Putnam

["zaina 2" <xeena16@hotmail.com>]

Civic Traditions
	Putnam evaluates the success of the representative government in Italy by 
looking at its responsiveness to the citizens and its efficiency in 
conducting its affairs.  A good democratic government gives the citizens the 
right to petition the government, requires fair competition, and 
accomplishes many of its goals.  To test the success of the performance of 
the new regional government, Putnam tried to make his tests comprehensive, 
internally consistent, reliable, and correspond to the citizens’ objectives 
and evaluations.
	To test the effectiveness of the regional governments, Putnam evaluated the 
institution’s policy processes, pronouncements, and implementation.  
Internally, the government has to be effective in its management and stable 
in its choices.  Included in these tests of internal operations were three 
indicators: cabinet stability and number, budget promptness, and statistical 
and information services.  The budget approval by regional council varied 
from January 27 to August 7, and the number of effective statistical and 
information facilities was directly related to the effectiveness of 
government.  These services are important because the government has to have 
a means of finding out the problems of its constituents.  These tests also 
emphasized the North/South disparity present in Italy.  In the North, the 
facilities were well equipped, while in the South, there were no such 
facilities.  To be effective, the government has to also make good policy 
decisions.  To examine this, Putnam rated the comprehensiveness (did they 
address the problem?), coherence (were they consistent and coordinated?), 
and creativeness (did they try new ways of solving problems?) of the reform 
legislation in policy including economic development, territorial and 
environmental planning, and social services.  The cities in the North such 
as Emilia-Romagna were rated as excellent while cities in the South such as 
Calaria were rated poorly.  Also, Putnam tested whether the regions picked 
up and passed laws that were new legislative ideas that tried to fulfill 
social needs.  Again, the cities in the North new laws were passed in areas 
such as air and water pollution, promotion of fisheries, and wildlife 
protection while cities in the South did not pass as many model laws.
	Finally, Putnam evaluated whether the governments used the available 
resources to perform actions that solve problems.  For example, he checked 
whether the governments actually solved problems, which they could affect, 
practically.  He counted the number of day care centers and family clinics 
in the regions.  Again, the North had more of these than the South.  Also, 
he checked which array of potential tools of industrial policy the region 
deployed and saw the difference between the North, which deployed various 
regional economic development and land use plans and South, which deployed 
less industrial policy instruments.  He then wanted to see how effective the 
regional government was at using the funds offered to them by the central 
government for use in agriculture, health, and housing and how feasible the 
regional government’s projects were.  The North actually used the funds 
allocated to them to better the agriculture, while the South let most of the 
money go to waste.  Also, the North used its money on national health 
services including hospitals, clinics, and health insurance and for housing 
programs.  Lastly, Putnam and his team assessed the responsiveness of the 
regional governments to the citizens.  In the Northern regions, the 
governments were efficient in responding to questions, while the Southern 
citizens needed to call the governments several times and even had to make 
personal visits to get answers to their concerns.  Overall, “regions that 
have stable cabinets, adopt their budgets on time, spend their 
appropriations as planned, and pioneer new legislation are the same regions 
that provide day care centers and family clinics, develop comprehensive 
urban planning, make loans to farmers, and answer their mail promptly.”  
These “objective” methods of measuring institutional performance 
corresponded to the views of Italians about their own regional governments.  
Thus, some regional governments have been consistently more efficient in 
their internal operations, more creative in their policy initiatives, and 
more effective in implementing these ideas, and the North regional 
governments as a group have been more successful than their southern 
counterparts.
              Putnam says that socioeconomic modernity (from the industrial 
revolution) and more importantly civic community (patterns of civic 
involvement and social solidarity) are the two factors that affect the 
success of the regional governments.  The industrial revolution has raised 
education and public health standards.  This not only expands the number of 
trained professional but also increases economic growth.  In the North, 
where these things took place, wealth made things easier and provided more 
resources for governmental institutions and expanded the middle class.  
Although fiscal redistribution by the central government provided more money 
to the South, it did not compensate for the differences in socioeconomic and 
technological infrastructure between the South and the North.  Thus, the 
South remained underdeveloped.
Putnam stresses the importance of the civic nature (character of the 
citizens) in a democratic government.   He, as other republicans, emphasized 
community and obligations of citizenship and believed that the democratic 
government depends on the degree to which its surroundings have the ideal of 
a civic community.  Civic virtue includes pursuing the public good at the 
expense of individual needs, and thus active participation in public affairs 
is important.  In other words, citizens should not just pursue personal 
interest, but should cooperate.  There should be an equality and reciprocity 
between citizens instead of relationship based on authority and dependency.  
Leaders are not absolute, as Hobbes believes they should be, but are 
responsible for their fellow citizens.  Virtuous citizens respect, trust, 
and tolerate one another.  Tocqueville believes that trust is important in 
order for a democracy to work because it fights opportunism, which blinds 
people from seeing their shared interest.  Hobbes, on the other hand, 
believed that the state of nature of man is competition and diffidence or 
distrust of others.  For example, as explained in the prisoner’s dilemma, in 
which two prisoner’s are separated and told to tell on the other, if both 
remain silent and trust each other, then they would be let off lightly, but 
each is better off squealing no matter what the other does because of the 
distrust.  Thus, Hobbes stressed individualism and believed that having a 
social contract when forming a state is artificial and goes against human 
nature.  Thus, an absolute despot is needed to force people abide by the 
social contract.  The problem with the absolute ruler is that if he is 
human, then he has self-interest and thus will run into the same problem as 
any other citizen in acting for the good of the community.  This pessimistic 
view of human nature contradicts the research done by Putnam.  He noticed 
that in regions where associations are formed, in which citizens collaborate 
together towards objects of common desires, democracy was more effective.  
Members of associations “displayed more political sophistication, social 
trust, political participation, and civic competence.”  Putnam believes that 
there are four indicators of the civic-ness of regional life.  The first one 
is the vibrancy of association life, especially sports clubs, cultural and 
leisure activity clubs.  There are fewer associations in Puglia in the South 
than in other cities in the North.  The presence of newspapers and a large 
electoral turnout are two important for the success of a civil society.  
Preference voting, on the other hand, is an indicator of the lack of a civic 
community.  From his research, Putnam found that there is a high correlation 
between a civic community and institutional performance (more effective 
government).
Not only does Putnam state the qualities of a good regional government and 
then test their presence in regional governments in Italy, but he also 
comprehensively did surveys and performed questionnaires to incorporate 
people’s perceptions of the government.  He also performed these tests over 
span of time, which further validates his findings.  Thus, by taking his 
ideas into consideration, countries who are trying to form regional 
governments, might benefit.





_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.