social Capital. New York: Routledge.
Maclean, K. (2010) Capitalizing on women's social capital? Women-targeted microfinance in Bolivia. Development and Change 41 (3): 495–515.
Maguire, G.E. (1998) Conservative Women: A History of Women and the Conservative Party, 1874–1997. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Molyneux, M. (2002) Gender and the silences of social capital: Lessons from Latin America. Development and Change 33 (2): 167–188.
Norris, P. and Inglehart, R. (2006) Gendering social capital: Bowling in women's leagues? In: B. O’Neill and E. Gidengil (eds.) Gender and Social Capital. New York: Routledge, pp. 73–98.
Norris, P., Lovenduski, J. and Campbell, R. (2004) Gender and Political Participation. London: The Electoral Commission.
O'Neill, B. (2006) Canadian women's religious volunteerism: Compassion, connections and comparisons. In: B. O’Neill and E. Gidengil (eds.) Gender and Social Capital. New York: Routledge.
O'Neill, B. and Gidengil, E. (eds.) (2006) Gender and Social Capital. New York: Routledge.
Putnam, R. (1976) The Comparative Study of Political Elites. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Putnam, R. (1977) Elite transformation in advanced industrial societies: An empirical assessment of the theory of technocracy. Comparative Political Studies 10 (3): 383–411.
Putnam, R. (1995) America's declining social capital. Journal of Democracy 6 (1): 65–78.
Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Putnam, R., Leonardi, R. and Nanetti, R. (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rankin, K. (2002) Social capital, microfiniance, and the politics of development. Feminist Economics 8 (1): 1–24.
Simpson, B. (2003) Sex, fear and greed: A social dilemma analysis of gender and cooperation. Social Forces 82 (1): 35–52.
Stolle, D. and Micheletti, M. (2006) The gender gap reversed: Political consumerism as a women-friendly form of civic and political engagement. In: B. O’Neill and E. Gidengil (eds.) Gender and Social Capital. New York: Routledge.
van Staveren, I. (2002) Social Capital: What is in it for Feminist Economics? Working Paper no. 368, edited by Institute for Social Studies.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Peter Allen, Judith Bara, Sabine Carey, Philip Cowley, Paul Heywood, Rainbow Murray, Cees Van Der Eijk and all of the members of the Nottingham and Queen Mary research seminars for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article; also Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski for their work on the electoral commission ‘Gender and Political Participation’ report that spawned my interest in this area.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Campbell, R. Leaders, footsoldiers and befrienders: The gendered nature of social capital and political participation in Britain. Br Polit 8, 28–50 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2012.21
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2012.21