Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been an extraordinary amount of attention paid to the interrelated issues of social capital, civil society, trust and social norms as central issues for contemporary democracies. The propensity for civil society was said to be an essential condition for the transition to stable democracy in Eastern Europe, and the decline in social capital in the United States is said to be a major problem for American democracy today.
Social capital can be defined simply as the existence of a certain set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permit cooperation among them. The sharing of values and norms does not in itself produce social capital because the values may be the wrong ones: The norms that produce social capital must substantively include virtues like truth-telling, the meeting of obligations and reciprocity.
