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and a more specific one. The general problem is “what are the conditions for creating strong, responsive, effective political institutions?” The specific problem, a subclass of the general one, is to explain the divergence in the performance of the Italian regional governments that were established in 1970.567 To answer this specific question, the study develops through several distinct phases. First, Putnam attempts to explain the variation in performance of the newly established regional governments. He finds that differences in the development of civic community among the regional governments account for the differences in their performance. Then he asks, “where do [these] differences in civic community originate?”

The research strategy chosen to meet these research objectives is multi-layered. First, he notes, the 1970 reform that established regional governments for the first time provides a before-after type of quasi-experiment. Existing socioeconomic and cultural variables that differed among the regions remained fairly constant in the before and after periods, while the structure of political institutions was abruptly altered. This provides an opportunity for a systematic comparative analysis and an explanation for the differences in the impact of the reform on the performance of its region.

Putnam chose six of the twenty regions for this analysis. They were “selected to represent the vast diversities” in Italy and provided an opportunity to study what accounted for differences in performance of the regional governments over time. Although not a “representative” sample, the case selection suited Putnam’s research agenda and the types of analytical conclusions he wished to draw. In a later part of the study that drew on more easily obtainable material, Putnam gathered data on all twenty regions, thus reducing a case selection problem.

In a second part of the study, Putnam addressed the question of how to explain the diversity in “performance” of the regions (which was based on an array of measures). Two major independent variables were considered: socioeconomic modernity and development of civic community (measured by an index based on four indicators). A number of other possible explanatory variables were also briefly considered, perhaps insufficiently to convincingly refute them.

In a later stage of the study, Putnam considers the historical source of civic community and offers some support for hypotheses that early medieval patterns account for the differences in performances of the northern and southern regions of Italy. After finding a difference between medieval regions that were rich in associations and other horizontal ties and other regions that were based on hierarchical ties (centralization, paternalism, and lack of trust), he engages in a form of process-tracing to support the inference of a causal link between the horizontal ties and the phenomenon of civic community. Covering a huge span of history in a cursory fashion, he tracks the persistence of traces of civic community in northern Italy from the late Middle Ages until the nineteenth century, and its absence in southern Italy. He supplements this with an effort, drawing on rational choice and game theory, to posit that it is rational for people to cooperate in networks to overcome collective problems in the political culture of the trustful, associational, and horizontally organized North and to be less inclined to do so in the distrustful, nonassociational, and hierarchically organized South. Such traits of a community develop slowly and cannot be simply changed overnight. Therefore, they constitute what Putnam refers to as “social capital,” which allows people to cooperate in ways that make government and economy stronger.568

AREND LIJPHART, THE POLITICS OF ACCOMMODATION: PLURALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN THE NETHERLANDS. BERKELEY: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1968.

This well-known study exemplifies the usefulness of a deviant case analysis for theory refinement.569 Lijphart’s research objective is to ascertain why stable democracy was