Abstract
Institutional Capital: Building Post-Communist Government
Performance. By Laura Brunell. Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 2005. 270p. $59.00. cloth, $39.00 paper This book makes an important theoretical contribution by opening the
“black box” linking social capital and democratic performance.
Spurred by Robert Putnam's observed correlation between social
capital and budget promptness (Making Democracy Work, 1995),
Laura Brunell seeks to explain the causal mechanisms connecting a vibrant
civil society to good government performance.