Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA; Computational Epidemiology Lab, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Innovation Program, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2020 Oct;262:113142. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113142. Epub 2020 Jun 17.
Jim Crow laws in the United States promoted racial prejudice, which may have reduced social capital. Our study tests the relationship between Jim Crow laws and social capital.
We conducted 3-level multilevel hierarchical modeling to study differences in the stock of social capital for 1997, 2005, 2009 in Jim Crow states compared to states without Jim Crow laws. We examined the moderation effects of county level median income, percent Black and percent with high school education and Jim Crow laws on social capital.
Jim Crow laws significantly reduced stock of social capital across 1997, 2005, 2009. The model was robust to the inclusion of random county, states, time and fixed county and state level covariates for median income, percent Black and percent with high school education. The largest percent of between state variations explained for fixed variables was from the addition of Jim Crow laws with 2.86%. These results demonstrate that although Jim Crow laws were abolished in 1965, the effects of racial segregation appear to persist through lower social connectiveness, community and trust. A positive moderation effect was seen for median income and percent Black with Jim Crow laws on social capital.
Our study supports a negative association between Jim Crow laws and reduction in the stock of social capital. This may be attributed to the fracturing of trust, reciprocity and collective action produced by legal racial segregation. Findings from this study offer insight on the potential impacts of historical policies on the social structure of a community. Future research is necessary to further identify the mechanistic pathways and develop interventions to improve social capital.
美国的吉姆·克劳法（Jim Crow laws）助长了种族偏见，这可能降低了社会资本。我们的研究检验了吉姆·克劳法与社会资本之间的关系。
我们进行了 3 级多层层次建模，以研究 1997 年、2005 年和 2009 年吉姆·克劳州与没有吉姆·克劳法的州之间社会资本存量的差异。我们检验了县平均收入、黑人和高中教育程度人口比例以及吉姆·克劳法对社会资本的调节作用。
吉姆·克劳法显著降低了 1997 年、2005 年和 2009 年的社会资本存量。该模型对包括随机县、州、时间以及固定县和州的平均收入、黑人和高中教育程度的固定变量进行了稳健性检验。固定变量中解释州间差异的最大百分比来自吉姆·克劳法的加入，占 2.86%。这些结果表明，尽管吉姆·克劳法于 1965 年被废除，但种族隔离的影响似乎通过较低的社会联系、社区和信任而持续存在。在有吉姆·克劳法的情况下，平均收入和黑人民众比例对社会资本具有积极的调节作用。
我们的研究支持吉姆·克劳法与社会资本存量减少之间存在负相关关系。这可能归因于法律种族隔离导致的信任破裂、互惠和集体行动的产生。本研究的结果为历史政策对社区社会结构的潜在影响提供了深入了解。需要进一步的研究来确定机制途径，并制定干预措施来改善社会资本。
