Social capital, institutional structures, and democratic performance: a comparative study of german local governments

Abstract

Abstract.The argument presented is that political culture and institutional structures independently shape government performance. This is consistent with Putnam et al.'s (1983) initial argument that ‘endogenous’ and ‘exogenous’ factors are independently at work in shaping institutional performance. It is hypothesized that: (I) social capital within a community positively contributes to government performance, and (2) governmental institutional forms that minimize the number of veto players in the decision making process generate performance superior to those where the number of veto players is large. An analysis of cross–sectional data (mainly drawn from surveys of citizens and elites) on 30 small– to medium–size municipalities in East and West Germany from the year 1995 is undertaken to evaluate these hypotheses. The results from this analysis lead to the following conclusions. Higher social capital within the elite political culture of a community leads to greater citizen satisfaction with local government performance. Local government structures where power is centralized (and thus the number of veto players minimized) generate greater citizen satisfaction with government performance than do those where the distribution of power is more diffuse.