More than seven hundred interviews over nearly two decades provided us with an unparalleled "moving picture" of the regional institutions from the point of view of their chief protagonists. Bankers and farm leaders, mayors and journalists, labor leaders and business representatives—these respondents knew their regional government well and could give us the perspective of informed outsiders.
These interviews enabled us to chart differences in political outlook and social engagement across the regions and to probe the views of the constituents of the new institutions.
These projects provided raw material for our assessment of the day-to-day business of politics and government in the regions and helped us interpret more antiseptic statistical data. Our regular visits to each of the six selected regions incidentally allowed us to experience firsthand the devastating earthquake that struck southern Italy in and its aftermath.
In short, we came to know these regions and their protagonists well. In Chapter 2 we ask how the process of reform transpired, and what difference it made for the practice of politics and the quality of government at the grassroots. How was reform accomplished, given the inertia of older institutions? Did the new institution actually affect the character of political leadership and the way politicians ply their trade?
Did it reshape the distribution of political power and influence? Did it lead to changes that were perceptible to the constituents of the new governments, and if so, what was their assessment? What evidence is there of the leverage that institutional change is said to exert on political behavior?
A primary concern of this study is to explore the origins of effective government. To lay the basis for that inquiry, Chapter 3 presents a comprehensive, comparative evaluation of policy processes, policy pronouncements, and policy implementation in each of the twenty regions.
Whereas Chapter 2 examines change through time, Chapter 3 and those that follow make comparisons across space. How stable and efficient are the governments of the various regions?
How innovative are their laws? How effectively do they implement policies in such fields as health, housing, agriculture, and industrial development? How promptly and effectively do they satisfy the expectations of their citizens? Which institutions, in short, have succeeded and which have not? Explaining these differences in institutional performance is the objective of Chapter 4, in some respects the core of our study. Here we explore the connection between economic modernity and institutional performance.
Even more important, we examine the link between performance and the character of civic life—what we term "the civic community. Some regions of Italy, we discover, are blessed with vibrant networks and norms of civic engagement, while others are cursed with vertically structured politics, a social life of fragmentation and isolation, and a culture of distrust.
These differences in civic life turn out to play a key role in explaining institutional success. The powerful link between institutional performance and the civic community leads us inevitably to ask why some regions are more civic than others.
This is the subject of Chapter 5. Pursuing the answer leads us back to a momentous period nearly a millennium ago, when two contrast- 16 CHAPTER ONE ing and innovative regimes were established in different parts of Italy—a powerful monarchy in the south and a remarkable set of communal republics in the center and north.
From this early medieval epoch through the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century, we trace systematic regional differences in patterns of civic involvement and social solidarity. These traditions have decisive consequences for the quality of life, public and private, in Italy's regions today.
Finally, Chapter 6 explores why norms and networks of civic engagement so powerfully affect the prospects for effective, responsive government and why civic traditions are so stable over long periods.
The theoretical approach we develop, drawing on the logic of collective action and the concept of "social capital," is intended not merely to account for the Italian case, but to conjoin historical and rational choice perspectives in a way that can improve our understanding of institutional performance and public life in many other cases. Our conclusions reflect on the power of institutional change to remold political life, and the powerful constraints that history and social context impose on institutional success.
This book does not promise to be a practical handbook for democratic reformers, but it does frame the broader challenges we all face.
The Italian regional experience can help us come to grips with this important issue. The new institutionalism argues that politics is structured by institutions. James March and Johan Olsen summarize this theory about the effects of institutions: The organization of political life makes a difference, and institutions affect the flow of history. Actions taken within and by political institutions change the distribution of political interests, resources, and rules by creating new actors and identities, by providing actors with criteria of success and failure, by constructing rules for appropriate behavior, and by endowing some individuals, rather than others, with authority and other types of resources.
Institutions affect the ways in which individuals and groups become activated within and outside established institutions, the level of trust among citizens and leaders, the common aspirations of political community, the shared language, understanding, and norms of the community, and the meaning of concepts like democracy, justice, liberty, and equality.
Two centuries of constitution-writing around the world warn us, however, that designers of new institutions are often writing on water. Institutional reform does not always alter fundamental patterns of politics.
As Deschanel characterized politics and government in the French Fourth Republic: "The republic on top and the empire underneath. That institutional reforms alter behavior is an hypothesis, not an axiom.
Theorists of institutions have lacked controlled settings in which to assess empirically the effects of changing the rules. Against this backdrop, the Italian regional experiment takes on special interest. This chapter begins our assessment of this experiment and its implications for institutionalism by asking how the new institutions were created and how they evolved during their first two decades.
Did this institutional reform actually reshape the identities of political actors, redistribute political resources, and inculcate new norms, as institutionalists predict? How were the customary practices of Italian governance shifted by these new institutions?
Indeed, were they altered in any noticeable way? Regional entities—geographically defined, politically independent, economically differentiated, and generally dominated by a strong city—have been prominent threads in the tapestry of Italian history for more than a millennium.
Fatta l'Italia, dobbiamo fare gli italiani was their slogan: "Having made Italy, we must now make Italians. Strong central authority was, they concluded, the necessary remedy for the weak integration of the new nation state. Fearing the reactionary tendencies of the Church and the peasants, as well as the backwardness of the South, however, the majority of the makers of modern Italy like most of their counterparts in the emerging states of today's Third World insisted that decentralization was incompatible with prosperity and political progress.
The centralizers quickly won the debate. Top local officials were appointed by the national government in Rome. Local political deadlock or even local dissent from national policy could lead to years of rule by a commissioner appointed by the national government.
Most areas of public policy, from agriculture to education to urban planning, were administered by field offices of the Roman bureaucracy. In practice, the rigor of this extreme administrative centralization was somewhat moderated by characteristic Italian political accommodations. To maintain their fragile political support in the nascent parliament, Italy's leaders developed the practice of trasformismo, in which patronage deals were struck with local notables. Support for the national governing coalition was bought by adjustments in national policy to suit local conditions or at least to suit the locally powerful.
The prefects, though responsible for controlling local government, were also responsible for conciliating traditional local elites, especially in the South.
Vertical networks of patron-client ties became a means of allocating public works and softening administrative centralization. Trasformismo allowed local elites and national deputies to bargain for local interests against national directives in return for electoral and parliamentary support.
Elections, parties, and political liberties were abolished, but the traditional organs of executive power and much of the older ruling class remained in power. Nevertheless, for local policymakers under the monarchy, under Fascism, and for more than two decades under the post-Fascist Republic, all roads led to Rome. Only after World War II, with the advent of democratic politics and growing grassroots revulsion against extreme centralization, did regionalist sentiment begin to re-emerge.
Newly powerful political parties, both the Christian Democrats on the center-right and the Socialists and Communists on the left, had historically opposed the national government and thus generally had argued for greater decentralization.
Under their aegis, the new Constitution of provided for directly elected regional governments. The central administration was naturally reluctant to divest itself of any significant authority. For more than twenty years, the constitutional provision for regional governments remained a dead letter, and central control remained the rule.
By the middle of the s, however, much had begun to change. In the background was the astounding pace of social and economic transformation in postwar Italy. During the two decades from to , the economy grew faster than ever before in Italian history and faster than virtually every other Western economy. Millions of Italians migrated from the impoverished South to the industrial North. Diets improved; illiteracy and infant mortality were cut by two thirds; bicycles were replaced by Vespas, and then Vespas by Fiats.
Millions of Italians changed jobs, homes, and life styles. Italy, and most of her regions and citizens, experienced one of the most concentrated periods of social change ever recorded. Politics and government lagged far behind these social and economic changes. Nevertheless, the increasingly frustrating sclerosis of Italian central administration, an emergent interest in regional planning, and a leftward drift in national politics combined to raise once again the issue of regional governments.
In February , after a record-breaking filibuster by hostile conservatives, parliament passed a law providing electoral machinery for the ordinary regions. Two years later a bill ordering regional finances was approved, allowing the first regional councils numbering thirty to eighty members, depending on the region's population to be elected in June In the ensuing months each council, following the conventions of the Italian party-dominated parliamentary system, elected a regional president and cabinet giunta and wrote a regional "statute," spelling out organization, procedures, and areas of regional jurisdiction, subject to the provisions of the Constitution and national enabling legislation.
A wide variety of objectives had been enunciated by proponents of the new institutions. Populists claimed that regional government would raise levels of democracy, by fostering citizen participation and responsiveness to local needs. Moderates argued that decentralization would increase administrative efficiency. Southerners believed that regional government could speed social and economic development, reducing regional inequalities.
Regional autonomy appealed to whichever group happened to be the "outs" in national politics—Communists at midcentury, like Catholics several decades earlier. Progressive technocrats argued that the regions were necessary for rational socio economic planning and could lead to a "new way of doing politics," more pragmatic than the traditional, ideological Italian political style.
They interpreted the destiny of the new governments in almost messianic terms, believing that "the creation of politically autonomous regional governments would be responsible for a radical social and political renewal of the country. Optimistic about the reform's future, they saw the regions as posing a potent challenge to the central authorities.
These were years of idealism and euphoria among Italian regionalists. But the struggle to assure adequate funding and authority for the new regions was only beginning. Two more years were required for the central government to issue decrees transferring powers, funds, and personnel to the regions, so that the new governments effectively did not open for business until April 1, Worse yet, at the regional level, the decrees were widely condemned as wholly inadequate by representatives of almost all parties and by the attentive public, as well as by regional officials themselves.
During these early years, an alliance of conservative national politicians, an entrenched national bureaucracy, and a traditionminded judiciary combined to impose numerous legal, administrative, and fiscal restraints on the regions. The central authorities retained general powers of "direction and coordination" over regional affairs, and they did not hesitate to use those powers.
For example, roughly one-quarter of all the laws passed by the regions during the first legislature were vetoed by the central administration.
Moreover, the central government kept a tight grip on the purse strings of the new governments. Spending projections published in foresaw virtually stationary allocations to the regions over the next three years, while expenditures by the central bureaucracy were to grow by 20 percent.
Euphoria turned to dismay and anger, as the regionalists realized that real devolution would require a political struggle with the center. Led by the independent-minded regional governments of Lombardia controlled by progressive Christian Democrats and Emilia-Romagna controlled by the Communists and encouraged by a leftward tide in national politics in —75, the regionalist forces renewed their attack. A sympathetic press helped rally grassroots support from regional interest groups and public opinion.
Regional governments of various stripes— North and South, red and white—joined forces in the so-called "regionalist front. Institutional change was creating its own momentum. In July , just after a powerful swing to the left in the second round of regional elections, the regionalists succeeded in pushing through par- 22 CHAPTER TWO liament Law , authorizing the decentralization of important new functions to the regions.
To shift the arena for decision making and forestall further obstruction by the central bureaucracy, Law required the government to obtain parliamentary approval of the implementing decrees. Preparation of those decrees occupied two more years of intense and often acrimonious negotiation among the national government, the regional authorities, and the parliamentary committee for the regions, as well as all the major political parties.
Our wave of interviews found our respondents much less confident about the ability of the regions to assert their autonomy. They reported more conflict between center and periphery, and more central control, than they had foreseen six years earlier. Their previous optimism about the new institution's capacity to address urgent social and economic problems was now more restrained, and they were quick to point the finger of blame at foot dragging in Rome.
Naturally, demands for autonomy stood much higher on their agendas now. As is true of intergovernmental relations everywhere, this centerperiphery game was played simultaneously in two distinct, but related forms, which we term "one-on-one" and "all-on-one. In the all-on-one version, the regional governments as a group struggled to shift the rules of the one-on-one games, in order to increase their bargaining resources. In these early years, the oneon-one battles were mostly lopsided victories for the central authorities.
All sides agreed that relations between center and periphery during these years were formalistic, antagonistic, and unproductive. But while the one-on-one battles favored the center, the all-on-one battle reached a climax more favorable for the regions. In a lengthy series of summit meetings among representatives of the major parties in June and July of , agreement was reached on a packet of regulations the socalled decrees that dismantled and transferred to the regions 20, offices from the national bureaucracy, including substantial portions of several ministries, such as the Ministry of Agriculture, as well as hundreds of semipublic social agencies.
Comprehensive legislative authority in several important fields, including social services and territorial planning, was delegated to the regions. Fiscal provisions of the decrees gave the regions responsibility for approximately one-quarter of the entire national budget, with some estimates running as high as one-third, including independent reforms that transferred to the regions virtually full responsibility for the national hospital and health care systems.
By , this sector alone accounted for more than half of total regional spending and like health policy everywhere, well more than half the administrative headaches. Supported by the Socialists and by left-wing Christian Democrats, the PCI pressed hard for further decentralization to the regions. Equally important, however, the existence of directly elected regional governments had created strong pressures and political incentives for more effective decentralization. The winning regionalist front drew on forces that had been unleashed by the initial reform and, in some cases, had actually been created by that reform.
Devolution is inevitably a bargaining process, not simply a juridical act. The legal and constitutional framework, the administrative framework controls, delegated powers, personnel patterns, and so on , and finances are both key resources in today's game and outcomes of earlier games.
As seen by regional leaders, the central authorities' main bargaining chips were control of funds and control over the delegation of formal authority—the pocketbook and the rulebook. Leaders of the richer, more ambitious regions of the North were more concerned about the rulebook, while the South was more conscious of the pocketbook. In the face of central recalcitrance fortified by central control over laws, rules, and money, the regions turned to less formal political resources. They relied heavily on interregional solidarity and on grass-roots support from regional and local interest groups, the press, and public opinion.
Southerners depended more on "vertical" strategies, such as private petitions to sympathetic national patrons, while northerners were readier to resort to "horizontal" collective action by a broad, regionalist front. This distinction between vertical politics in the South and horizontal politics in the North will recur repeatedly in various guises throughout this book.
The climactic confrontation with the central authorities was led primarily by the northerners. As we shall see later in this chapter, by the mids voters and community leaders, in both North and South, had become strong supporters of the principle of regional reform, even when they were critical of the actual operations of their own regional government.
The political momentum for devolution had become self-sustaining. The decrees reflected the regions' victory in the crucial struggle to establish their formal authority.
The less dramatic, but more demanding, struggle to deploy the new powers and spend the new money still lay ahead. The regions' all-on-one victory was sufficiently sweeping that they could no longer so plausibly blame the central authorities for their own shortcomings. With the benefit of hindsight, one regional leader told us in , "They threw us into the water, hoping that we could swim. The new division of authority between the center and the regions was still far from federal.
Most regional funds came from the center, and the central authorities retained a veto over regional legislation. But the regions were more powerful than local government had ever been in unified Italy. The legislative authority of the regions now encompassed such areas as health, housing, urban planning, agriculture, public works, and some aspects of education.
In addition, the regional statutes successfully claimed jurisdiction over territorial, economic, and structural planning. The far-flung activities of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno [Fund for the South], responsible for massive public investments in the South, were subjected to increased control by representatives of the regional governments.
Henceforth the regions, or the municipalities under regional supervision, could found and staff their own specialist agencies for welfare, run their own subsidy schemes for farmers and artisans, and organize their own co-operatives and nursery schools. They could draw up regional development and land use plans; they could take over the Chambers of Commerce.
Perhaps most startling of all was the handing over of the vital task of 'safeguarding public morals'—i. These were real powers of patronage and policing. Here, at last, was a revolution in government.
A practical measure of the importance of the regional governments was the resources they now controlled. Tens of thousands of administrative posts were created to serve the new governments and, during the waves of decentralization in the early s, thousands of employees were transferred from the central bureaucracy to the regions. The five special regions employed another 29, persons. By the beginning of the s, nearly one-tenth of Italy's gross domestic product was being spent by the regional governments, only slightly below the figure for American states.
For organizations that existed only on paper barely fifteen years earlier, the regions had come to control extremely large sums of money. Indeed, during most of the s and s, unspent appropriations carried over from one fiscal year to the next ballooned nearly everywhere, as the resources flowing to the regions exceeded their unfledged administrative capacity.
Apart from establishing the organization and procedures of the new institution, the major focus of regional legislation during the early years was distributing funds—loans for agricultural cooperatives, scholarships for needy students, aid for the handicapped, subsidies for interurban 26 C H A P T E R TWO buses, subventions for La Scala, and so on. Seeking public support, but lacking the necessary administrative infrastructure and often even the legal authority for carrying out substantial social reforms, most regions occupied themselves with distributive politics—often in the highly disaggregated form that Italians call leggine [little laws] and interventi a pioggia [projects "showered" indiscriminately over the region].
On the other hand, some regions did introduce substantive reforms in such areas as urban planning, environmental protection, and Italy's chaotic health and social services. The basic organizational structure for the subsequent national reform of health and social assistance—the "local unit for health and social services"—was pioneered by several of the regions.
Most experts agreed that urban planning improved significantly once responsibility for that function was shifted from the center to the regions. In certain "new" areas of public policy, such as energy and the environment, a number of regions moved into the void left by the ponderous Roman ministries, which had been slow to adapt to changing public demands and social needs. Whether the regions' legislative reach exceeded their administrative grasp is an important issue to which we shall return in the following chapters.
But for better or for worse, much of Italian domestic policy was now regionalized. Regional government had become, in Max Weber's evocative phrase, "a strong and slow boring of hard boards.
What effect, we must now ask, did these institutional changes have on the way politics was actually played and Italians were actually governed? Montesquieu observed that, at the birth of new polities, leaders mold institutions, whereas afterwards institutions mold leaders. Interaction between institutional change and the political elite is an important part of the story of the Italian regional experiment.
During the debate before the regions were established, some critics had prophesied that the councils would be packed by the parties with "falling stars," that is, superannuated party hacks. A few Utopian regionalists, on the other hand, had predicted the emergence from the regional grass-roots of a new group of novice citizen-politicians.
In the event, neither expectation was justified. From the very beginning, the new councils have been composed of well-trained, upwardly mobile, ambitious, and highly professional politicians. Councilors are on average a few years younger and less experienced than members of the national parliament, although in other respects the councilors' profile is closer to that of a national deputy than to that of a city councilor.
In fact, at least 20 percent of all regional councilors between and and more than a third of all those who had held a regional leadership post left for seats in the national parliament.
The new regional political elite is mostly comprised of self-made men. Fewer than 5 percent of the regional councilors are women; whatever its accessibility along other important dimensions, the regional council, like Italian politics more generally, remains a male-dominated world.
The councilors' social origins are more modest than those of national deputies, but much higher than the levels found among city councilors. With one exception, the regional legislators have firm roots in the towns and villages of their respective regions. More than half of the fathers of the councilors did not go beyond elementary school, and only about percent of the fathers attended university.
Among the councilors themselves, however, the overwhelming majority 77 percent in attended university, a figure that is close to the average for the national parliament and roughly double the average for Italian city councilors. The regional councilors are seasoned politicians with long experience in local government and party affairs.
Over three-quarters have held prior elective office, and more than four-fifths have held a major leadership post in their political party. The city council remains an important springboard toward the regional council, for two-thirds of all regional councilors have served previously in city government. Over the first two decades of the regional government, the region itself gradually replaced the province the administrative unit between the region and the local government as a crucial step in the Italian political hierarchy.
Between and the number of former provincial office holders among regional councilors declined from 45 percent to 20 percent, and the number of past or present provincial party leaders fell from 82 percent to 65 percent. By contrast, the number of councilors who have held or now hold a major post in their regional party organization rose from 26 percent in to 59 percent in This trend in career paths reflects the steady though still incomplete "regionalization" of the Italian party organizations, and of- 28 CHAPTER TWO fers initial evidence for the emergence of a distinctive regional political cursus honorem.
The regional councilor has gradually come to see his role as a full-time job, one indicator of increased institutionalization. The regional council has become a recognized arena for professional politicians. The Italian regional governments have passed this important hurdle. Even more important, the regional government has transformed elite political culture. The most striking metamorphosis in regional politics to appear in our repeated talks with both councilors and community leaders between and is a remarkable ideological depolarization, coupled with a strong trend toward a more pragmatic approach to public affairs.
The ideological depolarization is attributable primarily to a rightward convergence of views on a whole series of controversial issues, sparked by a powerful trend toward moderation among Communist and other leftist politicians. The proportion of leftists PCI, PSI, and other minor leftwing groups who agreed, for example, that "capitalism represents a threat to Italy" fell sharply and steadily from 97 percent in to 76 percent in , 54 percent in , and finally 28 percent in The proportion of centrists and rightists who concur, for instance, that "unions have too much power in Italy" fluctuated from 67 percent in to 74 percent in , 86 percent in , and back to 65 percent in As a result, the gap between the parties of the left and right narrowed substantially between and The net effect of these changes is summarized in Figure 2.
In the views of these politicians were distributed in a classic polarized bimodal fashion, skewed to the far left. Six years later the distribution remained bimodal, but the distance between the modes had narrowed. By the center of gravity had moved further to the right, so that the distribution, though no longer so polarized, was still quite wide. The first two decades of the new institution witnessed a steady, powerful centripetal tendency in regional politics.
As ideological distances narrowed, tolerance across party lines blossomed. In each survey we asked each politician to indicate his sympathy or antipathy toward the various political parties by rating them on a "feeling thermometer" from 0 complete antipathy to complete sympathy. Figure 2. The results show a steady trend toward greater mutual acceptance among virtually all parties. The average sympathy expressed for the Italian Communist party by non-Communists rose from 26 in to 44 in , for example, while the average sympathy toward Christian Democrats among councilors of all other parties rose from 28 in to 39 in Only the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement and to a lesser extent, the far left Proletarian Democracy remained ostracized by the rest of the political elite, and even this repulsion was less wholehearted by the end of the s than earlier in the s.
Virtually all of these scores remain in the lower half of the sympathyantipathy scale, for politicians in a competitive system could hardly be expected to express deep affection for their opponents. Sympathy toward opposing parties even toward the relatively well-received Italian Socialist Party seems bounded by a ceiling of neutrality. Nevertheless, during the first two decades of the regional experiment the high-voltage tensions that had traditionally characterized Italian party politics gradually dissipated, to be replaced by budding mutual respect.
The mellowing of partisanship within the regional political elite did not merely mirror broader changes in Italian society. Our parallel surveys of the mass public show that during the late s, while interparty relations within the regional political elite were warming, partisan hostility was actually on the increase among ordinary Italian voters.
In the s partisanship at the mass level began to recede. That timing is consistent with an interpretation that depolarization in Italian politics has been "eliteled," although further research would be necessary to confirm that hypothesis in detail. Be that as it may, at the founding of the regional governments, newly elected councilors from different parties were more hostile to one another than were their respective constituents.
Regional politicians no longer see their world in stark blacks and whites, but in more nuanced and more negotiable shades of gray. Table 2. The proportion of councilors who agreed that "in contemporary social and economic affairs, it is essential that technical considerations should have more weight than political ones" surged up from 28 percent in to 63 percent in The proportion suspecting that "to compromise with one's political opponents is dangerous because it usually leads to the betrayal of one's own side" plummeted from 50 percent in to 29 percent in Those who counseled moderation, concurring that "generally in political controversies one should avoid extreme positions because the proper solution usually lies in the middle" rose from 57 percent in to 70 percent in The proportion endorsing the view that "in the final analysis loyalty to one's fellow citizens is more important than loyalty to one's party" soared from 68 percent in to 94 percent in The idea of putting civic loyalty ahead of party loyalty was transformed over these years from a debatable proposition into a platitude.
Closer examination of the year-by-year changes in Table 2. Asked to rate their own region on a five-point scale from "ideological" to "pragmatic," the proportion of councilors who described their region as distinctively ideological fell from 26 percent in to 21 percent in , 14 percent in , and a mere 10 percent in Pragmatism was no longer an epithet, but a way of doing business.
Comparison of the open-ended interviews with councilors in , , and reveals some interesting changes in the way these policymakers analyze specific regional issues, such as social services or economic development. Councilors came to interpret their role less as being "responsive to" and more as being "responsible for," less as eloquent tribunes for popular causes and more as competent trustees of the public interest.
After a decade of regional government, regional leaders had become less theoretical and Utopian and less concerned with defending the interests of particular regional groups at the expense of others.
Practical questions of administration, legislation, and financing became more salient. Councilors now spoke more of efficient service delivery and of investment in roads and vocational education, and less of "capitalism" or "socialism," "liberty" or "exploitation.
In talking about the most important issues facing the regional government and about their hopes for the future, councilors in the s gave less attention to justice, equality, and social reform than they had in They now focused more on administrative, political, and procedural reforms.
Legislative autonomy and administrative efficiency or, more often, administrative inefficiency bulked much larger in their discussions of regional government, whereas concern for the "radical social renewal" of the messianic early years had faded. When they entered the council chambers for the first time, the new legislators had brought with them a conception of politics and social relations as essentially zero-sum, revolving about conflicts that were ultimately irreconcilable.
This outlook, rooted in the social and ideological struggles of the Italian past, predisposed the councilors to stridency and hobbled practical collaboration. These perspectives on social and political conflict were singularly transformed during the first decade of the regional experiment. Most councilors throughout these twenty years have said that they can trust their colleagues, even their political adversaries. Roughly two-thirds insist that ideological opponents can reach agreement on practical problems of the region.
Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. Re-examining a modern classic: does Putnam's Making Democracy Work suffer from spuriousness? What makes democratic institutions work efficiently? Robert Putnam argued in Making Democracy Work that a mixture of political participation and immersion in associative and social networks in the … Expand.
What is the connection between civic autonomy and political participation? This paper assesses three answers to this question: the left Tocquevillian argument suggesting that civic autonomy … Expand. The Interactive State: Democratisation from Above? This article examines the evolving political culture in contemporary South Africa.
It draws on elite culture, neo-patrimonialism, and revisionist institutionalist perspectives to understand state … Expand. View 2 excerpts, cites background. Download Making Democracy Work books , Why do some democratic governments succeed and others fail? In a book that has received attention from policymakers and civic activists in America and around the world, Robert Putnam and his collaborators offer empirical evidence for the importance of "civic community" in developing successful institutions.
Their focus is on a unique experiment begun in when Italy created new governments for each of its regions. After spending two decades analyzing the efficacy of these governments in such fields as agriculture, housing, and health services, they reveal patterns of associationism, trust, and cooperation that facilitate good governance and economic prosperity.
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