Urban planing history: summary

Copyright © 1995 National Endowment for Democracy and the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.

Journal of Democracy 6.1 (1995) 65-78

Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital

Robert D. 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 [End Page 67] 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 [End Page 68] 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 [End Page 69] 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 [End Page 70] 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 [End Page 71]

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. [End Page 73]

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

[End Page 74] 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. [End Page 75]

 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, [End Page 76] 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.