User:Nick Gardner /Sandbox

Low levels of social capital lead to a number of political dysfunctions, which have been extensively documented. Following Tocqueville's analysis of France, many observers noted how administrative centralization has led to an excessively rigid and unresponsive political system, one that can be changed only through antisystemic upsurges such as the evenements of 1968.7 Low levels of social capital have been linked to an inefficient local government in southern Italy, as well as to the region's pervasive corruption (Banfield, 1958; Putnam, 1993). In many Latin American societies, a narrow radius of trust produces a twotier moral system, with good behavior reserved for family and personal friends, and a decidedly lower standard of behavior in the public sphere. This serves as a cultural foundation for corruption, which is often regarded as a legitimate way of looking after one's family. It is of course also possible to have too much of a good thing. One person's civic engagement is another's rent-seeking; much of what constitutes civil society can be described as interest groups trying to divert public resources to their favored causes, whether sugar-beet farming, women's health care, or the protection of biodiversity. The public choice literature has analyzed the baleful consequences of rent-seeking for modern democracies at great length; Mancur Olson (1982) has argued that Britain's long-term economic decline was due to the long-term buildup of entrenched interest groups there

Ostrom, Elinor, 1990, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press).