January, 2004
We test the hypothesis that social capital is an important determinant of popular support for public funding of the arts. We employ data from the 1998 General Social survey in order to analyze individual responses to questions relating to public funding of the arts in general, as well as at the federal, state and local level. Multivariate statistical models reveal that neither individual or state level measures of social capital are significantly related to support for public funding of the arts. This result is robust to several alternative measures of social capital and to different sets of co-variates in the statistical model.