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Kyrgyzstan's recent violent revolution and presidential turnover foreground the subtle ways natural resources and poverty spark political disturbance. Of the socioeconomic problems and corruption for which President Bakiev was faulted, water resource mismanagement and the electricity crisis were central; they are also at the core of regional disputes and mirrored in neighboring Tajikistan's and Afghanistan's socioeconomic instability. Kyrgyzstan's April 2010 events help us explain under what conditions environmental issues lead to collective violence. By analyzing environmental security concerns, this study provides insight about future regional conflict potential and whether the weakness of the Kyrgyz state or geographical and resource limitations best explain these revolutionary events. This paper evaluates environmentally-related collective violence by identifying public and elite opinion and mobilization trends, reporting the findings of research conducted in Kyrgyzstan one year prior to (Jan-July 2009) and three months after (June-July 2010) the revolution. The following propositions in the collective action and social capital literatures are tested: the consistency and specificity in attributing blame for environmental problems, derived from blame attribution theory (Wilson 1961; Lichbach 1995; Javeline 2003); the visibility, complexity and salience of environmental problems and the grievance actor hypothesis; and the role of community organizers and entrepreneurs (Olson 1965). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the impact of social capital on economic performance in the context of post-communist transition. Social capital is a concept that has been introduced to examine the potential benefits of norms, networks, and trust as the “missing link” that, together with physical and human capital, could explain the inequality in economic growth. The concept was widely adopted by transition scholars who wished to understand the relationship between markets and states and to explain why the accepted set of economic and political reforms achieved extremely diverse results across Eastern Europe. While the concept has been gaining wide popularity in transition and development scholarship, empirical studies of social capital have been missing. Also, the scholarship has not examined the relationship between social capital and performance despite suggestions of a symbiotic relationship. This study attempts to fill this void through an investigation of the impact of social capital on the security of property rights and capital reinvestment in transition economies. Original evidence collected through surveys of managers and owners of SMEs in Serbia and Montenegro is employed in a rare quantitative analysis of the role of social capital in the provision of informal means of contract enforcement. This alternative strategy for enhancing the security of one’s property rights is important in environments where formal property rights are not enforced because institutions lack legitimacy or where institutions are inefficient in implementing formal rules and regulations. This paper examines the impact of such strategies on the overall prospects for economic growth. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In diverse global contexts, disenchantment with the effectiveness and legitimacy of national democratic institutions has driven an expansion of governance reforms increasing local civic participation as a solution to concerns of declining democratic legitimacy. This trend has been particularly notable in the U.K., with the creation of the Department of Communities and Local Government and the institutionalization of numerous participatory policy mandates at the local level, including the recent 'Duty to Involve'. Using data from the 2007 U.K. Citizenship Survey, this paper investigates the presumption that increased opportunities for local political participation increase expressions of support for national democratic rule. This analysis suggests that even when controlling for key measures of identity, socio-economic status and social capital, greater participation in local political institutions is associated with stronger expressions of support for national democratic institutions. These findings offer tentative support for the hypothesis that devolving authority to local participatory institutions can be helpful for bolstering the continued legitimacy of challenged democratic nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there has been much speculation about the influence of religious factors in shaping public attitudes on foreign policy, there are still few systematic empirical analyses testing that influence. In this paper, we use the 2008 American National Election Study (ANES) to investigate support for two central dimensions of the foreign policy attitudes of the American public: militant internationalism and cooperative internationalism (Wittkopf 1990). We find rather different religious constituencies for each perspective, and demonstrate the influence of both ethnoreligious and theological factors in shaping public attitudes. We also consider the potential impact of other value orientations that are often related to religion, including moral traditionalism, religious particularism, ethnocentrism, authoritarianism and social capital. After introducing controls for demography, ideology, partisanship, and other dispositions, we find that religious variables and related value orientations wield major direct and indirect influences on militant and cooperative internationalist attitudes, although not always in the directions expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper distinguishes between social capital that supports violence and social capital that supports peacebuilding with a focus on the long-term exclusivity of networks that support violence and the dynamic inclusivity of networks that support peacebuilding. The analysis identifies the characteristics of exclusive and inclusive networks. Exclusive and inclusive networks are examined specifically in terms of how their social capital serves to satisfy basic human needs. Constructive conflict leads to increased satisfaction of basic human needs, whereas unconstructive conflict leads to continued frustration of basic human needs. Finally, the conclusions explore ways we might more broadly satisfy human needs by building more social capital fueling nonviolent peacebuilding and redirecting that social capital currently directed towards violent conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ISO standards are a genre of communication; they are embodied within customary kinds of documents that are easily recognized as of a type. The social processes of voluntary consensus standard setting form a genre system, " a standard sequence of interrelated communicative actions," which, in combination with the actors regularly involved, form a particular social field. Much of the game-theoretic literature about standard setting treats that field as one in which economic capital is the determining element. But even a cursory attention to the history of industrial standard setting, and the migration of the process into other domains (e.g., through the Global Compact) illustrates that both social capital (the pull of prestigious individuals and institutions) and, especially, cultural capital (marked by the deference given to the most well recognized scientists and engineers) play an extremely important role. A kind of political space is created by the fact that none of these forms is determinative, which creates the opportunity for standard setters (more often engineers than leaders of business or government) to provide the kind of intellectual leadership in the formation of new private regulatory regimes that has proven essential in the formation of intergovernmental regimes. We expect that examination of standards that unexpectedly survive "unexpectedly" only in terms of simple games defined by wealth or market power) will tell us a great deal about the actual potential of voluntary consensus standard setting as regulatory mechanism. This paper clears the ground for such analysis by describing the structure of ISO and the mechanisms by which it creates standards that are widely accepted. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how conceptions of poverty and local community have been refashioned within the framework of neoliberalism in order to analyze emergent formations of hegemony, consent, and contestation within the sphere of global governance. It focuses on how World Bank initiatives promoting popular participation and the development of social capital not only redeploy poverty and community as terms for remediation and management, but establish both as central to neoliberal modes of governance more broadly. In the new millennium, the rhetoric of poverty alleviation and the valorization of community participation within the international context are central to the terms of consent. Whereas historically neoliberalism in principal jettisoned the social and political in favor of some idealized economism, influential neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank have increasingly sought to reintegrate ostensibly non-economic factors into their policy agenda. For instance, the Bank explains its interest in social capital by noting that A growing body of evidence indicates the size and density of social networks and institutions, and the nature of interpersonal connections, significantly affect the efficiency and sustainability of development programs. My analysis centers on a series of World Bank reports which, over the course of the 1990s, linked strategies of good governance to local participation and civic engagement in development projects for poverty alleviation and which became institutionalized with the articulation of the Comprehensive Development Framework in 1999. Having in the mid-1980s identified a crisis in governance that Bank analysts believed obstructed the implementation of its neoliberal economic reforms, Bank policymakers gradually rediscovered civil society and the state. I draw evidence from World Bank publications including Governance and Development (1993), The World Bank and Participation (1994), World Development Reports The State in a Changing World (1997), Attacking Poverty (2000-01), and Building Institutions for Markets (2002). This paper argues that the manner in which World Bank programs incorporate non-economic factors actually narrow the horizon of social action, obscuring the social costs of the market system and appropriating the survival strategies of the poor as a support for the ongoing maintenance of the so-called free market. Nevertheless, it is precisely the voluble attention to poverty, set out in copious diagnostic and quantitative detail, with first-person testimonial anchoring time-worn humanistic truths in such World Bank publications as Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? (2000), that suggests the shifting logics of neoliberal governance. World Bank initiatives illustrate the dynamic reciprocities between global and local development that remake community in neoliberal form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent policy and academic discourse much emphasis is placed on creating social capital for achieving development goals, mitigating conflict and creating harmonious communities. However, there have been few attempts to examine whether and to what extent analysis od conceptualizations of social capital and ethnic conflict are applicable and can travel across different settings. By disaggregating social capital into four kinds: bridging, bonding, binding, and blinding, this paper seeks to better understand how civic participation works in multi-ethnic societies. This paper argues that although developing countries tend to suffer most from ethnic conflict and war, western countries have also much to gain on a regional and national level from examining the relationship between civic life and ethnic conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the role of social capital in the process of post-communist transition. Social capital is a concept that embodies the potential benefits of norms, networks and trust and is often employed in the study of the relationship between market ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Putnam's recent work on social capital has refocused attention on the critical role that civil society plays in creating and sustaining successful democratic governance. Ssocial capital is defined by Putnam as the connections among individuals social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arises from them?. [S]social capital calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when imbedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations (Putnam 2003, 19). Putnam reminds us, as did de Tocqueville more than 175 years ago, that high rates of participation in civic institutions ?greases the wheels that allow communities to advance smoothly. Where people are trusting and trustworthy and where they are subject to repeated interactions with fellow citizen, everyday business and social transactions are less costly? (Putanm 288).In many ways this bottom up approach to civic capacity or as sometimes defined social capital or civic engagement, represents the lowest unit of analysis of Relative Political Capacity (RPC). By stretching PRC downward to the local level, it may be possible to extract ever more accurate indexes for this phenomena which we call, in its broadest sense, government efficient. A comparative analysis of government efficiency gives promise to open up entirely mew avenues of research involving development, investment, infrastructure and educational strategies. This is paper represents a new direction on the RPC panel and one that promises the possibly of a significant intellectual marriage of two different disciplines. The analysis will be both quantitative and qualitative. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the embedded liberalism hypothesis, governments can increase public support for economic globalization by providing stronger social safety nets. Existing studies have thus far focused primarily on the role of government-sponsored social safety nets (i.e. the welfare state). We argue that non-governmental social safety nets in the form of social capital can have a positive effect on individual preferences vis-àvis economic openness as well. Using new survey data we find some support for the argument that individuals benefiting from more social capital are more supportive of economic globalization. This effect is independent of other factors that may also affect globalization attitudes - for instance government sponsored social safety nets, factors advocated by the factor endowments and sector specific trade models, sector exposure to globalization, proximity to an international border, or personal satisfaction with life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Korea and Taiwan are both the representation of Third Wave democratization in East Asia. Both countries transitted from authoritative regimes to democracies in early 1990s. Although Korea and Taiwan share great similarities in democratic transition, the momentum of democratization has varied greatly after 2000. While Korean citizens kept initiating mass movements to get involved in politics regarding various public issues, especially during the impeachment of their president, the Taiwanese society has become more and more apathetic to politics and gradually lost the social capital to consolidate the democracy.This paper compares Korea?s and Taiwan?s democratization, arguing that it is the isolation of Taiwan from the rest of the world that prevents non-state social forces in Taiwan from becoming reliable social capital. The failure of Taiwan?s non-state actors? engaging with the international society and building transnational networks has harmed governmental and societal capabilities, reduced the political leverage, and jeopardized the independence of social actors, and therefore has become obstacles for Taiwanese in forging deliberative and participatory democracy. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines extended hypotheses on social capital and civic engagement in a cultural context. It contributes to a growing corpus of research that suggests social capital has important implications for democratic development. The paper specifically addresses the impact of interpersonal trust and political institutional confidence upon confrontational political protest in more than 80 countries in eight distinct ?civilizations? or cultures. Drawing upon individual-level data from the 1999-2000 World Values dataset and controlling for a variety of economic and socio-political variables, regression analyses suggest that social capital is strongly correlated with protest in all countries. Nevertheless, there is significant variation in the effect of trust and confidence on protest between subsets of countries, particularly between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microfinance has emerged as a successful international development policy over the past 30 years. One primary reason for this is its ability to sidestep prevalent corruption in developing world state governments. In this analysis, I step outside traditional measurement of success for microfinance, which focuses on its impact on economic development, and instead investigate the political ramifications of microfinance. I analyze emerging trends in microfinance: (1) the emergence of the Internet as a new funding and global networking paradigm; (2) a shift towards for-profit microfinance institutions; (3) the rise of individualized, rather than group microfinance lending. I argue that microfinance institutions influence social capital, political empowerment and thus democratization. This research contributes a new way of conceptualizing microfinance institutions in their influence on political development. It also investigates seven prominent microfinance institutions in a case study analysis: non-profits Kiva, Global Giving, Calvert Organization and MicroCredit Enterprises and for-profits MicroPlace, Micro Vest, Oikocredit. My preliminary findings indicate that as a development policy, different types of microfinance have unique characteristics that can influence political development. It is important for policy makers and theorists alike to understand how and why microfinance can be beneficial for political development, particularly in the developing world, where social capital, political empowerment and democracy, has had intermittent success. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years since the so-called "Third Wave" democracies made their transitions, it has become increasingly obvious that it is somewhat naive to think that these democracies will last. What many of these new democracies experience are instead, periods of democratic erosion and the subsequent process of re-democratization. Therefore in order to avoid these vicious cycles of instability, we argue that determining when a democracy becomes consolidated; that is, it is able to succeed and thrive as a political system over a period of time, is of critical importance. This study analyzes the role of social capital in democratic consolidation. Using evidence from the third and fourth wave of the World Values Survey, we find that there is a positive relationship between positive social capital, or trust, and democratic consolidation. In contrast, we find that there is a negative relationship between negative social capital, or corruption, and democratic consolidation. We find also that positive attitudes toward democracy and the level of economic development are positively related to democratic consolidation. There are also significant region-specific characteristics that help explain the likelihood of democratic consolidation, such as the legacy of colonialism in Latin America and the importance of regionalism in Eastern Europe, as our case studies suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Aristotle to Gurr, political protest was viewed as the tool of the politically frustrated who lacked access to the political process. However, research in advanced industrial societies demonstrates that protest is now commonly used by those who possess the skills and resources to also participate in conventional political channels. In the less developed world, however, protest may still be important as a tool for the politically powerless, who lack resources and access to democratic political channels. Our research examines the use and sources of protest by citizens across the globe. We analyze the interaction of individual characteristics and national context to examine the roots of protest on a near global scale. With data from the new 1999-2002 wave of the World Values Survey, we test past theories of the factors related to protest, ranging from social capital to deprivation to resource theories. More important, the WVS enables us to test these theories on a broadly cross-national scale with data from nearly 70 national surveys, comparing how the nature of protest potentially varies as a function of political development, democratization, and integration into the global system. This research demonstrates that contextual factors significantly shape protest patterns. In particular, we find that traditional predictors of protest activity -such as individual resources and political orientation -- are much more strongly associated with protest in affluent rich countries than in less developed countries. Our empirical analysis highlights a need for further theory building that would enable a better understanding of the correlates of protest in the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy goes hand in hand with strong civil society and vice versa, nations with high social capital enjoy democratic political life. Yet, is this true in all regions ? Post-Communist democracies prove this not to be always the case. Hence, high membership in NGOs cannot be be a necessary component of democratic life, otherwise democracy should be redefined as a less encompassing notion. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typically, social theory considers trust as the ordering principle of politics, that is, the principle without which a complex world will not hang together. Importing this view to securitization, I articulate the claim that how threats emerge, how they e ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politics of exclusion has been the norm for Latin American states since their inception. The most recent wave of democratic transitions, coupled with neoliberal policy expansion has however affected the dynamics of democratic participation. While previous incarnations of democracy and dictatorship were able to exclude and marginalize vast populations through policy and force, the third wave transition governments have been hindered by neoliberal structural adjustment in marginalizing these populations. Antiquated party structures and elite civic associations have limited the political space for new political voices to be heard in civil society-state synergy. Thus,my research shows that social movements have resulted from the an assymetry of social capital in marginalized populations and state capacity to process new policy input demands from those populations. The case of CONAIE in Ecuador is used to illustrate social capital formation among indigenous populations, where state capacity to disrupt social capital formation or to process policy inputs was reduced by structural adjustment and loan conditionality and and vertical oriented party structure. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study looks at the results of the Chilean educational reforms. The introduction of "choice" in primary education by the military regime in Chile led to a proliferation of voucher schools in 20 years. The study investigates the relationship between choice, sorting of students, and its effects on social capital by means of a 3-wave panel. The results are compared to the results of similar studies in the US. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the impact of associational participation of migrants on their political integration in the US, by testing the social capital argument that participation in voluntary organizations is beneficial for political engagement. In the first part of the research I will identify the migration patterns within the Latin American countries and the effects that such patterns have on the initial construction of social capital. The migration to the United States of America implies certain changes in the structure of the social capital, initially affecting the family construction and extending further to broader networks of social reciprocity. By identifying the effects those changes might have at the level of the Latino community, I will discuss the potential and the interest of the latter in making a significant contribution to the American politics through civic engagement. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]