Institutions or culture: What is the raw material for the legitimacy of new democracies?

In the last years, have been retaken a theoretical perspective that maintain that the culture, values and beliefs shared by the citizens, are conditions for development and the democracy building (Putnam, 1996; Inglehart, 2002). In opposition to these analytical approaches, the purpose of this work is to demonstrate that civic values or social capital do not constitute prerequirements to found democratic institutions on the national plan. In order to verify this hypothesis, the work tries to compare a set of 47 nations, with different institutional frameworks and cultural values. The information referring to the cultural values was isolated with base in the index of social capital, produced from the World Values Study. The used index to formalize and to measure degrees of democratization in different national societies was the generated one by Freedom House, produced from a combination of referring values to political rights, civil liberties, characteristic of the political regime, life expectancy and rent per capita. The correlations observed between indicators of social capital and democracy were modest. The comparative analisys shows countries that present a democratic configuration, with low indices of social capital, over all between the new democracies, in opposing to the predictions of the social capital approach. The main conclusion is that civic values or high levels of social capital are not conditions to found democratic institutions. The data suggest, alternatively, a strong relation between greater power-sharing (Lijphart, 1996) and democratic institutions building, maintaining a recommendation of which when levels of development and civic values are low, to divide the power it is the best condition for the constitution of new democracies.