Do Television and Radio Destroy Social Capital? Evidence from Indonesian Villages

By Benjamin A. Olken. 2009

340 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In "Bowling Alone," Putnam (1995) famously argued that the rise of television may be responsible for social capital's decline. I investigate this hypothesis in the context of Indonesian villages. To identify the impact of exposure to television (and radio), I exploit plausibly exogenous differences in over-the-air signal strength associated with the topography of East and Central Java. Using this approach, I find that better signal reception, which is associated with more time spent watching television and listening to radio, is associated with substantially lower levels of participation in social activities and with lower self-reported measures of trust. I find particularly strong effects on participation in local government activities, as well as on participation in informal savings groups. However, despite the impact on social capital, improved reception does not appear to affect village governance, at least as measured by discussions in village-level meetings and by corruption in a village-level road project.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Media Technology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf9f2596a6436d52a661a7fc39fbb154443db098

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Citations in the corpus

Ideological Segregation Online and Offline (2011, positive): “A growing literature in economics studies the effects of the news media on public policy (e.g., Stromberg 2004, Stromberg and Snyder forthcoming),political beliefs and behavior (Prior 2005, Gentzkow 2006, DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007, Knight andChiang 2008), and social capital (Olken 2009).”
Radio and the Rise of the Nazis in Prewar Germany (2015, positive): “ 4 locality, predicted using the information on the location and the power of transmitters by the Irregular Terrain Model (Hufford 2002, Olken 2009).”
A Tear in the Iron Curtain: The Impact of Western Television on Consumption Behavior (2016, positive): “While in contrast to studies that take signal strength as a linear predictor of viewership (Olken, 2009; Enikolopov et al., 2011), this approach is, in our view, justified by the crucial importance of access to Western media in a communist regime and consistent with actual viewership data as in…”
Building Social Capital Through Microfinance (2010, neutral): “The presumed importance of social interactions in sustaining social capital also underlies scholars’ concern over recent declines in community membership in the United States (?) and some low-income countries (Olken, 2009).”
The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV (2019, positive): “In fact, previous research has documented that, by priming particular cultural models, light entertainment shows, soap operas, and advertising can have important and persistent effects on various types of non-political behavior, from civic engagement (Putnam, 2000; Olken, 2009) to gender attitudes (”
Economic and Social Impacts of the Media (2015, positive): “…the previous sections include Jensen and Oster (2009) and La Ferrara, Chong and Duryea (2012) for family outcomes in India and Brazil, respectively; Olken (2009) on social capital in Indonesia; Paluck (2009) on inter-ethnic attitudes in Rwanda; and Berge and Zia (2013) on financial choices in…”