Public Decisions and Culture

The way in which the social subjects take decisions, the interactions established between these, the web of social institutions and rules, the architecture of the power relationships between the various “points of social coagulation” have as a foundation a complex set of determinants, in which the “pure” economic factors have an important, but not unique role. Thus, this paper intends to draft a possible analytical framework, capable of allowing the stress of some existing connections between the cultural variables, the social actions and the role of the public power. Heavy indebted to OLSON and NOZICK, the starting point is made out by a version of the mandate theory, within the way in which society, as a whole, as well as its individual components, delegates a certain set of social responsibilities to the public authorities, based on some social utility functions, which include the characteristics of the dominant cultural model. Part I of the paper deals with the elements of the theoretical foundation, elements resumed by a set of critical postulates and a special definition of state as the dominant agency in a social space and also of the negotiation/parallel associations. Part II is an attempt to examine some empirical evidences in the favor of some results derived from this foundation. The main conclusion of the paper could be resumed by the idea that trying to describe the interactions between state and society without taking into the account the characteristics of the cultural paradigm is equivalent to talk about Hamlet without mentioning the prince of Denmark.