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Making Social Science Work Across Space and Time: A Critical Reflection on Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Sidney Tarrow
Sidney Tarrow*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Abstract

Political scientists are becoming more self-conscious about how they connect quantitative and qualitative data in social science and about the role of systematic country studies in comparative research. As the most striking example of both practices in recent years, Robert Putnam and his collaborators' Making Democracy Work deserves more serious criticism than it has received. While Putnam's original project aimed at a precise goal—studying how a new administrative reform is institutionalized—his ultimate project aimed at nothing less than examining how differently democracy works in different sociopolitical contexts, operationalized cross-sectionally in southern and northern Italy. The sources of these differences he found in the two regions' histories, which led him to employ the quantitative interregional data he had collected for one purpose to support a model of historical development of North and South. This historical reconstruction rests largely on qualitative data; but it also rests on a set of comparative inferences about individual values and community cohesiveness in the two regions that is of questionable historical validity and innocent of structural grounding. This article applauds Putnam's joining qualitative and quantitative data but attacks his reconstruction of Italian history to fit his model of social capital.

Type
Forum
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 90 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 389 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1996

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