Abstract
We hope in this article to bridge the gap between all those researchers who in the trail of Almond and Verba (1963) have investigated the relationship between civic culture and political participation and those that are primarily interested in multicultural democracy. In earlier research we have found a correlation between political participation and political trust of ethnic minorities on the one hand and the network of ethnic associations on the other. (Fennema/Tillie, 1999) In this paper we treat the network of ethnic organizations a proxy for civic community. It is a long established assumption that voluntary associations create social trust, which, in turn can spill over into political trust. But if voluntary associations generate trust why would interlocking directorates among such organizations add to it? Our answer is that trust can travel trough a network of interlocking directorates and by doing so increase. Civic community building is the creation of trust among organizations.
Bottom up, increased social trust may generate political trust because the citizens feel that their leaders are competent to monitor local government. The rank and file sees their leaders as their agents. Top down, interlocking directors can spread the political trust they themselves have within the ethnic community. By doing so, they act as an agent for the local government. In both cases the interlocking directors have an important broker function.
Finally we discuss whether this civic community is generated by factors that stem from the political opportunity structure in the host country or whether more weight should be given to those cultural factors that originate in the country of origin.
We would like to thank the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences (NIAS) that gave us a chance to finish this paper as part of a joint research plan that will hopefully result in a monographic study about Making Multicultural Democracy. We also want to thank Henk Flap, Ruud Koopmans, Susan Olzak and Andreas Wimmer for critical comments and stimulating discussions. This is a revision of a paper prepared for the Workshop ‘Voluntary Associations, Social Capital and Interest Mediation: Forging the Link’ ECPR Joint Session of Workshops, Copenhagen 14–19 April 2000-02-15. We are also in debt with the members of that workshop, especially with Marc Hooghe and Dietlind Stolle.
“The role of social trust and cooperativeness as a component of civic culture cannot be overemphasized. It is, in a sense, a generalized resource that keeps a democratic polity operating.” Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, 1965:357
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Fennema, M., Tillie, J. (2001). Civic Community, Political Participation and Political Trust of Ethnic Groups. In: Behr, H., Schmidt, S. (eds) Multikulturelle Demokratien im Vergleich. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-85129-1_9
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