MPMC Working Paper 3 - Unesco

oader social world but is less dependent upon and less controlled by his political system. The
association of which he is a member can represent his needs and demands before the government. It
would make the government more chary of engaging in activities that would harm the individual.”
(Almond and Verba, 1965: 245)
There is clearly a paradox working in democratic governance. On the one hand, a democratic
government is appointed by the people and should therefore act as its agent. However to make the
government act as its agent the citizens apparently need more than just a vote. They need to have
associations that provide governance independent of the democratically elected government. These
associations make citizens more competent to handle their own affairs and to control the government.
This was demonstrated by Almond and Verba at the macro-level as well as on the micro-level.
Membership of voluntary associations was more frequent in the well-established democracies, like
the US and the UK than in new democracies like Germany, Italy and Mexico. Members of such
organizations considered themselves more competent citizens than non-members, while active
members considered themselves more competent than passive members. There appeared to be a
relation between subjective civic competence and actual political participation. The authors suggest
that voluntary associations are a hotbed for civic competence. What they do not show as in how far
civic engagement and political participation also leads to better government. We are indebted to
Robert Putnam for his demonstration that good governance in Italian regions is related to the number
of voluntary associations, to electoral and political participation and to political trust (Putnam, 1993).
Putnam’s thesis looks like the last element in the corroboration of Tocqueville’s analysis of
democratic governance. It relates the structure of civic community to political participation and
political trust and sees good governance as the dependent variable. Civic engagement is crucial in the
explanation of governmental performance. Governance prospers by the monitoring of its citizens.
Is this also true for multi-ethnic polities, that is, for societies where ethnic minorities add to the
heterogeneity of political culture and sometimes to deep cultural cleavages? Classical democratic
theory assumes that religious or ethnic divisions were antagonistic to democratic governance. The
Jacobin strand of democratic theory also denies the viability of multicultural democracy. The nation
should be one and indivisible, cultural differences are considered irrelevant, they are denied or
suppressed. There should be only one loyalty to the nation, a single and uniform patriotism. Jacobin
versions of democracy assume shared values among the members of a democratic polity. It is a
communitarian vision of democracy. Even today, the French government finds it very hard to
recognize cultural differences in the public sphere, as the headscarf discussion has shown.
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