Does social capital enforce social distancing? The role of bridging and bonding social capital in the evolution of the pandemic

Abstract

By shaping the way people look at members of their networks as well as strangers, social capital affects the behavior of a population during a pandemic. Over the course of 2020, various countries implemented non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), imposing restrictions that were difficult to enforce (due to the scale of the policies) in order to protect the public from the threat of COVID-19. This is an interesting quasi-experimental setting in which to test the compliance of populations with different levels of social capital with government suggestions and prescriptions. With the help of European Social Survey data, and the John Hopkins University dataset on the spread of COVID-19 around the world, the present work aims to test the impact within a sample of European countries with different social capital stocks on the spread of coronavirus. The results show that countries with higher social capital have fewer COVID-19 cases, ceteris paribus for NPI. This is especially true if this capital is of the bonding kind.

The Measurement of Social Capital in America: A Reassessment

“…It has been recognized that the discrepancy in responses to public health interventions across various communities in the US and elsewhere is due to different patterns of social interaction. Nowhere was the importance of understanding and measuring social capital more noticeable than during the recent COVID-19 pandemic (Alfano, 2022 ; Wong & Kohler, 2020 ). Different regional distributions of social capital and rates of urbanization clearly accounted for variations in vaccination uptake across many countries (Qiao et al, 2022 ).…”

COVID-19 in Central Asia: exploring the relationship between governance and non-pharmaceutical intervention

“…This happens because, without cures or vaccines, the only ways to halt the spread of contagion are social distancing and other NPIs. Another common assumption in this literature ( Alfano and Ercolano, 2021a , b ; Alfano, 2021 ; 2022 ) is to consider NPIs as policies whose effectiveness depends principally on voluntary compliance among the population, given how complex it would be for a government to enforce them through the use of public force. Hence, when comparing country-level COVID-19 diffusion rates among different countries, controlling for the different levels of NPI stringency is considered a good measure of the levels of compliance with these policies among the population (Alfano and Ercolano, 2021a ; Alfano, 2021 ).…”

“…This limit has been overcome by previous studies ( Alfano and Ercolano, 2021a , b ) by dividing the sample by quantiles of the variable of interest and estimating the impact in different subsamples, for later comparison among the betas. It has been noted that this empirical strategy has two main limitations ( Alfano, 2021 ; 2022 ): first, comparing betas that have been estimated in different samples may lead to inconsistent conclusions, since these could be subsamples affected by different biases and errors; second, dividing the sample by quantiles of one variable also implies dividing it by all the variables that are highly correlated with it, creating uncertainty in the identification of the effect, which could be due to some omitted variable.…”

“…An alternative strategy, already used ( Alfano, 2021 ; 2022 ), is to include time-invariant variables in the analysis. This, while maintaining the advantages of a fixed effects estimation, would avoid the need of dividing the sample into quantiles.…”

Examining the Complex (Curvilinear and Contingent) Associations between Social Distancing Compliance and Subjective Health during a Global Health Crisis

“…On the one hand, as prior research has shown, food insecurity is a potent stressor with deleterious consequences particularly for the old, or more ‘vulnerable,’ population [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. On the other, empirical evidence points to health advantages of ecological or contextual social capital, i.e., community-level resources such as norms of reciprocity, collective identity, and mutual support [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ]. We build on this line of research by conceptualizing community social capital as a collective resource in buffering the negative effect of social distancing.…”