Introduction

This chapter deals with the somewhat mysterious and obscure concept of ‘social capital’. It was probably the famous books Making democracy work (1993) and later Bowling alone (2000) by Robert Putnam that started a new wave of analysing this concept. However, much of the recent research in this area can be seen as new wine in old bottles (van Oorschot and Arts, 2005) – not necessarily a bad thing, it should be said. It only indicates that aspects of the phenomenon have been analysed one or another way before.

Researchers have hypothesised that social capital could have positive implications for areas such as the economy (Putnam, 1993; Fukuyama, 1995), democracy, and how well societies function (Putnam, 1993). It has also been suggested that social capital may be linked to health and health inequalities. However, the empirical results have been contradictory (Pearce and Davey Smith, 2003). This chapter explores the links between social capital, health and health inequalities in Swedish society.

Social capital has a multidimensional character. Consequently, a number of aspects of social relations – such as informal social contacts with relatives, family and friends; general trust and solidarity between citizens in society; participation in voluntary associations (Putnam, 2000), and trust in the state and its institutions (Rothstein, 2003a) – have been included in the concept in earlier studies. This chapter mainly examines two dimensions of the concept, namely informal social contacts with relatives and friends and participation in voluntary associations that are often suggested to be important preconditions in the creation of social capital (Putnam, 1993, 2000).

It is likely that the (welfare) state plays an important role in creating social capital in society and in stimulating civic activities and social relations. Some researchers, however, claim that universal welfare states crowd out and destroy central aspects of social capital (for example, Wolfe, 1989; Fukuyama, 2000; Scheepers et al, 2002), while others do not support this notion (for example, Rothstein, 2001; Torpe, 2003). In this chapter I will therefore discuss the central role of the welfare state in maintaining and creating social capital.

The aim of the present chapter is to analyse: (1) general changes in the levels of informal and formal social contacts in Sweden during the period 1968-2000, together with changes in the levels of social trust between 1981 and 1996;