User:Nick Gardner /Sandbox: Difference between revisions

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<ref>[http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTSOCIALCAPITAL/Resources/Social-Capital-Initiative-Working-Paper-Series/SCI-WPS-24.pdf Christiaan Grootaert and Thiery van Bastelaer: ''Understanding and Measuring Social Capital; A Synthesis of Findings and Recommendations From the Social Capital Initiative'', World Bank, 2001]</ref>
Government institutions come in many forms, and there is no reason to believe that all of them influence interpersonal trust in the same way or even in the same direction
<ref>[http://www.colbud.hu/honesty-trust/Background.htm Bo Rothstein: ''Social Capital and Quality of Government:The Causal Mechanism", Paper  presented at Collegium Budapest, Project on Honesty and Trust: Theory and Experience in the Light of Post-Socialist Experience Workshop 2: Formal and Informal Cooperation, November 22-23, 2002]</ref>
Low levels of social capital lead to a number of political dysfunctions, which have
been extensively documented. Following Tocqueville's analysis of France, many observers
noted how administrative centralization has led to an excessively rigid and unresponsive
political system, one that can be changed only through antisystemic upsurges such as the
evenements of 1968.7 Low levels of social capital have been linked to an inefficient local
government in southern Italy, as well as to the region's pervasive corruption (Banfield, 1958;
Putnam, 1993). In many Latin American societies, a narrow radius of trust produces a twotier
moral system, with good behavior reserved for family and personal friends, and a
decidedly lower standard of behavior in the public sphere. This serves as a cultural
foundation for corruption, which is often regarded as a legitimate way of looking after one's
family.
It is of course also possible to have too much of a good thing. One person's civic
engagement is another's rent-seeking; much of what constitutes civil society can be described
as interest groups trying to divert public resources to their favored causes, whether sugar-beet
farming, women's health care, or the protection of biodiversity. The public choice literature
has analyzed the baleful consequences of rent-seeking for modern democracies at great
length; Mancur Olson (1982) has argued that Britain's long-term economic decline was due
to the long-term buildup of entrenched interest groups there
   
Ostrom, Elinor, 1990, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective
Action (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press).






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