‘Making democracy work’ in the eastern half of Europe: Explaining and conceptualising divergent trajectories of post-communist democratisation

Abstract

Europe's post-communist states have experienced widely differing degrees and trajectories of democratisation and (economic as well as political) liberalisation. Outcomes have frequently been explained and/or conceptualised in cultural or ‘civilisational’ terms – i.e. mainly with reference to ‘culturalist’ or ‘essentialist’ conceptions of allegedly prevalent ‘mentalities’, attitudes, belief-systems, value-systems and so-called ‘political cultures’. This paper highlights the major objections to explanations and conceptualisations of this kind and advocates an alternative explanatory and conceptual framework that draws on Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993) while also taking on board various critical responses to his highly influential ideas and to much of the thinking and research he has precipitated. Making Democracy Work (MDW) is most famous for its use and elaboration of conceptions of social capital, trust, norms of generalised reciprocity, networks of civic engagement and civic community, and for arguing that these have been the key determinants of political and economic outcomes in modern times. However, such phenomena have largely been dependent rather than independent variables, more akin to cultural attributes than to structural determinants. They are far less crucial than Putnam's lucid (but largely neglected) conceptualisation of the ways in which the emergence of more horizontally structured political, social and economic power-relations has increased the scope for and viability of liberal democracy and liberal market economies and, conversely, the ways in which vertically structured political, social and economic power-relations have limited the scope/potential for democratisation and liberalisation.