Social capital and democracy in Russia

Abstract

The two basic objectives of this study are to determine whether or not Russia has stocks of social capital upon which to draw as it seeks to democratize, and to examine the nature of the relationship between social capital and democracy in Russia. I present both qualitative and quantitative evidence that social capital exists in many parts of Russia. After a quantitative analysis of social capital and democratization, which identifies a strong positive relationship, I suggest that if the center is able to sustain democracy, Russia should be able to consolidate democratic rule.

Investigating the Roots of Civic Morality: Trust, Social Capital, and Institutional Performance

“…The sample consists of 47210 respondents nested within 392 regions. 8 This level of aggregation is suitable for the analysis in this paper, since arguments referring to patterns of attitudes and behavior prevalent within ''communities'' are typically tested at the levels of regions or states (Marsh, 2000;Putnam, 1993Putnam, , 2000. The variables used at the individual and regional levels are generated from the World Values Study, while the country-level variables come from the World Development Indicators 2001 report, 9 Polity IV Project Political Regime Characteristics andTransitions, 1800-2002, 10 The World Values Survey contains a battery of questions referring to the acceptability of certain types of public good related behavior, such as claiming government benefits to which people are not entitled, avoiding a fare on public transport and cheating on taxes, as well as questions on the acceptability of various ''private conscience'' issues, such as homosexuality, divorce, prostitution, suicide and euthanasia.…”

“…Regional level analysis has been relatively popular in research related to social capital and institutional performance, yet this type of analysis usually concentrates exclusively on aggregate-level dependencies (c.f. Marsh, 2000;Putnam, 1993Putnam, , 1995bPutnam, , 2000. Here regions are treated not as units of analysis but as the context within which individuals operate.…”

Social Capital at Work: A Case of Adapting a Norwegian Cooperation Model in Russia

“…According to Vedantam's 3 interview with political scientist Robert Putnam, the social capital guru, top-down models of governance and resource allocation run counter to everything known about how social capital grows (Amsterdam, 2007). Note that in fairness, there are also a few studies offering rather optimistic views of social capital in Russian regions (Marsh, 2000;Petro, 2001), political networks (Hayoz & Sergeyev, 2003) and networks of entrepreneurs (Batjargal, 2003). In any case, the extant studies are helpful in describing Russia in terms of bridging-bonding and formal-informal typologies of social capital.…”

Patterns of Participation in Post-Soviet Politics

“…To an extent this is unsurprising; as noted earlier, 'social capital' as a concept can be transferred over to the post-Soviet context only with difficulty, and there is some debate as to what the best measure is for modelling it (Marsh, 2000).…”