Copyright © 1995 The National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns
Hopkins University Press. Registered users of a subscribed campus network
may download, archive, and print as many copies of this work as desired for
use within the subscribed institution as long as this header is not removed
-- no copies of the below work may be distributed electronically, in whole
or in part, outside of your campus network without express permission
(permissions@muse.jhu.edu). Contact your institution's library to discuss
your rights and responsibilities within Project Muse, or send email to
copyright@muse.jhu.edu. The Johns Hopkins University Press is committed to
respecting the needs of scholars -- return of that respect is requested.
Journal of Democracy 6.1 (1995) 65-78
As featured on National Public Radio, The New York Times, and in other major
media, we offer this sold-out, much-discussed Journal of Democracy article
by Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone." The Journal of Democracy is at present
scheduled to go online in full text in the third year of Project Muse
(1997). You can also find information at DemocracyNet about the Journal of
Democracy and its sponsor, the National Endowment for Democracy.
Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital
Robert D. Putnam
An Interview with Robert Putnam
Many students of the new democracies that have emerged over the past decade
and a half have emphasized the importance of a strong and active civil
society to the consolidation of democracy. Especially with regard to the
postcommunist countries, scholars and democratic activists alike have
lamented the absence or obliteration of traditions of independent civic
engagement and a widespread tendency toward passive reliance on the state.
To those concerned with the weakness of civil societies in the developing or
postcommunist world, the advanced Western democracies and above all the
United States have typically been taken as models to be emulated. There is
striking evidence, however, that the vibrancy of American civil society has
notably declined over the past several decades.
Ever since the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America,
the United States has played a central role in systematic studies of the
links between democracy and civil society. Although this is in part because
trends in American life are often regarded as harbingers of social
modernization, it is also because America has traditionally been considered
unusually "civic" (a reputation that, as we shall later see, has not been
entirely unjustified).
When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, it was the
Americans' propensity for civic association that most impressed him as the
key to their unprecedented ability to make democracy work. "Americans of all
ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition," [End Page 65] he
observed, "are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial
and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand
different types -- religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very
limited, immensely large and very minute. . . . Nothing, in my view,
deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in
America." [1]
Recently, American social scientists of a neo-Tocquevillean bent have
unearthed a wide range of empirical evidence that the quality of public life
and the performance of social institutions (and not only in America) are
indeed powerfully influenced by norms and networks of civic engagement.
Researchers in such fields as education, urban poverty, unemployment, the
control of crime and drug abuse, and even health have discovered that
successful outcomes are more likely in civically engaged communities.
Similarly, research on the varying economic attainments of different ethnic
groups in the United States has demonstrated the importance of social bonds
within each group. These results are consistent with research in a wide
range of settings that demonstrates the vital importance of social networks
for job placement and many other economic outcomes.
Meanwhile, a seemingly unrelated body of research on the sociology of
economic development has also focused attention on the role of social
networks. Some of this work is situated in the developing countries, and
some of it elucidates the peculiarly successful "network capitalism" of East
Asia. [2] Even in less exotic Western economies, however, researchers have
discovered highly efficient, highly flexible "industrial districts" based on
networks of collaboration among workers and small entrepreneurs. Far from
being paleoindustrial anachronisms, these dense interpersonal and
interorganizational networks undergird ultramodern industries, from the high
tech of Silicon Valley to the high fashion of Benetton.
The norms and networks of civic engagement also powerfully affect the
performance of representative government. That, at least, was the central
conclusion of my own 20-year, quasi-experimental study of subnational
governments in different regions of Italy. [3] Although all these regional
governments seemed identical on paper, their levels of effectiveness varied
dramatically. Systematic inquiry showed that the quality of governance was
determined by longstanding traditions of civic engagement (or its absence).
Voter turnout, newspaper readership, membership in choral societies and
football clubs -- these were the hallmarks of a successful region. In fact,
historical analysis suggested that these networks of organized reciprocity
and civic solidarity, far from being an epiphenomenon of socioeconomic
modernization, were a precondition for it.
No doubt the mechanisms through which civic engagement and social
connectedness produce such results -- better schools, faster economic [End
Page 66] development, lower crime, and more effective government -- are
multiple and complex. While these briefly recounted findings require further
confirmation and perhaps qualification, the parallels across hundreds of
empirical studies in a dozen disparate disciplines and subfields are
striking. Social scientists in several fields have recently suggested a
common framework for understanding these phenomena, a framework that rests
on the concept of social capital. [4] By analogy with notions of physical
capital and human capital -- tools and training that enhance individual
productivity -- "social capital" refers to features of social organization
such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and
cooperation for mutual benefit.
For a variety of reasons, life is easier in a community blessed with a
substantial stock of social capital. In the first place, networks of civic
engagement foster sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity and encourage the
emergence of social trust. Such networks facilitate coordination and
communication, amplify reputations, and thus allow dilemmas of collective
action to be resolved. When economic and political negotiation is embedded
in dense networks of social interaction, incentives for opportunism are
reduced. At the same time, networks of civic engagement embody past success
at collaboration, which can serve as a cultural template for future
collaboration. Finally, dense networks of interaction probably broaden the
participants' sense of self, developing the "I" into the "we," or (in the
language of rational-choice theorists) enhancing the participants' "taste"
for collective benefits.
I do not intend here to survey (much less contribute to) the development of
the theory of social capital. Instead, I use the central premise of that
rapidly growing body of work -- that social connections and civic engagement
pervasively influence our public life, as well as our private prospects -- as
the starting point for an empirical survey of trends in social capital in
contemporary America. I concentrate here entirely on the American case,
although the developments I portray may in some measure characterize many
contemporary societies.
Whatever Happened to Civic Engagement?
We begin with familiar evidence on changing patterns of political
participation, not least because it is immediately relevant to issues of
democracy in the narrow sense. Consider the well-known decline in turnout in
national elections over the last three decades. From a relative high point
in the early 1960s, voter turnout had by 1990 declined by nearly a quarter;
tens of millions of Americans had forsaken their parents' habitual readiness
to engage in the simplest act of citizenship. Broadly similar trends also
characterize participation in state and local elections.
It is not just the voting booth that has been increasingly deserted by Americans. A series of identical questions posed by the Roper
Organization to national samples ten times each year over the last two
decades reveals that since 1973 the number of Americans who report that "in
the past year" they have "attended a public meeting on town or school
affairs" has fallen by more than a third (from 22 percent in 1973 to 13
percent in 1993). Similar (or even greater) relative declines are evident in
responses to questions about attending a political rally or speech, serving
on a committee of some local organization, and working for a political
party. By almost every measure, Americans' direct engagement in politics and
government has fallen steadily and sharply over the last generation, despite
the fact that average levels of education -- the best individual-level
predictor of political participation - -have risen sharply throughout this
period. Every year over the last decade or two, millions more have withdrawn
from the affairs of their communities.
Not coincidentally, Americans have also disengaged psychologically from
politics and government over this era. The proportion of Americans who reply
that they "trust the government in Washington" only "some of the time" or
"almost never" has risen steadily from 30 percent in 1966 to 75 percent in
1992.
These trends are well known, of course, and taken by themselves would seem
amenable to a strictly political explanation. Perhaps the long litany of
political tragedies and scandals since the 1960s (assassinations, Vietnam,
Watergate, Irangate, and so on) has triggered an understandable disgust for
politics and government among Americans, and that in turn has motivated
their withdrawal. I do not doubt that this common interpretation has some
merit, but its limitations become plain when we examine trends in civic
engagement of a wider sort.
Our survey of organizational membership among Americans can usefully begin
with a glance at the aggregate results of the General Social Survey, a
scientifically conducted, national-sample survey that has been repeated 14
times over the last two decades. Church-related groups constitute the most
common type of organization joined by Americans; they are especially popular
with women. Other types of organizations frequently joined by women include
school-service groups (mostly parent-teacher associations), sports groups,
professional societies, and literary societies. Among men, sports clubs,
labor unions, professional societies, fraternal groups, veterans' groups,
and service clubs are all relatively popular.
Religious affiliation is by far the most common associational
membership among Americans. Indeed, by many measures America continues to be
(even more than in Tocqueville's time) an astonishingly "churched" society.
For example, the United States has more houses of worship per capita than
any other nation on Earth. Yet religious sentiment in America seems to be
becoming somewhat less tied to institutions and more self-defined.
How have these complex crosscurrents played out over the last three or four
decades in terms of Americans' engagement with organized religion? The
general pattern is clear: The 1960s witnessed a significant drop in reported
weekly churchgoing -- from roughly 48 percent in the late 1950s to roughly 41
percent in the early 1970s. Since then, it has stagnated or (according to
some surveys) declined still further. Meanwhile, data from the General
Social Survey show a modest decline in membership in all "church-related
groups" over the last 20 years. It would seem, then, that net participation
by Americans, both in religious services and in church-related groups, has
declined modestly (by perhaps a sixth) since the 1960s.
For many years, labor unions provided one of the most common organizational
affiliations among American workers. Yet union membership has been falling
for nearly four decades, with the steepest decline occurring between 1975
and 1985. Since the mid-1950s, when union membership peaked, the unionized
portion of the nonagricultural work force in America has dropped by more
than half, falling from 32.5 percent in 1953 to 15.8 percent in 1992. By
now, virtually all of the explosive growth in union membership that was
associated with the New Deal has been erased. The solidarity of union halls
is now mostly a fading memory of aging men. [5]
The parent-teacher association (PTA) has been an especially important form
of civic engagement in twentieth-century America because parental
involvement in the educational process represents a particularly productive
form of social capital. It is, therefore, dismaying to discover that
participation in parent-teacher organizations has dropped drastically over
the last generation, from more than 12 million in 1964 to barely 5 million
in 1982 before recovering to approximately 7 million now.
Next, we turn to evidence on membership in (and volunteering for) civic and
fraternal organizations. These data show some striking patterns. First,
membership in traditional women's groups has declined more or less steadily
since the mid-1960s. For example, membership in the national Federation of
Women's Clubs is down by more than half (59 percent) since 1964, while
membership in the League of Women Voters (LWV) is off 42 percent since 1969.
[6]
Similar reductions are apparent in the numbers of volunteers for mainline
civic organizations, such as the Boy Scouts (off by 26 percent since 1970)
and the Red Cross (off by 61 percent since 1970). But what about the
possibility that volunteers have simply switched their loyalties to other organizations? Evidence on "regular" (as opposed to occasional
or "drop-by") volunteering is available from the Labor Department's Current
Population Surveys of 1974 and 1989. These estimates suggest that serious
volunteering declined by roughly one-sixth over these 15 years, from 24
percent of adults in 1974 to 20 percent in 1989. The multitudes of Red Cross
aides and Boy Scout troop leaders now missing in action have apparently not
been offset by equal numbers of new recruits elsewhere.
Fraternal organizations have also witnessed a substantial drop in membership
during the 1980s and 1990s. Membership is down significantly in such groups
as the Lions (off 12 percent since 1983), the Elks (off 18 percent since
1979), the Shriners (off 27 percent since 1979), the Jaycees (off 44 percent
since 1979), and the Masons (down 39 percent since 1959). In sum, after
expanding steadily throughout most of this century, many major civic
organizations have experienced a sudden, substantial, and nearly
simultaneous decline in membership over the last decade or two.
The most whimsical yet discomfiting bit of evidence of social disengagement
in contemporary America that I have discovered is this: more Americans are
bowling today than ever before, but bowling in organized leagues has
plummeted in the last decade or so. Between 1980 and 1993 the total number
of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling
decreased by 40 percent. (Lest this be thought a wholly trivial example, I
should note that nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once
during 1993, nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional
elections and roughly the same number as claim to attend church regularly.
Even after the 1980s' plunge in league bowling, nearly 3 percent of American
adults regularly bowl in leagues.) The rise of solo bowling threatens the
livelihood of bowling-lane proprietors because those who bowl as members of
leagues consume three times as much beer and pizza as solo bowlers, and the
money in bowling is in the beer and pizza, not the balls and shoes. The
broader social significance, however, lies in the social interaction and
even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers
forgo. Whether or not bowling beats balloting in the eyes of most Americans,
bowling teams illustrate yet another vanishing form of social capital.
Countertrends
At this point, however, we must confront a serious counterargument. Perhaps
the traditional forms of civic organization whose decay we have been tracing
have been replaced by vibrant new organizations. For example, national
environmental organizations (like the Sierra Club) and feminist groups (like
the National Organization for Women) grew rapidly during the
1970s and 1980s and now count hundreds of thousands of dues-paying members.
An even more dramatic example is the American Association of Retired Persons
(AARP), which grew exponentially from 400,000 card-carrying members in 1960
to 33 million in 1993, becoming (after the Catholic Church) the largest
private organization in the world. The national administrators of these
organizations are among the most feared lobbyists in Washington, in large
part because of their massive mailing lists of presumably loyal members.
These new mass-membership organizations are plainly of great political
importance. From the point of view of social connectedness, however, they
are sufficiently different from classic "secondary associations" that we
need to invent a new label -- perhaps "tertiary associations." For the vast
majority of their members, the only act of membership consists in writing a
check for dues or perhaps occasionally reading a newsletter. Few ever attend
any meetings of such organizations, and most are unlikely ever (knowingly)
to encounter any other member. The bond between any two members of the
Sierra Club is less like the bond between any two members of a gardening
club and more like the bond between any two Red Sox fans (or perhaps any two
devoted Honda owners): they root for the same team and they share some of
the same interests, but they are unaware of each other's existence. Their
ties, in short, are to common symbols, common leaders, and perhaps common
ideals, but not to one another. The theory of social capital argues that
associational membership should, for example, increase social trust, but
this prediction is much less straightforward with regard to membership in
tertiary associations. From the point of view of social connectedness, the
Environmental Defense Fund and a bowling league are just not in the same
category.
If the growth of tertiary organizations represents one potential (but
probably not real) counterexample to my thesis, a second countertrend is
represented by the growing prominence of nonprofit organizations, especially
nonprofit service agencies. This so-called third sector includes everything
from Oxfam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Ford Foundation and the
Mayo Clinic. In other words, although most secondary associations are
nonprofits, most nonprofit agencies are not secondary associations. To
identify trends in the size of the nonprofit sector with trends in social
connectedness would be another fundamental conceptual mistake. [7]
A third potential countertrend is much more relevant to an assessment of
social capital and civic engagement. Some able researchers have argued that
the last few decades have witnessed a rapid expansion in "support groups" of
various sorts. Robert Wuthnow reports that fully 40 percent of all Americans
claim to be "currently involved in [a] small group that meets regularly and
provides support or caring for those who participate in it." [8] Many of these
groups are religiously affiliated, but many others are not.
For example, nearly 5 percent of Wuthnow's national sample claim to
participate regularly in a "self-help" group, such as Alcoholics Anonymous,
and nearly as many say they belong to book-discussion groups and hobby
clubs.
The groups described by Wuthnow's respondents unquestionably represent an
important form of social capital, and they need to be accounted for in any
serious reckoning of trends in social connectedness. On the other hand, they
do not typically play the same role as traditional civic associations. As
Wuthnow emphasizes,
Small groups may not be fostering community as effectively as many of their proponents would like. Some small groups merely provide occasions for individuals to focus on themselves in the presence of others. The social contract binding members together asserts only the weakest of obligations. Come if you have time. Talk if you feel like it. Respect everyone's opinion. Never criticize. Leave quietly if you become dissatisfied. . . . We can imagine that [these small groups] really substitute for families, neighborhoods, and broader community attachments that may demand lifelong commitments, when, in fact, they do not. [9]
All three of these potential countertrends -- tertiary organizations,
nonprofit organizations, and support groups -- need somehow to be weighed
against the erosion of conventional civic organizations. One way of doing so
is to consult the General Social Survey.
Within all educational categories, total associational membership declined
significantly between 1967 and 1993. Among the college-educated, the average
number of group memberships per person fell from 2.8 to 2.0 (a 26-percent
decline); among high-school graduates, the number fell from 1.8 to 1.2 (32
percent); and among those with fewer than 12 years of education, the number
fell from 1.4 to 1.1 (25 percent). In other words, at all educational (and
hence social) levels of American society, and counting all sorts of group
memberships, the average number of associational memberships has fallen by
about a fourth over the last quarter-century. Without controls for
educational levels, the trend is not nearly so clear, but the central point
is this: more Americans than ever before are in social circumstances that
foster associational involvement (higher education, middle age, and so on),
but nevertheless aggregate associational membership appears to be stagnant
or declining.
Broken down by type of group, the downward trend is most marked for
church-related groups, for labor unions, for fraternal and veterans'
organizations, and for school-service groups. Conversely, membership in
professional associations has risen over these years, although less than
might have been predicted, given sharply rising educational and occupational
levels. Essentially the same trends are evident for both men and women in
the sample. In short, the available survey evidence [End Page 72] confirms
our earlier conclusion: American social capital in the form of civic
associations has significantly eroded over the last generation.
Good Neighborliness and Social Trust
I noted earlier that most readily available quantitative evidence on trends
in social connectedness involves formal settings, such as the voting booth,
the union hall, or the PTA. One glaring exception is so widely discussed as
to require little comment here: the most fundamental form of social capital
is the family, and the massive evidence of the loosening of bonds within the
family (both extended and nuclear) is well known. This trend, of course, is
quite consistent with -- and may help to explain -- our theme of social
decapitalization.
A second aspect of informal social capital on which we happen to have
reasonably reliable time-series data involves neighborliness. In each
General Social Survey since 1974 respondents have been asked, "How often do
you spend a social evening with a neighbor?" The proportion of Americans who
socialize with their neighbors more than once a year has slowly but steadily
declined over the last two decades, from 72 percent in 1974 to 61 percent in
1993. (On the other hand, socializing with "friends who do not live in your
neighborhood" appears to be on the increase, a trend that may reflect the
growth of workplace-based social connections.)
Americans are also less trusting. The proportion of Americans saying that
most people can be trusted fell by more than a third between 1960, when 58
percent chose that alternative, and 1993, when only 37 percent did. The same
trend is apparent in all educational groups; indeed, because social trust is
also correlated with education and because educational levels have risen
sharply, the overall decrease in social trust is even more apparent if we
control for education.
Our discussion of trends in social connectedness and civic engagement has
tacitly assumed that all the forms of social capital that we have discussed
are themselves coherently correlated across individuals. This is in fact
true. Members of associations are much more likely than nonmembers to
participate in politics, to spend time with neighbors, to express social
trust, and so on.
The close correlation between social trust and associational membership is
true not only across time and across individuals, but also across countries.
Evidence from the 1991 World Values Survey demonstrates the following: [10]
1. Across the 35 countries in this survey, social trust and civic
engagement are strongly correlated; the greater the density of
associational membership in a society, the more trusting its citizens.
Trust and engagement are two facets of the same underlying
factor -- social capital.
2. America still ranks relatively high by cross-national standards on both
these dimensions of social capital. Even in the 1990s, after several
decades' erosion, Americans are more trusting and more engaged than
people in most other countries of the world.
3. The trends of the past quarter-century, however, have apparently moved
the United States significantly lower in the international rankings of
social capital. The recent deterioration in American social capital has
been sufficiently great that (if no other country changed its position
in the meantime) another quarter-century of change at the same rate
would bring the United States, roughly speaking, to the midpoint among
all these countries, roughly equivalent to South Korea, Belgium, or
Estonia today. Two generations' decline at the same rate would leave
the United States at the level of today's Chile, Portugal, and
Slovenia.
Why Is U.S. Social Capital Eroding?
As we have seen, something has happened in America in the last two or three
decades to diminish civic engagement and social connectedness. What could
that "something" be? Here are several possible explanations, along with some
initial evidence on each.
The movement of women into the labor force. Over these same two or three
decades, many millions of American women have moved out of the home into
paid employment. This is the primary, though not the sole, reason why the
weekly working hours of the average American have increased significantly
during these years. It seems highly plausible that this social revolution
should have reduced the time and energy available for building social
capital. For certain organizations, such as the PTA, the League of Women
Voters, the Federation of Women's Clubs, and the Red Cross, this is almost
certainly an important part of the story. The sharpest decline in women's
civic participation seems to have come in the 1970s; membership in such
"women's" organizations as these has been virtually halved since the late
1960s. By contrast, most of the decline in participation in men's
organizations occurred about ten years later; the total decline to date has
been approximately 25 percent for the typical organization. On the other
hand, the survey data imply that the aggregate declines for men are
virtually as great as those for women. It is logically possible, of course,
that the male declines might represent the knock-on effect of women's
liberation, as dishwashing crowded out the lodge, but time-budget studies
suggest that most husbands of working wives have assumed only a minor part
of the housework. In short, something besides the women's revolution seems
to lie behind the erosion of social capital.
Mobility: The "re-potting" hypothesis. Numerous studies of organizational
involvement have shown that residential stability and such related phenomena
as homeownership are clearly associated with greater civic
engagement. Mobility, like frequent re-potting of plants, tends to disrupt
root systems, and it takes time for an uprooted individual to put down new
roots. It seems plausible that the automobile, suburbanization, and the
movement to the Sun Belt have reduced the social rootedness of the average
American, but one fundamental difficulty with this hypothesis is apparent:
the best evidence shows that residential stability and homeownership in
America have risen modestly since 1965, and are surely higher now than
during the 1950s, when civic engagement and social connectedness by our
measures was definitely higher.
Other demographic transformations. A range of additional changes have
transformed the American family since the 1960s -- fewer marriages, more
divorces, fewer children, lower real wages, and so on. Each of these changes
might account for some of the slackening of civic engagement, since married,
middle-class parents are generally more socially involved than other people.
Moreover, the changes in scale that have swept over the American economy in
these years -- illustrated by the replacement of the corner grocery by the
supermarket and now perhaps of the supermarket by electronic shopping at
home, or the replacement of community-based enterprises by outposts of
distant multinational firms -- may perhaps have undermined the material and
even physical basis for civic engagement.
The technological transformation of leisure. There is reason to believe that
deep-seated technological trends are radically "privatizing" or
"individualizing" our use of leisure time and thus disrupting many
opportunities for social-capital formation. The most obvious and probably
the most powerful instrument of this revolution is television. Time-budget
studies in the 1960s showed that the growth in time spent watching
television dwarfed all other changes in the way Americans passed their days
and nights. Television has made our communities (or, rather, what we
experience as our communities) wider and shallower. In the language of
economics, electronic technology enables individual tastes to be satisfied
more fully, but at the cost of the positive social externalities associated
with more primitive forms of entertainment. The same logic applies to the
replacement of vaudeville by the movies and now of movies by the VCR. The
new "virtual reality" helmets that we will soon don to be entertained in
total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology
thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective
interests? It is a question that seems worth exploring more systematically.
What Is to Be Done?
The last refuge of a social-scientific scoundrel is to call for more
research. Nevertheless, I cannot forbear from suggesting some further lines
of inquiry.
-
We must sort out the dimensions of social capital, which clearly is not
a unidimensional concept, despite language (even in this essay) that
implies the contrary. What types of organizations and networks most
effectively embody -- or generate -- social capital, in the sense of mutual
reciprocity, the resolution of dilemmas of collective action, and the
broadening of social identities? In this essay I have emphasized the
density of associational life. In earlier work I stressed the structure
of networks, arguing that "horizontal" ties represented more productive
social capital than vertical ties. [11]
-
Another set of important issues involves macrosociological
crosscurrents that might intersect with the trends described here. What
will be the impact, for example, of electronic networks on social
capital? My hunch is that meeting in an electronic forum is not the
equivalent of meeting in a bowling alley -- or even in a saloon -- but hard
empirical research is needed. What about the development of social
capital in the workplace? Is it growing in counterpoint to the decline
of civic engagement, reflecting some social analogue of the first law
of thermodynamics -- social capital is neither created nor destroyed,
merely redistributed? Or do the trends described in this essay
represent a deadweight loss?
-
A rounded assessment of changes in American social capital over the
last quarter-century needs to count the costs as well as the benefits
of community engagement. We must not romanticize small-town,
middle-class civic life in the America of the 1950s. In addition to the
deleterious trends emphasized in this essay, recent decades have
witnessed a substantial decline in intolerance and probably also in
overt discrimination, and those beneficent trends may be related in
complex ways to the erosion of traditional social capital. Moreover, a
balanced accounting of the social-capital books would need to reconcile
the insights of this approach with the undoubted insights offered by
Mancur Olson and others who stress that closely knit social, economic,
and political organizations are prone to inefficient cartelization and
to what political economists term "rent seeking" and ordinary men and
women call corruption. [12]
-
Finally, and perhaps most urgently, we need to explore creatively how
public policy impinges on (or might impinge on) social-capital
formation. In some well-known instances, public policy has destroyed
highly effective social networks and norms. American slum-clearance
policy of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, renovated physical capital,
but at a very high cost to existing social capital. The
consolidation of country post offices and small school districts has
promised administrative and financial efficiencies, but full-cost
accounting for the effects of these policies on social capital might
produce a more negative verdict. On the other hand, such past
initiatives as the county agricultural-agent system, community
colleges, and tax deductions for charitable contributions illustrate
that government can encourage social-capital formation. Even a recent
proposal in San Luis Obispo, California, to require that all new houses
have front porches illustrates the power of government to influence
where and how networks are formed.
The concept of "civil society" has played a central role in the recent
global debate about the preconditions for democracy and democratization. In
the newer democracies this phrase has properly focused attention on the need
to foster a vibrant civic life in soils traditionally inhospitable to
self-government. In the established democracies, ironically, growing numbers
of citizens are questioning the effectiveness of their public institutions
at the very moment when liberal democracy has swept the battlefield, both
ideologically and geopolitically. In America, at least, there is reason to
suspect that this democratic disarray may be linked to a broad and
continuing erosion of civic engagement that began a quarter-century ago.
High on our scholarly agenda should be the question of whether a comparable
erosion of social capital may be under way in other advanced democracies,
perhaps in different institutional and behavioral guises. High on America's
agenda should be the question of how to reverse these adverse trends in
social connectedness, thus restoring civic engagement and civic trust.
Robert D. Putnam is Dillon Professor of International Affairs and director
of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. His most
recent books are Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and
Domestic Politics (1993) and Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in
Modern Italy (1993), which is reviewed elsewhere in this issue. He is now
completing a study of the revitalization of American democracy.
Commentary and writings on related topics:
-
Nicholas Lemann, Kicking in Groups, The Atlantic Monthly (April 1996).
- Mary Ann Zehr, Getting Involved in Civic Life, Foundation News and
Commentary (May/June 1996). The Foundation News and Commentary is a
publication of The Council on Foundations.
Notes
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Maier, trans.
George Lawrence (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969), 513-17.
2. On social networks and economic growth in the developing world, see
Milton J. Esman and Norman Uphoff, Local Organizations: Intermediaries in
Rural Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), esp. 15-42 and
99-180; and Albert O. Hirschman, Getting Ahead Collectively: Grassroots
Experiences in Latin America (Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press, 1984), esp.
42-77. On East Asia, see Gustav Papanek, "The New Asian Capitalism: An
Economic Portrait," in Peter L. Berger and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, eds.,
In Search of an East Asian Development Model (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction, 1987), 27-80; Peter B. Evans, "The State as Problem and
Solution: Predation, Embedded Autonomy and Structural Change," in Stephan
Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, eds., The Politics of Economic Adjustment
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 139-81; and Gary G. Hamilton,
William Zeile, and Wan-Jin Kim, "Network Structure of East Asian Economies,"
in Stewart R. Clegg and S. Gordon Redding, eds., Capitalism in Contrasting
Cultures (Hawthorne, N.Y.: De Gruyter, 1990), 105-29. See also Gary G.
Hamilton and Nicole Woolsey Biggart, "Market, Culture, and Authority: A
Comparative Analysis of Management and Organization in the Far East,"
American Journal of Sociology (Supplement) 94 (1988): S52-S94; and Susan
Greenhalgh, "Families and Networks in Taiwan's Economic Development," in
Edwin Winckler and Susan Greenhalgh, eds., Contending Approaches to the
Political Economy of Taiwan (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1987), 224-45.
3. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
4. James S. Coleman deserves primary credit for developing the "social
capital" theoretical framework. See his "Social Capital in the Creation of
Human Capital," American Journal of Sociology (Supplement) 94 (1988):
S95-S120, as well as his The Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1990), 300-21. See also Mark Granovetter,
"Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,"
American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): 481-510; Glenn C. Loury, "Why
Should We Care About Group Inequality?" Social Philosophy and Policy 5
(1987): 249-71; and Robert D. Putnam, "The Prosperous Community: Social
Capital and Public Life," American Prospect 13 (1993): 35-42. To my
knowledge, the first scholar to use the term "social capital" in its current
sense was Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New
York: Random House, 1961), 138.
5. Any simplistically political interpretation of the collapse of American
unionism would need to confront the fact that the steepest decline began
more than six years before the Reagan administration's attack on PATCO. Data
from the General Social Survey show a roughly 40-percent decline in reported
union membership between 1975 and 1991.
6. Data for the LWV are available over a longer time span and show an
interesting pattern: a sharp slump during the Depression, a strong and
sustained rise after World War II that more than tripled membership between
1945 and 1969, and then the post-1969 decline, which has already erased
virtually all the postwar gains and continues still. This same historical
pattern applies to those men's fraternal organizations for which comparable
data are available--steady increases for the first seven decades of the
century, interrupted only by the Great Depression, followed by a collapse in
the 1970s and 1980s that has already wiped out most of the postwar expansion
and continues apace.
7. Cf. Lester M. Salamon, "The Rise of the Nonprofit Sector," Foreign
Affairs 73 (July-August 1994): 109-22. See also Salamon, "Partners in Public
Service: The Scope and Theory of Government-Nonprofit Relations," in Walter
W. Powell, ed., The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987), 99-117. Salamon's empirical evidence does not
sustain his broad claims about a global "associational revolution"
comparable in significance to the rise of the nation-state several centuries
ago.
8. Robert Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America's New
Quest for Community (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 45.
9. Ibid., 3-6.
10. I am grateful to Ronald Inglehart, who directs this unique
cross-national project, for sharing these highly useful data with me. See
his "The Impact of Culture on Economic Development: Theory, Hypotheses, and
Some Empirical Tests" (unpublished manuscript, University of Michigan,
1994).
11. See my Making Democracy Work, esp. ch. 6.
12. See Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth,
Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982),
2.
[Project Muse] [SearchPage] [Journals] [Article Top]
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals