Measuring the Bridging Nature of Voluntary Organizations: The Importance of Association Size

Abstract

Recently, a distinction between bridging and bonding networks has been made in the social capital literature. Bridging groups are often expected to have greater effects on democratic norm development and to generate more positive externalities on society than bonding networks. To allow application of these theoretical constructs in practice, however, an adequate measurement of bridging versus bonding networks is crucial. One approach builds on connections between voluntary associations through individuals with multiple memberships. However, simply counting the number of members' additional memberships in other associations, as in previous work, is inappropriate. Indeed, we illustrate that this is biased towards finding that large associations are more bonding.We then propose a technique to alleviate this bias and illustrate that the proposed correction is crucial to avoid erroneous conclusions in tests of the hypothesis that membership in bridging or bonding associations is differently related to individuals' civic attitudes.