Making Democracy Work Better

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360 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 17 illus., 8 tables, 6 maps, appends., bibl., index

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-4824-1
Published: October 1999
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-6108-0
Published: July 2003
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6774-2
Published: July 2003

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Awards & distinctions

2000 Virginia A. Hodgkinson Research Prize, The Independent Sector

The decade of the 1980s marked a triumph for market capitalism. As politicians of all stripes sought to reinvent government in the image of private enterprise, they looked to the voluntary sector for allies to assuage the human costs of reductions in public policies of social welfare. This book details the "savage side" of market capitalism in Appalachia and explains the social, political, and economic roles that mediating structures play in mitigating it. Profiling the work of twenty-three such mediating structures--community-based organizations that battled to provide social safety nets, fight environmental assaults, and upgrade the education and job skills of Appalachian residents--Richard Couto distills the practical lessons to be found in their successes and shortcomings.

Couto argues that a broader set of democratic dimensions be used in taking the measure of civil society and public policy in the twenty-first century. He shows that mediating structures promote the democratic prospect of reduced inequality and increased communal bonds when they provide and advocate for new forms and increased amounts of social capital--the public goods and moral resources that we invest in one another as members of a community.

About the Author

Richard A. Couto, Modlin Chair in Leadership Studies, teaches in the Jepson School at the University of Richmond and is author or editor of eight previous books.

For more information about Richard A. Couto, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Offers an excellent review of the social capital literature. . . . Because the research design of this project can be adapted to many other studies focused on social capital, the book will be especially useful for social scientists and management specialists in various disciplines interested in social capital research."--Choice

"This is a wonderful book about democracy, economics and community in the real world. Richard Couto has a fine eye for political theory and a fine ear for the poems, songs, chants and voices of people struggling to improve their lives."--James A. Morone, Brown University

"In a rich study that combines sophisticated political theory with well-grounded research, Richard Couto examines the potential contributions voluntary organizations make to the 'democratic prospect' of enhancing community and equality in American public life. Specifically, he examines the mediating role a wide range of community-based organizations and coalitions in Appalachia play between the public and private sectors in order to understand how grassroots groups best mitigate and challenge the failure of economies and governments to provide for basic human needs, especially in rural communities and regions of poverty, disinvestment, and deindustrialization."--Dwight B. Billings, University of Kentucky