Working paper: "Social Institutions of the Frontier"
Working paper " Internal Empires I: Social Institutions of the Frontier " by Research Fellows: Roberto Foa , Anna Nemirovskaya , Elena Mostovova.
Working paper "Internal Empires I: Social Institutions of the Frontier" by Research Fellows: Roberto Foa, Anna Nemirovskaya, Elena Mostovova.
Abstract: One of the attributes most consistently highlighted in the literature on frontier society is the tendency to spontaneous social organisation. However, despite the resilience of the ‘frontier Thesis’ within sociology and political science, it has not been subject to a rigorous empirical examination. Does it constitute a description of the social norms and institution of the western United States, or is it one manifestation of a more general ‘frontier phenomenon’, found in other times and places? In order to answer these questions, this article examines data on the nature of social relations in frontier zones in four countries: Brazil, Russia, Canada and the United States. Taking a wide range of survey items, the authors find that higher levels of voluntary activity, social trust, tolerance of outgroups, and civic protest are distinctive features of frontier life, and not simply a feature of the American historical experience.
Paper was prepared under the personal project at the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, the author thanks for the advises and recommendations to the paper given by Ronald Inglegart, Christian Welzel, Eduard Ponarin and Daniel Alexandrov.
Keywords: Social institutions, social capital, settlement patterns, historical institutionalism, frontier thesis