SOCIAL CAPITAL, TRUST AND LEGAL INSTITUTIONS

During the last decades there has been a growing perception that institutional frameworks, such as political regimes, the welfare state and economic systems, which had once been taken for granted, are now showing their flaws and inefficiencies. Nowadays, it is not surprising to read and feel that modern democracies are undergoing a crisis of trust in the institutions that once would have granted them stability. These circumstances have created a sense of uncertainty, discomfort and reaction from different societies. The implications of this situation on legal theory cannot be disguised. Some scholars have ventured in saying that such declining trust in institutions shows a failure of law, in the sense that the existent legal system has not been able to support or foster the legitimacy framework suitable for the efficient functioning of the public sector. In this sense, the present Ph.D. thesis proposes the social capital theory as an innovative approach to address the described circumstances, with particular focus on the issue of trust in legal institutions. To this end, the present thesis firstly analyzes the theory of social capital and its implications in modern sociology of law. Secondly, the social capital approach is applied to the study of the legal institutions in a concrete case: the Argentina case. In this sense, a specific quantitative survey on social capital, institutions, trust and law was carried out in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. The results obtained provide a better illustration of the main hypothesis proposed in the initial chapters of the present work.