Today many sociologists, historians, and governmental theorists depend
highly on a concept known as social capital to explain past
economic-governmental-social trends. Social capital boils down to the
general amount of trust present in a society. Social capital has been
identified as a direct cause of phenomena as varied as the legitimization
and empowerment of governmental rule and overall happiness and contentment
in a society. It is interesting to look back at history to see how well
these hypotheses have performed, but the real test of the theories
revolving around social capital will be in predicting future governmental,
economic, and social changes.
Robert Putnam has done extensive research into the ties between civil
society and governmental efficacy in present-day Italy. He is now a huge
advocate of the causal relation between strong social capital and good
government. Through research and statistical analysis of Italian
political participation, culture, and social norms, Putnam has created a
strong argument for this viewpoint. His work in Italy culminated in the
book Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. In this
book he outlines his methodology and all of the evidence that led him to
his current way of thought. It took two decades, numerous surveys and
interviews, and some serious deliberation over social and political
theory, but the result is an extensive study of the relation between
politics, economics, society, and culture.
Putnam began his project as a study of Italy’s regional governmental
institutions. In 1970 Italy created a set of 15 regional governments for
the purpose of making policy decisions that better suited certain areas of
the country. The country had previously set up 5 similar institutions to
govern outlying regions of Italy where there existed certain specific
issues that had little relevance to the majority of the country. Over the
course of two decades these twenty smaller governing bodies gained
significant portions of national funds and increased their overall
governing power. Putnam studied the differences between these regional
governments and then used his findings as the basis of a search for
deeper, more substantial differences between the cultures of the north and
the south.
The results of Putnam’s work may not be too surprising to people who have
been exposed to the current societal dichotomy in Italy. He found that
even though all regional institutions were created with the same
allocation of funding and power, some regions performed significantly
higher than others. The northern half of the country progressed
economically and succeeded in creating more modern, effective governments
while, by comparison, southern Italy remained much as it previously had.
Putnam’s task in the evaluation of his newly acquired regional data was to
explain this discrepancy between the north and the south in the areas of
political reform and economic development.
This search led Putnam to analyze the underlying causes of governmental,
economic, and social change. At the beginning of his book he mentions
three main schools of thought concerning institutional performance:
institutional design, socioeconomic factors, and sociocultural factors.
The nature of his study ruled out an examination of different
institutional designs; all of the regional governments were created with
similar powers and duties. So controlling for institutional design, he
explored the other two possibilities. He looked into the economic
development in Italy and its relation to social associations. He surveyed
the people to find correlations between associational ties and political
participation. The northern regions showed much more economic growth and
more earnest political participation. The south initially looked very
politically active, but the causes were more related to patron-client
networks than real concern for governmental policy-making. But why did
some regions excel in economic production and social reform while others
seemed unwilling or unable to progress similarly?
Putnam found his answer in civil society and social capital. He decided
that there was a basic cultural difference between the north and the south
that produced these various economic and political climates. The next
task on Putnam’s agenda was to discover the initial pressures that
affected this difference between the north and the south. In order to
explain the origins of the differing Italian cultures, he had to look back
at the medieval ruling powers and their social consequences. He
eventually decided that the most important cultural differences in Italy
could be traced back through about 1000 AD. The Normans invaded the south
and set up a tyrannical rule, and a system of communal city-states
appeared in the north. The horizontal lines of community present in the
north were starkly contrasted by the strict hierarchy of the south. The
northern way of life nurtured a system of cooperation and trust that grew
into strong civic-mindedness, but the oppressive nature of Norman rule and
the Catholic church kept the citizens of the south in a state of
dependence which, in turn, caused a widespread social feeling of
distrust. I am oversimplifying in the extreme, but Putnam’s main point is
that from these beginnings rose the two extremely different cultures that
we see in Italy today.
Putnam concludes his book with the assertion that social capital in the
form of secondary associations is one of the most significant causes of an
effective government. I have much respect for the work he has done in the
field, but this is where he enters unproven territory. Though there is
much evidence for the causality of civil society in strong governmental
and economic performance, I do not believe that this hypothesis has been
tested to the extent that it should be. Certainly it stands as a
reasonable idea of how cultures and ruling bodies interact, but in fields
as complex as sociology and political science, reams and reams of evidence
must be produced before a new idea is readily accepted. Granted, the
relationship between civil society and government was put forth hundreds
of years ago by Tocqueville, but a few hundred years is not a long enough
to rigorously test an idea that deals with societal changes. Putnam
himself was forced to delve about one thousand years into Italy’s past to
sufficiently argue his point. So many factors enter into the activity of
a society that much simplification of the situation will inevitably lead
to the oversight of essentially countless variables. Also, the
presumption that the case of Italian social evolution is generalizable to
global social trends is a mistake of specific induction. To make this
kind of argument solid Putnam needs much more corroborating evidence from
civilizations and governments around the world. Overlooking his venture
into the world of speculation, I believe that his observations on the
Italian state do provide helpful insights into the relationship between
civil society and governmental development and efficacy. Putnam’s only
real faults are oversimplification and overgeneralization, but they are
serious faults, indeed.