In Washington Monthly, Nationhood Lab’s director shares the findings of Nationhood Lab’s recent analysis of regional differences in social capital, which has been shown to have an effect on a wide range of economic and social indices
For Washington Monthly, Nationhood Lab Director Colin Woodard shared the results of the project’s recent analysis of the geography of social capital in the United States.
The online piece summarized the results of the study, which used a Social Capital Index developed by economists at three other institutions, showing large communitarian-minded regional cultures in the northeast and on the West Coast having high scores, the Spanish-legacy regions having the lowest, and Southern regions in between.
“The bottom line is this: the distribution of social capital is regionally correlated and likely a product of the divergent attitudes toward public goods across our balkanized federation,” Woodard wrote, nothing the data powering the model is from 2014, the last year all the factors to power it were available. “There’s every reason to assume social capital reserves have declined in the ensuing Trump era,” he added. “Those regions already running on empty are likely to fall into social crisis first. If there’s a return to normalcy in the coming election cycles, it’s these regions that will need help most urgently.
The work examines the effects of the regional differences using the historically-based regional model first described in Woodard’s 2011 history, American Nations, which is based on First Settler effects and the geography of colonization. Woodard has previously used the model to examine the 2024, 2020, 2016, and 2012 presidential contests, the 2022, 2018, and 2014 midterms, and key off-year contests in 2025, 2013 and 2011, as well as a wide range of social, health, historical and policy phenomena in American life. It is summarized for an academic audience in this peer-reviewed journal article.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, examines regional issues in American life and has developed a revised civic national story for the 21st century United States tied to the ideals in the Declaration.