Social capital and local governance: Exploring the institutional design variable

This article argues that Robert Putnam’s social capital thesis is too society-centred and undervalues state agency and associated political factors. It explores the role of institutional design in explaining how governments can shape the development of social capital and its potential influence upon democratic performance. New Labour’s programme of ‘democratic renewal’ within British local government provides an excellent opportunity to assess the relevance of institutional design to arguments about social capital and democracy. We propose that prospects for the creation and mobilisation of social capital may depend as much upon the process as the content of institutional design. It is hard to overstate the impact upon political science of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work (1993), described by discipline-watchers Goodin and Klingemann as an emerging ‘contemporary classic ’ (1996, pp 16-17). Put simply, Putnam’s thesis is that dense networks of civic engagement produce a capacity for trust, reciprocity and co-operation (‘social capital’), which in tur