Across the 35 countries in this survey, social trust and civic
engagement are
strongly correlated; the
greater the density of associational membership in a society, the more
trusting
its citizens. Trust and engagement
are two facets of the same underlying factor--social capital.[End Page
73]
America still ranks relatively high by cross-national standards on
both these
dimensions of social capital.
Even in the 1990s, after several decades' erosion, Americans are more
trusting
and more engaged than people in most
other countries of the world.
The trends of the past quarter-century, however, have apparently moved
the
United States significantly lower
in the international rankings of social capital. The recent deterioration
in
American social capital has been
sufficiently great that (if no other country changed its position in the
meantime) another quarter-century of change
at the same rate would bring the United States, roughly speaking, to the
midpoint
among all these countries, roughly
equivalent to South Korea, Belgium, or Estonia today. Two generations'
decline at
the same rate would leave the
United States at the level of today's Chile, Portugal, and Slovenia.
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