Leaders, footsoldiers and befrienders: the gendered nature of social capital and political participation in Britain
Campbell, Rosie (2013) Leaders, footsoldiers and befrienders: the gendered nature of social capital and political participation in Britain. British Politics 8 , pp. 28-50. ISSN 1746-918X.
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.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | social capital, gender, political participation |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Gender and Sexuality, Birkbeck (BiGS), Social Research, Birkbeck Institute for (BISR), Birkbeck Centre for British Political Life |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Nov 2012 15:07 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:00 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/5597 |
Statistics
Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.
Archive Staff Only (login required)
 |
Edit/View Item |