ABSTRACT
What is the role of intermediary organizations in the establishment of a working democracy? According to Robert Putnam's analysis of the Italian democracy, we should expect them to be important because they produce the amount of "social capital" (i.e., trust, solidarity) necessary to make democracy work. Without the type of trust produced by the interaction among citizens in voluntary associations, the development of a working democracy will be hindered by different collective action problems (Putnam 1993). The well-known problem is that the establishment of strong voluntary associations is in itself a first-rate collective-action problem. If people act within a narrow self-interested rationality, voluntary organizations will not come about because of a lack of social capital (Bianco and Bates 1990; Bendor and Mookherje 1987). If strong voluntary organizations are necessary for establishing a stable and working democracy, the question, then, is how we should understand how such a situation can be established. One way to look at this topic is to analyze the role of associations when successful transformations to democracy have taken place.
