High social capital can enable rather than prevent authoritarian mobilization

Evidence

In 2000 already, Putnam himself warned that social capital exhibited a “dark side.” “It was social capital, for example, that enabled Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City,” he wrote. “McVeigh’s network of friends, bound together by a norm of reciprocity, enabled him to do what he could not have done alone.” Other scholars have followed suit. In their much-cited article “Bowling for Fascism,” Shanker Satyanath, Nico Voigtländer, and Hans-Joachim Voth marshal regression analyses to show that in the early phase—particularly in Länder (federal states) with unstable coalition governments—a higher density of social capital increased the likelihood that people would join the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 145

Categorization

• XREF: Directly complicates the Putnam-from-the-Left appropriation: the reader is studying social capital as an analytic tool, and here the same data cuts against the benign reading. — connects to: Social-capital interventions fail precisely where they are needed most — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1104