TY  - JOUR
AU  - Olken,Benjamin A.
TI  - Do Television and Radio Destroy Social Capital? Evidence from Indonesian Villages
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12561
PY  - 2006
Y2  - October 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12561
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12561.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Benjamin A. Olken
Department of Economics
MIT
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA  02142-1347
Tel: 617/588-1437
Fax: 617/868-2742
E-Mail: bolken@mit.edu
M3  - presented at "SI 2006 EFG Working Group (EFABG)", July 17-19, 2006
AB  - 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.
ER  -