Post-communist countries are unlikely to develop high levels of coordination in providing collective goods due to their "hourglass" social structure: trust and cooperation exist mainly at the top among elites and at the bottom between individuals. This structure reinforces social traps such as corrupt institutions and ineffective cooperative equilibria. This study explores how “second-best" governance strategies located at the bottom-half of the hourglass can overcome these traps. It examines why small- and medium-sized companies (SMEs) provide vocational education and training (VET) – a paradigmatic collective good requiring high levels of coordination. The study develops a most-different case study design and applies a multi-method approach to analyse rich empirical data collected during interviews with SMEs and stakeholders in the Albanian and Slovak VET systems. The findings demonstrate that micro-level actors can functionally substitute the lack of institutional trust and meso-level intermediaries by relying on the features of particularized trust.
Event Title
Swiss Political Science Association Annual Congress