In Making Democracy Work, what exactly is it that Putnam ...



Melissa Hudson

Political Science 311

Making Democracies Work: A comparison of Robert Putnam and Barry Weingast

From a cursory view, Putnam and Weingast appear to be asking the same fundamental question: what are the conditions for democracy’s success? Closer analysis, however, brings their divergent research programs, modes of analysis, and ultimately, conclusions into focus. A great deal of the conceptual confusion in comparing the two works comes from Weingast’s assertion that they are working on the same problem; when he states that “Putnam argues that democratic stability depends on a specific form of social organization and citizen values…”[1], he is assimilating Putnam’s dependant variable to his own. This is, of course, a mistake – made perhaps in his eagerness to create a “new synthesis” of the existing literature. Putnam’s dependent variable is very clearly “organization performance” – in the democratic context, yes, and certainly as an element of democratic performance, but not democratic stability. In fact, if we look at the conclusion of Weingast’s article, he specifically asserts that he has not considered the problem of “how democracies ensure adequate governance”(262). This is exactly what Putnam is exploring in Making Democracy Work. Ultimately, Putnam places the sustenance of democracy on the shoulders of the masses, Weingast on those of the elites; in the final analysis, Putnam’s explanation for “making democracy work” is the more coherent of the two.

In Making Democracy Work, Putnam seeks to account for the divergent performance of similar democratic institutions. Using the “new institutionalism” as a foil and the Italian regional experiment as a comparative case study, Putnam asks, “what are the conditions for creating strong, responsive, effective representative institutions?” (6). His response: “social capital”, or the existence and cultivation of civic community. Putnam’s method of inquiry emerges as a response to Karl Deutsch’s contention that “truth...lies at the confluence of independent streams of evidence” (12). This methodological maxim enriches Putnam’s analysis and enables theory-building beyond the limited realm of the Italian case. As Putnam explains, his intent is theoretical, his method, empirical. More specifically, he uses historical and empirical evidence from the Italian case, in combination with formal analysis, to buttress his model of institutional performance and the implications of “embeddedness”, or social context.

Putnam begins by asserting that the purported link between institutional design and political behavior must be treated as a hypothesis, not an axiom (18). Accordingly, he proposes to assess empirically the results of “changing the rules”. For Putnam, the introduction of regional government in Italy offers an exceptional opportunity for the comparative analysis of institutional dynamics. By controlling for institutional design, Putnam demonstrates that context matters; it may, in fact, be decisive to the evolution of representative government. Putnam seeks to confirm the essential durability of these social factors through historical analysis. Thus, his model entails not only cross-sectional, but longitudinal analysis of institutional context. Taking institutional performance as a dependent variable, Putnam asserts “the power of historical continuities to affect the odds of institutional success” (161). More specifically, Putnam charts the powerful influence of historic legacies of civic involvement in the North and South of Italy. These legacies have had an enduring impact on the social context in which institutional reform takes place. Thus, Putnam invokes historical analysis in an attempt to reinforce his contention that social context is crucially important to institutional performance, and to establish the evolution of the former as a dominant independent variable over the centuries.

Putnam concludes his analysis of civic community and institutional performance by transposing his explanation in game theoretic form. More specifically, he identifies the problem of effective government as a dilemma of collective action. Nevertheless, he notes, traditional game theory underpredicts voluntary cooperation (165). The solution, Putnam contends, lies in the use of “soft” solutions to the analysis of collective action problems, namely community and trust. These “soft” solutions attribute the achievement of stable cooperative equilibrium, or effective governance, to the existence of egalitarian social networks which “allow trust to become transitive and spread” (169). Thus, the possibility for cooperation is enhanced by embedding the “game” within an enduring civic community. Accordingly, iteration and enforcement should enhance opportunities for collective action. Putnam locates these very properties in the concept of “social capital”, “features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” (167).

In “The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law”, Weingast seeks to account for variation in democratic stability. Through the use of a game theoretic model of “coordination in a political context” (with illustrative case studies), he elaborates the prerequisites for the creation and sustenance of democratic societies. Citing the asymmetrical (distributive) incentives of consent to sovereign infractions, Weingast argues that democratic stability – and the attainment of the attendant “social surplus” – is conditioned upon resolving a massive coordination problem. Moreover, any solution to this coordination problem must be self-enforcing; that is, it must be in the interest of the sovereign to abide by it. This leads Weingast to focus on elite incentives and capacities for the development of a “focal point” for cooperation in society: “to the extent that solutions to the coordination dilemma occur, it is elites who construct them…” (246). The effective establishment of such a focal point results in citizen behavior commensurate with the maintenance of democratic stability. This top-down approach, Weingast argues, ultimately results in a self-sustaining equilibrium in which citizens acquire the civic resources necessary to sustain democracy in society. Thus, a consideration of institutions (as focal points), and elite and mass behavior are essential to Weingast’s analysis. Ultimately, he argues, this model has created a “new synthetic treatment” of the problem of democracy and the rule of law (245).

A comparison of Putnam and Weingast’s analyses of “making democracy work” is clearly hampered both by their different conceptualizations of the task at hand, and by their radically different research approaches: in a sense, Putnam and Weingast “talk past each other”. As alluded to in the introduction, Putnam considers the efficacy of institutional performance in democracies, while Weingast seeks a more comprehensive understanding of how states achieve and maintain democracy itself. More important are the distinctive assumptions that underlie both their choice of research method and, ultimately, their analysis and conclusions: Putnam works from a fundamentally organic view of society, while Weingast views society in more mechanistic terms. This, I believe, is key to a valid comparison and evaluation of the contribution of each to the study of democracy.

Putnam’s organic view leads him in two directions: first, toward the methodological pluralism discussed above, and second (and relatedly), to a belief that society (as a collectivity), and history (as a process) fundamentally matter. As he effectively demonstrates, “social context and history profoundly condition the effectiveness of institutions” (182). And while Weingast takes Putnam to task for excluding elites and an incorrectly specified formal model, this is beside the point. For Putnam, democracy and institutional performance are fundamentally mass, not elite-driven. Moreover, Putnam applies formal modeling loosely, having explicitly rejected neo-institutionalism’s deterministic (or probabilistic) claims. Thus, he uses game theoretic terminology more as metaphor than method[2], and his analysis escapes largely unscathed by Weingast’s critique.[3]

Weingast’s mechanistic view of society leads him down a completely different path. His use of formal modeling in an attempt to provide the “microfoundations for [democracy and] the rule of law” (262), is an example of methodological individualism taken to the extreme. Although he claims to have provided an integrated theory of institutions, and elite and mass behavior, his causal arrows run in only one direction: elites create institutions (focal points), which “induce” mass behavior. This seems a very undemocratic theory of democracy.[4] In neglecting the role of history, culture, and society, Weingast unnecessarily precludes the potential of “soft” solutions to the problem of coordination and enforcement. Although he explicitly speaks to iteration, even granting its necessity for the achievement of Pareto-optimal outcomes, he refuses to take the next step and recognize that iteration means that “civic-ness” has a causal role in democratic stability. This lack is all the more surprising given his extensive references to Putnam’s work (moreover, we have to wonder how he can reject Putnam’s fundamental analysis and call his own work “a reinterpretation consistent with his account”) (256).

Ultimately, Weingast’s causal model is that elite-led coordination leads both to social consensus and stable democracy, and that the latter two are consequences of the elite-induced equilibrium (253). Putnam, of course, offers an entirely different causal mechanism. If pressed to work within the parameters of Weingast’s mode of analysis, however, he might suggest that mass consensus leads both to social cooperation and democratic stability, each the consequence of mass-induced equilibrium. Of course, there is a danger in extrapolating from Putnam’s earlier work, but clearly, the latter specification – even on Weingast’s own terms - is as, or more, coherent than the former.

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[1] Weingast, 255, emphasis added.

[2] Although the contribution of game theory to political science are extremely valuable, they are stylized models whose predictive capacities are seriously open to question.

[3] As a critique of Putnam (that doesn’t really fit into the theme of this piece), I would concentrate on the validity of some of his indicators (for example, the use of newspaper readership in the index of civic engagement). More puzzling is his reliance on measures of association; the only time he uses regression modeling is in linking aggregate data from the early 20th century to present day measures of economic performance and civic engagement; this would seem to be its least reliable use. Nevertheless, his correlations are intriguing and certainly meet the “interocular trauma test” (13).

[4] That it is normatively unappealing doesn’t of course mean that it’s not accurate, although I argue that it is not.

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