Making Democracy Work

Civic Traditions in Modern Italy

Robert D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, Raffaella Y. Nanetti

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9781400820740
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do some democratic governments succeed and others fail? In a book that has received attention from policymakers and civic activists in America and around the world, Robert Putnam and his collaborators offer empirical evidence for the importance of "civic community" in developing successful institutions. Their focus is on a unique experiment begun in 1970 when Italy created new governments for each of its regions. After spending two decades analyzing the efficacy of these governments in such fields as agriculture, housing, and health services, they reveal patterns of associationism, trust, and cooperation that facilitate good governance and economic prosperity.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Studying Institutional Performance

WHY DO some democratic governments succeed and others fail? This question, though ancient, is timely. As our tumultuous century draws to a close, the great ideological debates between liberal democrats and their adversaries are waning. Ironically, the philosophical ascendancy of liberal democracy is accompanied by growing discontent with its practical operations. From Moscow to East St. Louis, from Mexico City to Cairo, despair about public institutions deepens. As American democratic institutions begin their third century, a sense is abroad in the land that our national experiment in self-government is faltering. Half a world away, the former communist nations of Eurasia find themselves having to build democratic systems of governance from scratch. Women and men everywhere seek solutions to their shared problems—cleaner air, more secure jobs, safer cities. Few believe that we can dispense with government, yet fewer still are confident that we know what makes governments work well.

This book aims to contribute to our understanding of the performance of democratic institutions. How do formal institutions influence the practice of politics and government? If we reform institutions, will practice follow? Does the performance of an institution depend on its social, economic, and cultural surround? If we transplant democratic institutions, will they grow in the new setting as they did in the old? Or does the quality of a democracy depend on the quality of its citizens, so that every people gets the government they deserve? Our intent is theoretical. Our method is empirical, drawing lessons from a unique experiment in institutional reform conducted in the regions of Italy over the last two decades. Our explorations will draw us deep into the character of civic life, into the austere logic of collective action, and into medieval history, but the journey begins in the diversity of today’s Italy.

A VOYAGE OF INQUIRY

On the autostrada that soars along the Apennine spine of Italy, a hurried traveler can cover the 870 kilometers from Seveso in the north to Pietrapertosa in the south in one long day, looping first through the busy industrial suburbs of Milan, crossing rapidly the fertile Po Valley, plunging past the proud Renaissance capitals of Bologna and Florence, circling the grimy, joyless outskirts of Rome and then Naples, and climbing at last into the desolate mountains of Basilicata, isolated in the instep of the Italian boot.¹ To the thoughtful observer, however, this swift passage is less impressive for the distance spanned than for the historical contrasts between the point of departure and the destination.

In 1976 Seveso, a modest, modern town in the mixed industrial-and-farming belt ten miles north of Milan, became world-famous as the site of a major ecological disaster, when a local chemical plant exploded, spewing poisonous dioxin across its homes and workshops and fields and inhabitants. For many months thereafter, motorists on the superhighway that passes Seveso sped by with their windows rolled tightly shut, gawking at the boarded-up houses and the dreadful, white-hooded, goggle-masked figures laboring to decontaminate the town and its lands. Throughout the industrialized world, Seveso came to symbolize the growing risks of ecological disaster. For dazed local officials, the catastrophe at Seveso embodied the looming public policy challenges of the twenty-first century.²

From the perspective of public governance, to travel from Seveso to Pietrapertosa in the 1970s was to return centuries into the past. Many Pietrapertosesi lived still in one- and two-room stone hovels, clinging to the mountain face just below the rocky summit to which their Lucanian ancestors repaired many generations ago. Nearby, farmers still threshed grain by hand, aided only by the wind blowing through the tines of their rakes, as Mediterranean peasants had done for millennia. Many local men had sought temporary jobs in northern Europe, and the success of a few was marked by the German license plates on several automobiles parked just below the village. For less fortunate residents, however, transportation was provided by the donkeys that shared their rocky shelters, alongside a few scrawny chickens and cats. Lower on the hill, some returned emigrants had built stucco houses, complete with indoor plumbing, but for much of the village, the absence of running water and other public amenities remained the most pressing problem, as it had been throughout much of Europe three or four centuries earlier.

Like their compatriots in Seveso, the people of Pietrapertosa confronted grave problems of what economists call “public goods” and “public bads.” The economic and social and administrative resources of the two towns differed dramatically, as did the details of their problems, but people in both needed help from government. In the early 1970s the primary responsibility for addressing these diverse problems of public health and safety, along with much else of concern to ordinary Italians, was suddenly transferred from the national administration to a newly created set of elected regional governments. For solutions to their shared concerns, the citizens of Seveso and Pietrapertosa were now directed to nearby Milan and Potenza rather than distant Rome. Studying how well those new institutions responded to their constituents and why will lead us to confront basic issues about civic life and collaboration for the common good.

The borders of the new governments largely corresponded to the territories of historic regions of the peninsula, including such celebrated principalities as Tuscany and Lombardy. Since the unification of Italy in 1870, however, its administrative structure had been highly centralized, modeled on Napoleonic France. For as long as anyone could remember, local officials had been closely controlled by prefects reporting directly to Rome. No level of government corresponding to the regions had ever existed. Thus the fact that the public problems of Seveso and Pietrapertosa and thousands of other Italian communities, large and small, would be addressed by the untried regional governments was, for their citizens, an experiment of considerable practical importance.

Beginning in 1970, we have closely followed the evolution of a number of these nascent regional institutions, representing the range of economic, social, cultural, and political environments along the Italian peninsula. Our repeated visits to the various regional capitals soon revealed dramatic differences in institutional performance.

Even finding officials of the Puglia regional government in the capital city of Bari proved a challenge for us, as it is for their constituents. Like visiting researchers, ordinary Pugliesi must first locate the nondescript regional headquarters beyond the railroad yards. In the dingy anteroom loll several indolent functionaries, though they are likely to be present only an hour or two each day and to be unresponsive even then. The persistent visitor might discover that in the offices beyond stand only ghostly rows of empty desks. One mayor, frustrated at his inability to get action from the region’s bureaucrats, exploded to us, “They don’t answer the mail, they don’t answer the telephone, and when I go to Bari to finish paperwork, I have to take along my own typewriter and typist!” A rampant spoils system undermines administrative efficiency: as a clerk once responded to his nominal superior in our presence, “You can’t give me orders! I am ‘well-protected.’” Meanwhile, the region’s leaders engage in Byzantine factional feuds over patronage and posts, and offer rhetorical promises of regional renewal that seem never to reach reality. If Puglia is to become “a new California,” as local boosters sometimes say, it will be despite the performance of its new regional government, not because of it. The citizens of Puglia do not disguise their contempt for their regional government; indeed, they do not often think of it as “theirs.”

The contrast with the efficiency of the government of Emilia-Romagna in Bologna is stark. Visiting the glass-walled regional headquarters is like entering a modern, high-tech firm. A brisk, courteous receptionist directs visitors to the appropriate office, where, likely as not, the relevant official will call up a computerized data base on regional problems and policies. Bologna’s central piazza is famous for its nightly debates among constantly shifting groups of citizens and political activists, and those impassioned discussions about issues of the day are echoed in the chambers of the regional council. A legislative pioneer in many fields, the Emilian government has progressed from words to deeds, its effectiveness measured by dozens of day care centers and industrial parks, repertory theaters and vocational training sites scattered throughout the region. The citizen-debaters in the Bologna piazza are not uncritical of their regional government, but they are vastly more content than their counterparts in Puglia. Why has the new institution succeeded in Emilia-Romagna and not in Puglia?

The central question posed in our voyage of inquiry is this: What are the conditions for creating strong, responsive, effective representative institutions? The Italian regional experiment offers an unparalleled opportunity for addressing this question. It presents a rare opportunity to study systematically the birth and development of a new institution.

First, fifteen new regional governments were established simultaneously in 1970, endowed with essentially identical constitutional structures and mandates. In 1976-77, after an intense political struggle described in Chapter 2, all regions were granted authority over a wide range of public issues. In partial contrast with these fifteen “ordinary” regions, another five “special” regions had been created some years earlier, with somewhat greater, constitutionally guaranteed powers. These five regions were in border areas that had been threatened by separatist sentiment at the end of World War II. In some respects, the somewhat greater longevity and broader powers of the special regional governments make them distinctive. For most purposes, however, they may be safely considered alongside the fifteen ordinary regions. Generally speaking, in this book we draw evidence from all twenty regions.

By the beginning of the 1990s, the new governments, barely two decades old, were spending nearly a tenth of Italy’s gross domestic product. All regional governments had gained responsibility for such fields as urban affairs, agriculture, housing, hospitals and health services, public works, vocational education, and economic development. Despite continuing complaints from regionalists about constraints imposed by the central authorities, all the new institutions had acquired enough authority to test their mettle. On paper, these twenty institutions are virtually identical and potentially powerful.

Second, however, the social, economic, political, and cultural contexts into which the new institutions were implanted differed dramatically. Socially and economically, some regions, such as Pietrapertosa’s Basilicata, ranked with countries of the Third World, whereas others, such as Seveso’s Lombardia, were already becoming postindustrial. Cutting across this developmental dimension were differences of political tradition. Neighboring Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, for example, had similar economic profiles in 1970, but Veneto was ardently Catholic, whereas Emilia-Romagna, the buckle of Central Italy’s “Red Belt,” had been controlled by Communists since 1945. Some regions had inherited patron-client politics more or less intact from the feudal past. Others had been transformed by massive waves of migration and social change that swept across Italy during il boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Italian regional experiment was tailor-made for a comparative study of the dynamics and ecology of institutional development. Just as a botanist might study plant development by measuring the growth of genetically identical seeds sown in different plots, so a student of government performance might examine the fate of these new organizations, formally identical, in their diverse social and economic and cultural and political settings. Would the new organizations actually develop identically in soils as different as those around Seveso and Pietrapertosa? If not, what elements could account for the differences? The answers to these questions are of importance well beyond the borders of Italy, as scholars and policymakers and ordinary citizens in countries around the world—industrial, postindustrial, and preindustrial—seek to discover how representative institutions can work effectively.

CHARTING THE VOYAGE

Institutions have been an enduring concern of political science since ancient times, but recently theorists have attacked institutional questions with renewed vigor and creativity in the name of “the new institutionalism.” The tools of game theory and rational choice modeling have been put to use, casting institutions as “games in extensive form,” in which actors’ behavior is structured by the rules of the game.³ Organization theorists have emphasized institutional roles and routines, symbols,...