evidence of a correlation between individuals‟ behavior in the public goods experiment and their willingness to cooperate with others in participatory accountability systems and civic engagement.

The paper is arranged as follows. Section 2 describes the Albanian context focusing, in particular, on the education sector. Section 3 describes the school survey and the public goods experiment. Section 4 presents descriptive statistics about the surveyed parents and explores individual and community characteristics affecting parents‟ cooperativeness in the public goods game. Section 5 reports our empirical results, and Section 6 provides some conclusions.

# **2. The Albanian context**

# **2.1 A new democracy**

Albania was the last country in Europe to participate in the “third wave of democracy” (Huntington, 1991). Despite the high levels of economic growth experienced during the democratic transition, Albania remains one of the poorest in Europe, with a per capita GDP of 8,000 USD (2010 international PPP $). Albania‟s relative underdevelopment has been attributed, in part, to the slowness of its transition to democracy relative to other Eastern European countries. The new constitution, which established that the “sovereignty in the Republic of Albania belongs to the people” (article 2) and that “governance is based on a system of elections that are free, equal, general and periodic” (article 1), was adopted in 1998. Since then, there have been three parliamentary elections – not without controversies concerning electoral fraud, protests and boycotts by the losing party. In each, voter turnout has been around 50%.

Albania‟s slow transition to democracy has been attributed to the unique characteristics of its communist regime: its isolation from other countries, including the Soviet bloc, for half a century; the elimination of intellectuals (including western-educated Albanians); the abolition of religious practices; and the harsh persecution of opponents to the regime. With the end of communism, a new era began. According to Elbasani (2004), the recently acquired freedom was interpreted and understood by Albanians as the “unhindered pursuit of personal gains at the expense of society and public good”. One of the consequences of the repression of civic organizations during the communist regime is the lack of an active civil society, i.e. formal and informal organizations (with or without political objectives) and voluntary community participation, in the newly formed democracy of Albania.<sup>11</sup> This is consistent with the evidence that totalitarian regimes destroy social capital, however conceptualized, i.e., as the density of

> 11 According to Talifi (2008), most of the efforts to build a civil society in Albania – primarily undertaken by donor-based NGOs – have relied on awareness campaigns and capacity building, and have emphasized the importance of an informed society and electoral base. The inherent shortcoming of this approach is the assumption that by informing people about democratic and participatory institutions, participation will follow. Talifi (2008) argues that “this approach of civil society has decreased rather than increased public participation in the process, because simply telling people to participate is not a good enough approach to contribute to the democratization of the country”.

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