Despite a great variety of theoretical approaches, empirical analyses of social capital are surprisingly similar. Virtually all of them treat membership in voluntary associations as the chief indicator of community involvement while neglecting another form of community involvement: participation in elite-challenging actions. Likewise, authors readily attribute manifold civic bene?ts to associational life, while hesitating to attribute such bene?ts to elite-challenging activity. We question these views on two grounds. Firstly, we argue that elite-challenging action re?ects social capital, even though this is a speci?c form of it: an emancipative form typical of self-assertive publics. Secondly, we use data from the Value Surveys to demonstrate that elitechallenging action is linked with greater civic bene?ts, at both the individual and societal level, than is membership in voluntary associations. This ?nding con?rms the concept of human development, which suggests that emancipative forms of social capital are more civic in their consequences than others. Following this concept, we show that mass self-expression values nurture emancipative social capital, in motivating elite-challenging action. Finally, we locate self-expression values and elite-challenging actions in a theory of emancipative social capital.