Political capital and how it grows

Abstract

Our inquiry and analysis in the previous chapter helped us to pinpoint three possible key components of political capital, which most clearly interact with successful democratic development across the 1990s. The analysis showed that a positive or stable development of democracy - including a large succession and choice of new local leaders in the more successfully developed Baltic new democracies - runs parallel with growing horizontal networks, increasing commitment to core democratic values and escalating local-global relations. In this chapter, we continue our search for a latent political capital by analyzing the correlations across cities between these factors in greater detail. © 2006 VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften GWV Fachverlage GmbH, Wiesbaden.