In Making Democracy Work and a recent article in The American Prospect, Robert Putnam argues that the same factors he believes contribute to a healthy polity—civic engagement and social capital—also foster economic prosperity. They do so, in his view, by encouraging cooperation. The author argues that Putnam is right to emphasize the value of cooperative economic behavior, but that he overstates the contribution of civic activism and social capital to both cooperation and economic success. The principal economically beneficial forms of cooperation tend to be products of institutional incentives rather than social capital. And civic engagement, although helpful in accounting for economic performance differences between Italy's north and south, is of little explanatory utility beyond the Italian case.
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