Journal of Electoral Studies

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Home Issues Backissues Volume 31, No.1 Gender Difference? A Preliminary Study of the Typology of Utilization of Social Capital in Politics

Gender Difference? A Preliminary Study of the Typology of Utilization of Social Capital in Politics

Pei-Ting Lin
2014 / 11
Volume 21, No.2

pp.81-112
10.6612/tjes.2014.21.02.81-112
Paper

Abstract

Most of the studies indicate that one of the advantages for social capital is it can stimulate democratic development. At the individual level, one's political interest, political knowledge and citizen skill can be brought up through participating in the communities. However, there is no consensus on whether women use their social capital in the same way as men. This study thus attempts to focus on the relationship between community participation and political engagement for the gendering social capital in Taiwan. With the empirical data analysis used in this study, we have two findings as the follows. First, regardless of the gender, people who involve in a community will engage more positively in civic and traditional political activities. Secondly, by classifying the observations according to the social status (high/ low) and their main living area (public/private sphere), we found that people, except those who have high social status and live in the public sphere, will have the same pattern of spending social capital in political engagement when they possess the same social status and have the same main living area. In other words, gender is not the main explanation of the difference in using social capital within the traditional political engagement.

Keywords

social capital

community participation

gender division

political engagement

civic engagement