Adelin-Costin Dumitru — Forging the Resistive Republic: Social Capital, Institutional Stability, and Civic Virtue in Pluralist Democracies

30 published claims from this book.

• A republic’s stability rests on assurance that all will respect shared rules.
• Dispersing state power across independent governance centers protects liberty without over-complicating rules.
• Extreme inequality erodes citizens’ willingness to abide by shared rules.
• Freedom requires a well-ordered institutional framework to reduce domination.
• Ideas can serve republicanism regardless of their author’s self-identification
• Individual autonomy presupposes shared norms, accountability, and public trust.
• Institutional rules cannot be transplanted across settings unchanged.
• Mutual trust predates and is prerequisite for civic virtue.
• Non-domination requires active citizen contribution and cannot be produced by institutions alone.
• Polycentric governance can generate republican norms without state coercion
• Polycentric governance exceeds federalism by adding crosscutting jurisdictions and non-state actors.
• Polycentric governance favors locally adapted rules that reduce domination.
• Polycentric governance structures enable citizens to resist domination through multiple remedies.
• Republican civic virtue and a game-theoretic view of democracy can be reconciled.
• Republican civic virtue is thin enough to suit pluralist societies
• Republican democracy has authorial and editorial dimensions addressing different threats.
• Republican freedom from domination requires redistributive social policy including basic income and wealth constraints.
• Republican governance presupposes social capital that citizens must actively build
• Republican ideals could be advanced by studying real-world successful collective action
• Republican liberty may not require citizens to be inwardly virtuous.
• Republican theorists have historically neglected explaining how civic norms emerge.
• Republicans prefer civic-minded dispositions over civic virtue to avoid the positive liberty connotation.
• Social capital enables citizens to contest policies endangering non-domination.
• Social capital grows from participation, not prior endowment alone.
• Social capital works without assuming individuals share common-oriented goals.
• Social capital’s self-reinforcing strength does not explain how it emerges originally.
• Social trust is an outcome and byproduct of social capital
• Spanish decentralization under Zapatero improved non-dominating governance prospects.
• Tocqueville advocated enlightened self-interest, not republican civic virtue
• Well-designed republican institutions can generate norms of policy-making through games of acceptability.