Civic Culture in Poland in a Comparative Perspective. The Case of Galicja

Presented at the Western/Rocky Mountain Slavic Studies Association Conference

Robert Putnam in his Making Democracy Work (1993) claimed to elucidate civic and un-civic patterns of political behavior in Italy through the concept of "social capital" and its supposed medieval cultural roots. His own empirical evidence, however, contradicted his theses. My comparative study re-examines Putnam's evidence and adduces original Polish research to show that democratic and participatory regional political cultures in both countries emerged with early socialist and populist movements. Polish Galicja (area of the former Austrian partition), which in terms of post-Communist political behavior is civic, has a history of flourishing class-based social movements in the first half of the twentieth century. While the movements were destroyed by Communist repression, participatory qualities of the region's political culture re-emerged after 1989. Similar albeit more politically continuous patterns can be detected in Italy. Modern civic culture in both cases can be thus traced to the traditions of sustained class-based popular mobilization.