Re-thinking putnam in Italy: The role of beliefs about democracy in shaping civic culture and institutional performance

Robert Putnam is a key figure in the democratic decline debate that suggests declining political engagement represents a threat to democracy. His famous studies of the United States draw their intellectual framework from his Italian study Making Democracy Work. This paper returns to the Italian study and argues that Putnam mis-theorized the findings, and that a more cogent theoretical approach would have led him to identify different causal factors driving shifts in political culture. It proposes a re-theorization of his findings that re-interprets the Italian study. When these new conclusions are applied to the broader debate they suggest a different line of explanation for the changing patterns of civic engagement occurring across many Western countries. The paper argues that ideological debates about the nature of democracy affect citizen's political behaviour and lead to changes in democratic practice. In the Italian case, it argues that the variation in regional political cultures reflected different local beliefs about the nature of democracy. These beliefs were played out and re-made through ideological debates between political parties.