ABSTRACT
This chapter stresses that the roles of legal arrangements and type of constitutional regime are crucial in particular for transformation of social capital into political capital and vertical trust, or 'political confidence'. Trust and confidence in actors and institutions are reciprocal phenomena. In both Wroclaw and L'viv local authorities are considered much more trustworthy than the national political actors. Civic life in Ukraine at large, as well as in L'viv specifically, reveals certain differences to the situation in Poland and Wroclaw. Nationalism and being interpreted as not having a 'separatist attitude' to Ukrainian statehood had a similar function to encouraging people to be organised in the early 1990s. Available data on post-Communist organisational life also suggest that the general decline in trust has occurred parallel to increasing variation in types of formal and organised forms of social cooperation. A factor that does matter, though, is the distinction between active and passive membership, and then only within specific organisational spheres.
