The collapse of the European communist regimes has provided social scientists with the rare opportunity to observe the birth of new political institutions and to reexamine the effect of political behavior on institutional change. In the last decade, scholars and policy makers have argued that new institiutional frameworks from the democratic world would solve Eastern Europe's many economic and political problems. This volume builds on the work of Robert Putnam to argue that what makes institutions democratic goes beyond state arrangements to the realm of society. The new institutions in Eastern Europe performed differently in various countries, although their formal structure varied little among countries. Stan explores the extent to which social capital affected the performance of one such institution, the Romanian county council.