Social capital and its consequences on political participation: a complex puzzle?

The current decline in political participation is a great cause of concern among political scientists, opinion makers and political leaders. There are two main approaches to this decline that occurs especially in Europe. The first one is the ‘modernization’ thesis. The second is the ‘social individualization’ thesis. Nevertheless, the empirical debate has not been successful in providing a detailed record of the relations between social capital and political participation. Much of it is due to a reductionist use of both concepts’ operationalization. In this article we have two main goals. Firstly, we showed that the concepts of social capital and political participation are, theoretically and empirically, multidimensional concepts. Secondly, we assessed, through multivariate regression analyses, the explicative capacities of the more traditional political participation explanatory models: ‘the individual resources model’ and the ‘civic voluntarism model’ together with the more recent ‘social capital relational model’.