CInSt Research Seminar “Civic Culture vs. Apolitical Social Capital: The Case of Moscow Apartment Buildings”

Alexander Rubin, PhD student, Lecturer, Faculty of Economic Sciences HSE University 
Leonid Polishchuk, Professor, Leading Research Fellow, Center for Institutional Studies HSE University 
Igor Shagalov, Junior Research Fellow, Center for Institutional Studies HSE University

Abstract 
We study the interplay between two cultural traits, one of which is apolitical social capital, which powers up grassroots collective action, and the other – civic culture, which reflects responsibility for social welfare and prompts political participation. We contrast two types of collective action in the contemporary urban setting, one of which is civic and the other is not. In the first one, tenants of an apartment building collectively manage funds designated for the building upkeep, and thereby exercise their civic rights and duties within the “micro-jurisdiction” of building residents. In the second, tenants build fences and gates around their building turning it into a “gated community”, and thereby opting for a collective “exit” as a response to a lack of public safety and security and other governance failures in the surrounding municipality. Such reaction is patently uncivic, as it dumps significant external costs onto the rest of the city, including fragmentation and loss of public space, restriction of mobility, segregation, crime displacement, and civic disengagement and apathy over city-wide public matters. We use a unique database of nearly 30,000 Moscow apartment buildings to show that generic apolitical social capital in the tenant community in the absence of civic culture facilitates both types of collective action, the civic and the uncivic ones alike. However, civic culture plays different roles, augmenting generic social capital in the first type and impeding it in the second. Put differently, apolitical social capital and civic culture are cultural traits that reinforce (complement) each other in the case of a civic collective action, and counteract each other, when a contemplated collective action is uncivic.    

March 28, 2019, 6:00-7:30 pm. 
Room 445, 20 Myasnitskaya street, Moscow. 
Working language: English.  

All are welcome.
If you don't have an HSE ID, please send your name and surname to savdeev@hse.ru before 1:00 PM on March 28.