172
tionship between social capital and such factors across countries and
stressed the importance of institutional features for the development of
social capital. The authors, however, convincingly showed that welfare
states unequally promote bonding and bridging social capital for their
members. Our own research (Ganjour and Widmer 2016 ; Widmer and
Ganjour 2017 ) provided some evidence that welfare states, along with a
series of other historical factors, unequally stimulate bonding and bridg-
ing social capital, as individuals are inclined to understand their respon-
sibilities for their kin and friends within such institutional settings
(Bjornberg and Ekbrand 2008 ). Norms of family support may have less
importance in countries such as Switzerland because the social policies
in liberal regimes do not consider family membership as an entitlement
status for support, in particular in the economic domain. This focus on
individual autonomy may decrease the importance of family members in
social capital with, as a consequence, more bridging than bonding capi-
tal, as individuals are expected to be active in shaping their personal
networks, rather than being compulsory recipients of family support.
Interpersonal support may be, in such an institutional context more
than elsewhere, considered to be a personal matter and each person a
relational entrepreneur in charge of investing strategically in her/his set
of personal relationships. Therefore we expect individuals in Switzerland
to more often develop a bridging type of social capital, characterised by
a variety of alternatives to the family in the constitution of their personal
networks.
Quite distinctly, Portugal, as a representative of the Mediterranean
welfare regime, is expected to promote a strong emphasis on family, and
thus a high level of bonding social capital, as it is based on the premise
that the state and the family are complementary (Ganjour and Widmer
2016 ). Because of the importance of this state–family complementarity,
hand-in-hand with the threats to social development arising from the
economic recession, family solidarity practices and norms of solidarity
are stronger in Portugal than in the other two countries. Overall, indi-
viduals in countries from the Mediterranean regime were found to be
embedded in dense family networks to a larger degree than individuals in
countries with other regimes (Kalmijn and Saraceno 2008 ). In such
countries, the family is held co-responsible for providing assistance to its
E.D. Widmer et al.