Short Paper #2:Putnam's Making Democracy Work

[SYOUNTCHI@hotmail.com (YOUNTCHI; SUZANNE MARIE)]

While looking at the power of institutional change to remold political life, Robert D. Putnam's study of "Italy's regional experiment" in Making Democracy Work, reveals how the differing social context and history of the northern and southern regions of Italy shape the performance of institutions.  Putnam uses Italy's institutions both as a independent variable and a dependant variable and provides both quantitative and qualitative data using various methodologies in order to measure, explain, and trace the roots of institutions.  At the end of this study, he concludes, "Toqueville was right: Democratic government is strengthened, not weakened, when it faces a vigorous civil society" (Putnam, 182).
  However, while Putnam's twenty-year study reveals the differing dynamics of one democratic government, there are some weaknesses in his argument.  After briefly summarizing Putnam's main points, and noting where Putnam's arguments and methods are innovative and strong, I discuss significant gaps in Putnam's argument (more specifically in his theoretical approach rather than his quantitative methodology).  First, as Sheri Berman argues in her example of The Collapse of the Weimer Republic, "not only did participation in civil society organizations fail to contribute to republican virtue, but it in fact subverted it" (Berman, 417).  Putnam fails to see the consequence of strong participation in volunteer associations as weakening necessary political parties and political structure.   Second, while he notes how historical and cultural context limit the dynamics of institutions and civil society, he overlooks the limits that state building can lend to institutions. He does not give the full attention to the importance of imperialism and state building, to the creation and limits of these institutions.  In order for his framework to be relevant in parts of the world where imperialism has left its "mark", he should have included a better international or structural level of analysis in addition to his domestic ones. 
Putnam begins his study by looking at how the institutions in Italy changed over time in chapter 2, and then compares the development of these institutions and regions over space in chapter 3. After first describing the institutional reform in Italy in the 1970's and how it came to light, Putnam illustrates in chapter 2 that "this institutional reform has had powerful consequences for the way Italian politics and government work" (60).  Here, he treats institutions as the independent variable as "the new regional institution fostered a tolerant, collaborative pragmatism among its members" (38).  What is significant about looking at the regional reforms throughout the North and South, is what it reveals about the different institutional dynamics and that "…any uniform verdict on the regional experiment so far is misleading, given the heterogeneity of the regions and their performance"(62). 
He aims to measure the performance of the institution- representative government in chapter 3.  In order to measure government performance, Putnam states that they must be comprehensive, internally consistent, reliable, and correspond to the objectives and evaluations of the institution's protagonists and constituents (64-65).  To perform these tests, Putnam uses twelve different indicators of institutional performance in order to evaluate policy processes, policy pronouncements, and policy implementations in the twenty regions.  Putnam's list of indicators used to quantify government performance is comprehensive and diverse as includes twelve institutions ranging from cabinet stability, budget promptness, and reform legislation, to day care centers, family clinics, and  bureaucratic responsiveness (61-73).  As a result of this quantitative analysis, Putnam develops an innovative index of institutional performance revealing that "[s]ome regional governments have been consistently more successful than others,"(81) and that these differences are also recognized by both ordinary citizens and community leaders (81-82).  Putnam's remarkable discovery is that the South was consistently performing worse in every area, hence "the South is different" (83).  
	Putnam's argument at this point is starting to indicate that using institutions as the independent variable may not be enough to explore the differences between the North and South.  Already, he has made a distinction between the two regions.  He has not oversimplified the situation though, like Samuel P. Huntington's distinction between regions, marking out where one civilization ends and the wilderness of 'the other' begins (Ajami, 26-7). But like Huntington, he has started to indicate that he must uncover another layer and start to look beneath the quantitative data that he so neatly put together.   
In fact, in chapter 4, in order to explain the "…correlation between latitude and institutional performance", Putnam asks, "what is it that differentiates the successful regions in the North from the unsuccessful ones in the South, and the more from the less successful within each section?" (83). After further examination of the institutional performance data, Putnam shows that "the most backward regions have more funds available than they have been able to expend" (86).  Therefore, Putnam states that the data cannot reveal whether modernity is a cause of performance, whether performance is a cause of modernity, or if there is a third, more complex factor.  
Obviously, Putnam is switching his variables and making institutions the dependent variable.  As he uses theories of civic engagement, political equality, "solidarity, trust, and tolerance", and associations (the social structures of cooperation) in order to explore the meaning of civic community (86-91), he changes his level of analysis to one of culture.  This is clear when he tests the theory, he uses four "cultural" indicators of the "civic-ness" of regional life: the vibrancy of associational life; the link between the local newspapers, civic vitality, and associations; electoral turnout; and preference voting (91-94).  It is remarkable how he strives to quantify this data and find a correlation among these indicators through various scatter-graphs and devises a "civic community index" (96). This index reveals that "…the predictive power of the civic community is greater than the power of economic development… the more civic a region, the more effective its government" (98).  This is because the regions with high institutional performance and high scores on the civic community index are from the Center-North, and the ones from the South scored low on the index (Figure 4.5, 98-99).  
However, what Putnam includes and what he excludes in "local cultural and recreational associations"(106-109) is an issue of concern.  Due to the vertical structure of institutions including the union, the church and religiosity, and political parties, Putnam has excluded three groups which are important affiliations for many Italians.  Therefore exclusion is because they are negatively associated with good government unlike "horizontal institutions", such as sports clubs, cooperatives, and voluntary union, vertical structured associations (175-176).  Putnam appears to write off these associations rather quickly for someone who is putting so much significance on the value of trust and collective actions.  Does the church not instill "values" to care for the community?  At times, do sport clubs not foster competition rather than teamwork?  It seems that Putnam is tailoring the Italian society in order to produce the data needed to fit his model. 
In chapter 5, after revealing the correlations between institutional performance and the civic community, Putnam aims to explain this link.  He begins with a qualitative analysis where he interprets the historical context, such as that in the fourteenth century, of both the regions and discovers that the history of the North and South parallels the "civic divergences" that were revealed in his quantitative data of civic community indicators (130). He does acknowledges though, that historical accounts are still ambiguous however in explaining the links between traditions and incidence of the civic community index previously discussed, so we "must move beyond qualitative sketches to quantitative assessments" (148).
In his move to quantitative assessments, Putnam jumps to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to measure the "durability of civic traditions" through yet another index and more scatter graphs, showing for example, the correlations between civic traditions of the past and civic community of today (150-151).  He concludes, "…one could have predicted the success or failure of regional government in Italy in the 1980's with extraordinary accuracy from patterns of civic engagement nearly a century earlier" (p. 150). Moreover, he moves to look at how the civic differences between the North and South appeared to be more stable than the economic differences (152-157).  After examining the various socioeconomic variables, he concludes that economics does not predict civics, but civics does predict economics, due to the remarkable staying power of civic traditions to directly affect the performance of regional power. (157).  
Putnam has now made a case linking associations or "civic mindedness" to the success of democracy and its institutions, but has also created a weakness and topic of debate in his argument.  While providing a "multiple level of analysis" in treating institutions both as the independent variable and dependent variable, Putnam has forgotten the importance of having a strong political structure.  For instance, Sherri Berman  classifies Putnam as a "neo-Toqueville", in Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimer Republic.  Berman argues this point as she attributes strong associations to corroding the necessary political parties and political structure needed for a state to survive, such as in Germany (Berman, 424-425).  Furthermore, in terms of the importance of having specifically "horizontal structured associations", Berman notes that these will not have a positive effect unless you have the strong institutions (429).
In Putnam's final chapter, he draws out his theoretical approach of the concept of social capital, illustrated through the significance of social trust, and hence voluntary cooperation.  Putnam attempts to put his theoretical arguments into the "big picture", and addresses the culture vs. social structure debate.   However, he quickly writes off this question, stating that the debate is fruitless since culture and structure are intertwined arguing that "norms and networks of civic engagement contribute to economic prosperity and are in turn reinforced by that prosperity" (180).  
Abandoning the issue of social structure though, shows how Putnam has only briefly touched on the importance of state building on institutions and political as well as social structure.  Although he focuses on a domestic level of analysis, he nearly forgot a structural level of analysis, such as the impact of colonialism and the "international context". This gap highlights a weakness in his theoretical discourse.  For example, as he describes the link between lacking norms and networks of civic engagement, and the impact of the former Communist lands that are moving towards self-government (183).  it looks as though he decided to add on the importance of "imperialism" in the last few pages of his study.  Even in his rather quick overview of Italy's history we read, "[d]uring the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, further miseries were inflicted on the peninsula, as Spain, France, and the other ascendant powers of Europe fought their bloody dynastic duels in the Italian arena.  The demographic and economic consequences of these foreign invasions, together with the devastating plagues and trade disruptions of the previous century, were especially traumatic for the communes of the North…."(134).   Putnam only gives us a glimpse of the impact of colonialism and imperialism on developing structures, in an almost "last minute" approach.  In order for his framework to be widely applicable all over the world, he should have devoted more attention to the colonial factors in state building, as many of the struggling democracies today are those which have had extensive colonial or imperialistic history. 


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