Social Capital of Women in Rural Areas and Their Participation in the Socio-political Life

The basic research problem discussed in this article concerns two inextricably linked fundamental issues. The first of them is connected with a specific character of the social capital in the Polish rural women’s environment, which in this paper is defined in terms of social participation and co-operation based on social trust, maintained networks of contacts, and on the system of their shared values and moral norms. Therefore, definite indices of social trust were adopted for this analysis. They are regarded as independent variables, which can determine the direction and the intensity of rural women’ participation in the socio-political life. The other issue refers to establishing a set of determinants-as exhaustive as possible-of the present and potential participation of rural women in the socio-political life and defining the role played by their social capital as one of these determinants.