Does social capital enforce social distancing? The role of social capital in the evolution of the pandemic

By shaping the way people look at members of their networks as well as stran gers, social capital afects the behavior of a population during a pandemic. Over the course of 2020, various countries implemented non-pharmaceutical interven tions (NPI), imposing restrictions that were difcult to enforce (due to the scale of the policies) in order to protect the public from the threat of COVID-19. This is an interesting quasi-experimental setting in which to test the compliance of populations with diferent levels of social capital with government suggestions and prescriptions. With the help of European Social Survey data, and the John Hopkins University dataset on the spread of COVID-19 around the world, the present work aims to test the impact within a sample of European countries with diferent social capital stocks on the spread of coronavirus. The results show that countries with higher social cap ital have fewer COVID-19 cases, ceteris paribus for NPI. This is especially true if this capital is of the bonding kind.