Social Capital and Democratisation

Roots of Trust in Post-Communist Poland and Ukraine

Martin Åberg, Mikael Sandberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754619369
• eBook ISBN: 9781351899710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Contributing an impressive historical basis for path dependency analysis and the role of social capital in newly established democracies, this book offers a fascinating and ground-breaking analysis of the role of social capital in the democratic context of Eastern Europe. Focusing on Poland and Ukraine, this book fills the literature gaps for integrated empirical and theoretical research with respect to post-Communist democratization, social capital vs. democratization theory, and the case study area of Central and Eastern Europe. Suitable for students from graduate level upwards in Central and Eastern European studies, political theory and history.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1
Social Capital and Post-Communist Democratisation: A Dynamic Case Study Approach

Municipal freedom is not the fruit of human efforts; it is rarely created by others, but is, as it were, secretly self-produced in the midst of a semi-barbarous state of society. The constant action of the laws and the national habits, peculiar circumstances, and, above all, time, may consolidate it; but there is certainly no nation on the continent of Europe that has experienced its advantages. Yet municipal institutions constitute the strength of free nations (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, Ch. V, 1981 [1835]).

Introduction

Originally a statement on the democratic revolution in the United States as compared to aristocratic France, the analysis of Tocqueville is still relevant to current debates on democracy. From the viewpoint of post-Communist democratisation the problem of civic engagement and grassroots involvement become of particular interest, since this transition largely has been about breaking free from old and highly centralised, Soviet-type power structures. ‘Electoral democracy’ alone, as Diamond (1992; see also Kubicek, 2001) has called the introduction from above of electoral practices in previously undemocratic countries, may not necessarily result in improved regime performance of the kind we know from ‘first wave’ democracies (Huntington, 1991; Eckstein, 1994; Rose and Shin, 2001).

Tocqueville’s reflections on the relation between civic engagement and government provide a clue to the problem. They relate to the themes we find in contemporary discussions on the role of ‘social capital’ in democratisation, as well as recent dynamic models of collective action. As Putnam (1993, 2000) demonstrates in his studies of Italy and the United States, one important feature of democracy as regime is its interactive quality. Institutional choice, constitutions and legislation are important factors as such. So, he argues, are historical background conditions, including social capital, i.e. ‘features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated action’ (Putnam, 1993, p. 167). However, the precise relation between these – widely defined – grassroots ‘civic traditions’, social trust and confidence in political institutions and actors (what we will also call ‘political capital’) still remain unsettled from a social science point of view.

To begin with, democratisation is ultimately, at systemic level, a matter of degree of ‘responsiveness’ to all citizens, to follow Dahl’s (1971, p. 2) definition. This definition of democracy may, of course, strike the reader as being too wide, abstract or systemic, since we do not consider all possible procedural aspects of democracy in this book. Yet, as political history since ancient democracy has demonstrated, procedures as such do not necessarily have to do with the actual dynamic of democracy, whereas social – and not least political – capital are, indeed, crucial factors, at least at certain stages of democratisation. That is, citizens’ actions always draw on anticipation of response from authority and government, which if ‘appropriate’ (March and Olsen, 1989) leads to higher levels of vertical trust and improved performance of the political system. Looked at the other way around, a high level of trust between citizens and politicians, if and when established, facilitates further responsive action from authority. Reciprocity is the key. Consequently the trustworthiness of new institutional arrangements (‘rules of the game’ in North’s (1990) sense) is contingent on a dynamic process of mutual and gradual adjustment in the interactions between polity and citizens.

Democracy, therefore, is basically about learning, and learning well, but under conditions that vary from case to case and from country to country. It is path dependent.¹ People learn democracy to the extent that formal institutions allow for collective interaction and to the degree to which the political system actively responds to publicly-expressed preferences, but all in a context of previous patterns of institutions, social capital, forms of grassroots cooperation and modes of interaction with authority. Indeed, another way to put it – although this may strike many political scientists and historians as odd – is that the principle for how regimes change and perform actually reveals certain interesting similarities to that of evolution in biology, through ‘coevolution’ as in the above case of responsiveness – between the political actions of citizens and elite, and often in adaptive aggregates such as organisations and authorities.

These assumptions, including our specific approach to institutional dynamics, social capital and democratisation, will be outlined in greater detail later in this chapter. Suffice it to say here that in both coevolution and adaptation the ‘selection environment’, or institutional parameters (formal as well as informal) and any number of other background factors for social practice, norms and beliefs are of crucial importance to the analysis. In some cases ‘selection’ and ‘reproduction’ of practices, norms, and beliefs lead to coevolution with constitutional arrangements, whereby the former gradually stabilise into new regime ‘traits’ of behaviour (such as the norm and practice of reciprocity between politicians and citizens). When institutional parameters change, as for instance through constitutional reform, it may, however, also be the case that yet other types of actions and norms simply fail to adapt to these changing conditions. They are, therefore, gradually sorted out and eventually fail to survive (for example, the idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as enforced by a uniform party state). Old paths fade and wither away, new ones branch out, but always in unique configurations.

Historically the evolution of democracy in the Western world has undoubtedly been connected with social capital and civic development, as is illustrated by the first wave democracies c.1820–1920. As recent research on the same Western-type democracies demonstrates, however, conventional indicators are not strongly correlated to the performance of these polities today. For example, it has been shown that governmental performance rather than social capital is the decisive factor in the level of confidence in formal institutions demonstrated by citizens (Cusack, 1997; Newton and Norris, 2000). Understood from a post-Communist perspective, we should also note that social capital sometimes includes values and practices that actually sustain distrust, rather than create trust in political institutions and authority. Precisely these features, however, may serve to illustrate one of our main points, considering that these ‘third wave’ democracies are far from stable or firmly rooted. That is, if we search for the critical role of social capital, we presumably find it in connection with the initial and transitory phases of democratisation – during the stages in which democratic ideas, beliefs, norms and practices have not yet diffused throughout society as a whole.

Analysing the first steps of democratisation as a complex social process is therefore particularly appropriate in the case of post-Communist countries, since quite similar Soviet-type regimes have led to quite different transitions. Constitutions and social capital are, generally speaking, the result of historical evolution blended with selective imitation from abroad. Considering new institutions we find remarkable variation between countries such as Poland and Ukraine. For example, until Poland regained independence in 1918 it had, up to then, been divided between the Prussian, Austrian and Russian empires, and thus between distinct constitutional regimes, for more than 140 years. From this followed first, the chaotic period of the Second Polish Republic in the interwar period, then the Communist period and, after 1989, a still further set of institutional selection parameters. A similar picture can, indeed, be drawn in the case of Ukraine. The current transition from Soviet-type systems, however, involves not only a number of national singularities. As suggested by recent research, the pattern also includes regional differentiation, particularly so in Ukraine (Birch, 1995, 1998, 2000; Wecławowicz, 1996; Gorzelak, 1996; Pirie, 1996; Khmelko and Wilson, 1998; Zarycki and Nowak, 2000; Zarycki, 2000). Interestingly, some Polish and Ukrainian localities (or local selection environments) are nothing short of being critical, or ‘deviant’ cases, to echo Lijphart (1971). On the one hand, they display both relatively impressive track records of democratisation and what simultaneously seem like high levels of both social and political capital. On the other hand, they are, at the same time, extreme in lacking the historical continuity of civic life held to be critical by Putnam (1993).

This Study

In the following chapters we will focus on three related problems. Firstly, the question of historical background conditions more generally, at regional level. To what extent and in which ways are ‘selection’ of social action and reproduction of social capital a path-dependent systemic process, i.e. reflect practice and behaviour patterned by previous constitutional regimes but also other types of background factors, such as socioeconomic differentiation, ethnicity and religion? In our analysis we will argue a complex and ambiguous role of ‘roots’ and ‘continuity’ extending beyond the local and regional levels suggested by Putnam. To begin with we detect patterns of social mobilisation and lack of political confidence that are, in some respects, similar to – although far from identical with – the ‘Mafia culture’ found by Putnam in southern Italy. We also argue that the roots of both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ social capital in Central and Eastern Europe in some instances run far deeper than the post-war period and Communism.

For this purpose we begin with studies of two localities – the cities of Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in Polish Lower Silesia and L’viv (Lwów, Lemberg, L’vov) in Ukrainian (eastern) Galicia.² These two cases, however, must also be considered in a wider perspective. As indicated, forms of social cooperation and trust can relate differently to different factors, only some of which are specific to the local, regional or even national level. Therefore we also attempt to analyse the relation between, on the one hand, locally specific path dependencies of social and political capital and, on the other hand, certain other – and in a sense more fundamental – cleavages between Poland and Ukraine in terms of political culture. In brief, we open up a discussion about the significance of Europe being divided along an ‘East—West borderline’ in terms of political culture, as suggested by, among others, Schöpflin (1989, 1993) and Huntington (1993b, 1996). Following their argument, this East– West cleavage originated in the Middle Ages, a borderline that – we might add – had cut right through the lands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before its partition in the late eighteenth century (see Map 1.1). Despite all subsequent regime changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we argue that this factor still tends to provoke effects on democratisation in Polish and Ukrainian society, in particular with respect to citizen—authority relations and political capital.

Secondly, what is the role of social capital in responsiveness today, in post-Communist regimes, compared to institutional factors? How do current selection parameters influence adaptation, modification and reproduction of democratic ideas, norms and practices? What is the extent of dynamic ‘coevolution’ between citizens and regimes in this process? In this second step we study contemporary social capital formation by focusing on emerging post-Communist systems, confidence in actors and the constitutional regime. Our two cases are scrutinised closely and analysed against a background of emerging patterns of social and political capital. We will argue that social capital does indeed play an important role in determining the level of vertical trust and dynamics in political systems still in the process of ‘habituating’ to new institutions (cf. Rustow, 1999 [1970]). This is particularly the case in countries like Ukraine, considering the apparent lack of dynamic domestic models of political regime and the immense social and political stress brought about by transition. On the basis of these findings, we turn our attention to emerging party systems and the evolution of constitutional regime in Poland and Ukraine. The case of post-Communist democratisation retains both historically-derived ‘national habits’ as well as ‘peculiar circumstances’, to echo Tocqueville, and these make the paths towards democracy distinct not only if we compare our two countries with each other, but also if we compare them with established democracies in Western Europe and the US.

Thirdly, and finally, we will – on the basis of local and national data derived from the above analyses – place Poland and Ukraine in a broader perspective, to make possible, in turn, a general and theoretical analysis of post-Communist democratisation. Using institutional and evolutionary theory, we outline what we find to be the specific dynamics of post-Communist democratisation. If we compare ‘waves’ of democratisation, social capital and democratic regime traits have, historically speaking, diffused very differently and at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Path Dependencies in Perspective
• Part Three: Post-Communist Patterns
• Part Four: Social Capital and Democracy: Lessons and Propositions
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index