Putnam - Making Democracy Work, Civic Traditions in Modern Italy

Social capital plays a central role in explaining variation in democratic performance
Initial goal to asses the difference institutional change makes to democratic and governmental performance in 20 Italian regions
Also sought to find what explains why some countries are democratic and others are not
1. What is the nature of the relation between society and its political institutions
2. What type of characteristics of a society promote democracy?
Research Questions
1. What are the conditions for creating strong, responsive effective representative institutions
2. What difference did the introduction of regional government make to institutional performance
3. What explains the wide disparities in the democratic performance of Italy's 20 regional governments
Quotes
1. Building social capital will not be easy, but it is the key to making democracy work
2. By social capital I mean features of social life networks, norms and trust that enable participants to acct together more effectively to pursue shared
  Anmerkungen:
  - Interests
Research Design
1. New powers for Italian government provided a natural experiment to asses performance of new governments
2. A Case Study That:
  1. Exploits a natural experiment to asses the different that institutional reform makes to institutional performance over 20 years
3. Comparing 20 regions but focusing on six
4. Justifciation
  1. 1970 reform rare case example of creating new representative institutions in western Europe
  2. Possible to tease out relative weight of different backgrond factors in shaping variation in democratic performance
  3. Design provide opportunity to asses association between different factors and dependence variables and opportunities to explore change over time
    Anmerkungen:
    - Causal Mechanisms
Stage 1
1. Describe institutional development in response to increasing power for regions over 20 years
2. Developed objective indicators for institutional perfomance
  1. Asses the degree to which these correlate across regions over 20 years
3. Data on institutional development - extracted from surveys and indicators of budgets and policy areas controlled by regional governments
4. 1. Four waves of interviews with councilors from the 6 regions. 2. Three Waves of interviews with community leaders in the 6 regions
  1. 3. Nation wide mail survey. 4. Several nationwide surveys of votes
Findings Stage 1
1. Institutional change happened
  1. Italian political leaders pursued different career paths
    1. Citizens and leaders depend on different agencies for government ation
2. Marked regional disparities in the institutional performance of different regions recognised by their constituencies
Stage 2
1. Goal - to explain regional disparities in institutional performance
2. Main explanatory variable - civic community
3. Control variable include socio-economic and social stability
4. Institutional indicators used in stage 1 and indicators of civic community
  1. Preference voting - Clientlism. Referendum turnot - participation. Newspaper Readership - interest in public affairs. Density of association - co-op
    Anmerkungen:
    - attitudes
5. Method of Analysis
  1. Correlation between index of institutional performance and other variables
  2. Correlation between civic traditions in past and institutional performance
  3. Tracing roots of civic community from medieval Italy to present through a historical narrative
Findings Stage 2
1. Civic community and socio- economic modern correlated institutional performance
  Anmerkungen:
  - Explains more of the difference between north and south
2. Civic traditions of 1880-1920 strongly correlated with later institutional performance
3. Historical link with feudalism in south and history of civic republicanism in North and institutional performance
4. Independent effect of the role of the communist party
Putnam Inferences
1. A civic community / social capital is necessary for democracy
2. Social capital more cause of economic success than consequence
3. Variation in institutional performance better explained by different amounts of social captial
4. Social capital built over time and path dependent
5. Different social endowments can be traced back to regime divergences in the 13th Century
Criticisms
1. Indicators don't measure democratic performance but policy performance
2. Indicators of institutional performance are not measuring one underlying concept
3. Correlation between civic community and institutional performance break down if run serparetely from north to south
4. Possible omitted variable bias, ignore role of political and state building strategies
5. Historical Narrative Unconvincing
  1. Why middle ages source of difference
  2. What happened in the middle ages?
  3. If civic traditions are created what explains their creation
6. Tarrow argues policy performance can be achieved under authoritarian regimes
7. Levi poor conceptualisation, operationalization and mesaurement of civic involvement
  1. Fails to acknowledge other sources that may contradict his conclusions
  2. Historical process tracing
8. Corruption not taken into account
9. Social capital beyond Italy
  1. Studies tend to be case specific not cross case
  2. No one message emerging from cases
  3. Paxton - trust in associational life not ncessarily tightly linked in US and Britain or move the same way over time
  4. Schnedier - Some evidence that participation and social capital can be shaped by institutions

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Putnam - Making Democracy Work, Civic Traditions in Modern Italy

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