Associational membership and social capital in comparative perspective: A note on the problems of measurement

Organizational membership seems to be linked to a more participatory and informed political culture, to foster electoral participation, and to promote positive feelings toward democracy. More recently, the social capital and associative democracy debates have introduced new arguments about the positive effects of associational involvement. However, little attention has been paid to the problems of measuring associational involvement and to their consequences for our theories. This article discusses the various problems of validity and reliability of our measurements of associational membership. It is shown that different questionnaire formats produce substantially different results. The article also addresses the issue of measurement errors and emphasizes the problems they introduce when doing cross-national comparisons.