Short paper #2, a bit late.

["Jonathan D. Fisher" <jfisher-p2ww@mail.utexas.edu>]

Jonathan Fisher
02-04-02
Paper #2


	Putnam's Making Democracy Work is split into two sections, the first of
which summarizes the data of a study that sought to identify the
determinants of successful democracy, and the second of which makes
conclusions based on that data.  The data for the study were collected
through numerous personal interviews, nationwide and local surveys,
statistical analysis of "measures of institutional importance", and several
"case studies of institutional politics"(14).

	After the introductory chapter, Putnam describes the political conditions
of Italy during the study.  When the study began in 1970, Italy's central
government divided the country into twenty regions, and appropriated
substantial governing power to them.  Each regional government was created
as a constitutional democracy more or less like its peers.  Each had
similar distribution of powers amongst its offices, similar laws, and the
same political parties.  However alike their constitutions were, the
social, technological, cultural, and political situations of these areas
varied significantly.  For instance, some regions were modern and affluent,
while some were pre-industrial and relatively poor.  The dominant pattern
Putnam expresses is that the regions of Northern Italy were at the
beginning of the study (and throughout) richer and more well-governed than
those in the South.

	Putnam measures the "institutional performance" of each of the local
governments by a list of 12 criteria, including expediency in publishing a
regional budget, the ratios of citizens to family health clinics, and to
day care centers, and general "bureaucratic responsiveness"(73).  He then
ranks each of the regions according to the twelve criteria, and finds a
positive correlation between a region's "success" and its citizens'
satisfaction with the regional government, which he takes to indicate that
his measures of success are valid.  He also finds strong correlation
between overall performance and performance within most of the 12 criteria.

	Next, Putnam shows a map of Italy which displays each region's
institutional performance.  The map shows that the Northern regions ranked
better than the Southern.  He briefly posits socioeconomic modernity as the
primary determinant of good government, but rejects the explanation for two
reasons.  The first is that the Southern areas receive funding from the
central government to supplement their lesser income.  The second is that
when Italy is divided into 4 geographical quadrants, each of the regions
within a given quadrant are of roughly equal economic strength, but still
have varying degrees of institutional success.

	Putnam quickly proposes that the health of the civic community is the main
explanatory factor of good democracy.  The general idea is that democracy
will work best when run by the best people, and that the people are made
better through participation in civil society.  He identifies newspaper
readership, club membership, referenda voting, and a lack of
preferred-candidate voting with strong civil community, and finds that high
levels of all four of these correlate positively with institutional
performance.  He then displays data from many surveys, which found that
regions with higher opinions of their neighbors and their leaders also had
stronger civic community scores.

	Next, Putnam makes observations about the history of Italy, and tries to
trace from the medieval period up to the time of his study the development
of civic community, or of its want.  The conclusion of the study is that
the North was more free to develop associations and bonds between workers
than was the South, and that this led to the dominance of strict "vertical
relationships" in the dealings between people in the South, while the North
enjoyed increasing community health.  He argues that this tradition can
explain the South's weaker and the North's stronger institutional success.

	In the last chapter, Putnam argues that social capital allows people in
communities that would otherwise be subject to blind opportunism to trust
each other, which allows them to freely contribute to the common good.  He
states that "horizontal" relationships between equals foster social
capital, and that the Northern regions' "norms of reciprocity" have made
them more successful than the Southern.  Finally he stresses that in any
case, the institutional change brought about by regionalization has
strengthened the South and has made it more likely that social capital will
grow there in the future, but that this development will take time.

	One limit of Putnam's analysis is that he fails to take into account the
role of technology in society.  He lumps the greater technological capacity
of the North with economic status, and by throwing the latter out, fails to
realize the potential effects of the former.  Although the regions of the
South receive money to compensate for their lesser tax income, since they
are not industrialized, they cannot be spending this money on research or
on creating new technological infrastructure that would contribute to
greater institutional success.

	The Southern regions' poor performance in several of the 12 criteria of
institutional success could be improved by better technological
infrastructure.  Just one example is that "Housing and Urban Development"
could be improved by a better network of roads.  "Statistical and
Informational Services" will of course be much more efficient and accurate
in regions with phones, paved roads, and above all, an abundance of
computers.  The factor most flagrantly dependent of all on technological
infrastructure is "Local Health Unit Expenditures".  In regions with fewer
hospitals and fewer doctors, of course there will be less money spent by
the government on health care.  Perhaps even more important is that people
in wealthy countries tend to live longer, and that as people age, medical
costs increase rapidly.  A government that subsidizes health at all will
have much greater health expenditures if its population is elderly.

	Perhaps more importantly, certain measures of success fail to take into
account the current technology level of each region.  For instance, because
Southern regions tend to be more agrarian, their populations is probably
less dense and less centralized than in the North.  It is probably not
feasible for the people living in the countryside to take their children to
a day care center that must be on average located further away in order to
draw the same number of children as a Northern day care center.  In a
capitalist economy, this means that day care centers in the South are much
more likely to fail if they are run privately, and will be much more
expensive per attending child if run publicly.  Either way, this amounts to
fewer day care centers, not because people care less about each other, but
because the cost is so much higher.

	Technological infrastructure cannot account for great discrepancy in all
of the categories.  For instance, "Bureaucratic Responsiveness" would
probably not be improved by introduction of e-mail into poor regions, if
they score poorly simply because officials tend to ignore requests.
Similarly, "Budget Promptness" would improve little in a gridlocked region
no matter what technology was introduced.  Even the well-connected United
States, one of the most technologically advanced countries, has failed to
meet its own budget deadline.  It is easy to imagine more major failures of
a society with a rich technological infrastructure.

	Nevertheless, the civil community could suffer if its government's income
were subsidized, and not generated by the people themselves.  If a regional
government distributes money that it did not earn locally, this could
reinforce the patron-client hierarchy that Putnam describes.  The people of
the region are effectively getting benefits from the nobility that they did
not themselves produce, and in an already corrupt government, the services
granted with this money are like a payment in return for a vote for a
specific candidate.  While it is certainly better for some people to be
well treated than none, patron-client systems may never be replaced by
healthier "horizontal systems" if the citizens are always dependant on the
officers of government.  A strong technological and industrial
infrastructure is a great way to supply jobs and thus internal money that
could undermine this dependence.
	Without a strong civic community, however, any new infrastructure would be
at risk of becoming just another part of the corrupt government's system.
So few factories and schools could be opened so that new jobs would become
mere awards for loyal clients, and the money and power would remain within
the system.  So, while Putnam's civic community alone can't fix 'broken'
democracies, it does seem at very least helpful in facilitating the process.