Culture, religion and social capital: evidence from European regions

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible relationship of religion and culture with the social capital in a particular region.

The data of 85 regions from 26 European countries are analysed. Regression analysis is used for analysing cultural dimensions, religion-related aspects and the communist past as possible factors of social capital components. In addition, graphic analysis is used for the generalisation of the results.

The results from both the regression and graphic analyses indicate that cultural dimensions capture the possible reasons for different levels of social capital better than religion-related aspects or the division according to the communist background.

Conclusions can be drawn only for the European regions analysed. Data were not available for regions in all European countries and including control variables was limited by the data availability.

When intending to develop policies for increasing social capital, the culture of a particular region should be assessed in order to predict the success of the policies.

The novelty of this study lies in including cultural dimensions based on Hofstede’s concept to the set of possible factors determining the level of social capital in a region.