Horizontal Transmission of Civic Capital and the Emergence of Cooperation: An Agent-Based Modelling Approach

Scholars in social sciences often refer to “social capital” to explain a wide list of relevant economic and social phenomena. Taking an economic perspective, as put forth by Guiso et al. (Social Economics Handbook, 2011), we refer in this chapter to civic capital, defined as “those persistent and shared beliefs and values that help a group overcome the free rider problem in the pursuit of socially valuable activities”. Starting from a first analytical discussion of how civic capital (collaboration between individuals) may emerge through horizontal transmission, we develop an agent-based model to simulate transmission of civic capital in a spatial interaction setting. We do so within the context of the so-called threshold models, which allow us to hypothesize conditional cooperation between agents, based on observation of societal behaviour. In our simulations, we model horizontal transmission of civic capital as given by social influence determining how behavioural thresholds evolve over time. We test interactions at both the global and local levels (in space), and test different ranges of parameters for the transmission mechanism. Finally, we attempt to find systematic evidence on the effect of model parameters on the amount of civic capital and on its level of spatial clustering by means of regression analyses.