After briefly explaining why social capital (civil society) is important to democracy, Putnam devotes the bulk of this chapter to demonstrating social capital’s decline in the United States across the last quarter century. (See Putnam 1995 for a similar but more detailed argument.) While he acknowledges that the significance of a few countertrends is difficult to assess without further study, Putnam concludes that crucial factors such as social trust are eroding rapidly in the United States. He offers some possible explanations for this erosion and concludes by outlining the work needed to consider these possibilities more fully.

/pdf/bowling-alone-america-s-declining-social-capital-cqbzoi2a0n.pdf

“Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”

Theory of International Politics

This article discusses: the doctrinal content of the group of ideas known as ‘new public management’(NPM); the intellectual provenance of those ideas; explanations for their apparent persuasiveness in the 1980 s; and criticisms which have been made of the new doctrines. Particular attention is paid to the claim that NPM offers an all-purpose key to better provision of public services. This article argues that NFM has been most commonly criticized in terms of a claimed contradiction between ‘equity’ and ‘efficiency’ values, but that any critique which is to survive NPM's claim to ‘infinite reprogrammability’ must be couched in terms of possible conflicts between administrative values. The conclusion is that the ESRC'S Management in Government’ research initiative has been more valuable in helping to identify rather than to definitively answer, the key conceptual questions raised by NPM.

A public management for all seasons

We investigate empirically the determinants of the quality of governments in a large cross-section of countries. We assess government performance using measures of government intervention, public sector efficiency, public good provision, size of government, and political freedom. We find that countries that are poor, close to the equator, ethnolinguistically heterogeneous, use French or socialist laws, or have high proportions of Catholics or Muslims exhibit inferior government performance. We also find that the larger governments tend to be the better performing ones. The importance of (reasonably) exogenous historical factors in explaining the variation in government performance across countries sheds light on the economic, political, and cultural theories of institutions.

/pdf/the-quality-of-government-3ptioorxqm.pdf

The quality of government

The conditions associated with the existence and stability of democratic society have been a leading concern of political philosophy. In this paper the problem is attacked from a sociological and behavioral standpoint, by presenting a number of hypotheses concerning some social requisites for democracy, and by discussing some of the data available to test these hypotheses. In its concern with conditions—values, social institutions, historical events—external to the political system itself which sustain different general types of political systems, the paper moves outside the generally recognized province of political sociology. This growing field has dealt largely with the internal analysis of organizations with political goals, or with the determinants of action within various political institutions, such as parties, government agencies, or the electoral process. It has in the main left to the political philosopher the larger concern with the relations of the total political system to society as a whole.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055400000034

Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy

Abridged, with an Introduction by Patrick Renshaw. Democracy in America is a classic of political philosophy. Hailed by John Stuart Mill and Horace Greely as the finest book ever written on the nature of democracy, it continues to be an influential text on both sides of the Atlantic, above all in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe. De Tocqueville examines the structures, institutions and operation of democracy, and shows how Europe can learn from American success and failures. His central theme is the advancement of the rule of the people, but he also predicts that slavery will bring about the 'most horrible of civil wars', foresees that the USA and Russia will be the Superpowers of the twentieth century, and is 150 years ahead of his time in his views on the position and importance of women.

Democracy in America

Democracy in America.

Alexis de Tocqueville, known and still frequently quoted for his book on democracy in America, started at the end of his life to write a book on the French Revolution, only the first part of which came to fruition, as de Tocqueville’s life was cut short by cholera in his fifties. This first part is not intended as a history of the Revolution as such, indeed there is almost no mention of the the day to day affairs of the process, and apart from an indirect reference to Louis XVI as ill-starred, no mention of the Kings decapitation is to be found, but is meant as a history of its precedent, providing an attempt to explain why it arose, and why in France particularly. Thus the bulk of the book is devoted to the ancien regime of the 18th century, immediately preceding the revolutionary cataclysm. The writings of the author is no mere speculation, although there is plenty of that in the book as well, but is based on extensive archival research, which no doubt took him years to pursue, and fragments of which found their place in the extended endnotes. His thesis is that in spite of the wide gulf that seems to separate us from the old regime, after all at the time of his writing, many people who had been born in those distant times were still alive, there is a remarkable continuity between the old and the new. In fact the reason the revolution took place, according to the author, is because of this very continuity. Political revolutions seldom if ever involve such total repudiations of the past as do scientific and technical, even if the French Revolution strikes the author as a most singular event in the history of mankind, and unlike any other political revolution, as it was imbued with a universal appeal, formerly more characteristic of the missions of the great religions. The author is an aristocrat and he is a conservative. The former may have only a slight effect on his point of view, the second is fundamental. No matter how assiduously you collect empirical evidence, there is no point to such exercises, unless they are guided by some overarching principle. Unsurprisingly de Tocqueville is in sympathy with Burke, whom he often quotes with approval, although from time to time censoring him for his unfamiliarity with the French social scene. Being a political conservative, is of course not the same as being a reactionary and being undemocratic, fanatically opposed to reform; nor does it necessarily mean to be indifferent to injustice let alone callous, although the term ’compassionate conservatism’ has recently come in disrepute due to the Bush administration. Burke, to take an immediate example, was a Whig and a forceful advocate for the abolition of slavery. What it means is a deep appreciation of tradition. With this comes a distrust of abstract schemes of thought, especially when applied to the affairs of quotidian politics. As noted above, there is no principal opposition to reform in the mind of the conservative, but reform should be piecemeal and address concrete issues. One of the virtues of a conservative observer is the mild cynicism that comes with a long perspective and the concomitant predilection to spot unintended consequences of well-meant

Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clérel de Tocqueville

Papers

Democracy in America

Democracy in America.

The old régime and the French Revolution

De la Démocratie en Amérique

Über die Demokratie in Amerika