ABSTRACT
Almond and Verba stress the fact that even in interest groups the individual citizen has to combine one’s own political demands with the demands of other citizens. By doing so the democratic citizens learn to overstep their own private interest already at a very early stage of the political process (Almond and Verba 1963). The political culture approach in political science has in the 1970s and 1980s been marginalized by the resurgence of a Marxist and structuralist approach to political life and by a narrowly-defined rational choice paradigm. Yet in the 1990s, the interest in civil society and its role in the wellbeing of democratic governance has reemerged (Cohen 1999) and its renewed popularity has been greatly enhanced by the work of Putnam (1993). The work of Putnam, in turn, has created a heated debate on nearly all aspects of his research but particularly on the causal model that is implicit in Making Democracy Work. Is it true that civil society creates strong and democratic governance or may it also be the other way around (Tarrow 1996)? Is it true that voluntary associations create civic virtue or is it the other way around and do we find virtuous citizens in associations because of a process of self-selection (Stolle 2000)? Do all voluntary associations add to democratic governance or only some (Levi 1996)? Do we also find the beneficial effects of civic community in an ethnically or religiously divided society (Cochrane, Chapter 3 of this volume)? How do we define social trust and how does social trust relate to political trust (Hardin 1999; Offe 1999; Warren 1999)?
