Assessing the role of national context: The enduring power of social class in shaping social capital

Abstract

Social capital is central to the reproduction of stratification, but the extent to which national context explains cross-national differences remains unclear. Drawing on Bourdieu and Lin, this study examines how much social capital varies across individuals and countries and whether a small set of country-level structural proxies accounts for the remaining between-country variation. Using the 2017 ISSP Social Networks and Social Resources module (N = 30,936 across 29 countries) and hierarchical linear models, the analysis shows that more than 91% of variation in social capital lies at the individual level, while 8.7% is attributable to country differences. Education, occupational prestige, and social class are consistently and positively associated with social capital across contexts. Although the macro indicators explain a limited share of between-country variance, institutional design and policy shifts may shape the opportunity structures through which individual-level stratification processes are reproduced or mitigated.