Abstract
On such study, we seeked to understand how the existing community social capital influenciates the political quality of its representative organizations. We analyzed projects who fight rural poverty in municipalities of the state of Pernambuco (northeast Brazil). In order to do so we analyzed the existing relations among both the community social capital and the political quality of its representative organizations. We also seeked to comprehend how the social capital and the political quality of rural communities comes out, identifying indicators to evaluate the local social capital and the political quality of the local organizations. Three indicator were identified for social capital measurement: (1) social rules for the use of collective good, (2) cooperation and (3) social networks; and eight indicators for the political quality of the local organizations: (1) year of foundation of the organizations, (2) percentile of families participating in local organizations in comparison to the total number of families ln the community, (3) frequency of the organizations' members on their own meetings, (4) number and frequency of the meetings, (5) power turnover, (6) level of information of the organizations' members, (7) level of collaboration on the organizations' boards of directors, (8) level of collaboration of the organizations' members. Fourteen towns were researched, all over Pernambuco, in a total of sixteen rural communities where projects were set up to fight poverty. The communities were visited between November 2002 and February 2003. The main conclusions of that study are: (1) the frequency in meetings varies by the quantity of social capital in given community, (2) the number of meetings has strongly to do with the quantity of social capital, (3) the level of information of the organizations' members depends on the quantity of social capital, (4) the level of collaboration of the organizations' members also depends on the quantity of social capital. ln front of the above issues addresses, the hypotheses: the existing community social capital influenciates the political/quality of its representative organizations is true.