Patricia Bayer Richard

TL;DR: The authors explored the relationship among two civil society measures (formal group activism and community self-help activism) and social and political capital, employing survey data from Central America, and found that while higher levels of formal group membership and several political capital measures associate with higher level of democracy, social capital lacks the relationship Putnam predicts, concluding that political rather than social capital links formal group activism to democra...

TL;DR: This paper explored the relationship among civil society and social and political capital and found that political context, specifically regime repression, powerfully affects civil society, and that civil society more clearly affects political capital variables than social capital variables.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined how perceived repression and systemic repression affect citizens' participation and support for democratic norms in six Central American countries for a most-similar systems test, and found that more intense regime repression markedly reduces both citizen activity and voter support for democracy in Central America.

TL;DR: This paper explored revolution's residual impact on individuals' electoral participation, civil society engagement, and social capital by comparing post-revolutionary Nicaraguans to their Central American neighbors and found higher electoral engagement in Nicaragua than in the other nations in the region that experienced major insurgencies but not revolution.

TL;DR: This paper conducted a study of media use and attention during the 1988 primary election campaign and found that those who relied on newspapers reported higher cognitive involvement in reading newspaper campaign coverage than in viewing television coverage.