BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  By contrast, none of the “old-fashioned” chapter-based organizations that attained record membership after World War II and whose travails we summarized in figure 8 lost as much as 85 percent of its membership in the three or four decades from its postwar peak to the end of the century.38 The reason is obvious and yet crucial in understanding the difference between the older and newer organizational types: Members of the Moose Club or Hadassah are joined to the organization not merely by symbolic ties, but by real ties to real people—that is, by social capital. Members of the local American Legion post are kept there, not mainly by patriotism or by a desire to lobby for more funds for the Veterans Administration, but by long-standing personal ties among the guys. The tensile strength of the newer organizations is much weaker. As Christopher Bosso concludes, supporters of mail-order organizations are less “members” than “consumers” of a cause. “The sharp decline in Greenpeace’s numbers in the 1990s may reflect a market axiom that today’s hot product is tomorrow’s remaindered bin.”39

  Most affiliates of tertiary associations do not even consider themselves “members.” More than half of Environmental Defense Fund “members” say that “I don’t really think of myself as a member; the money I send is just a contribution.” Another survey of “members” of five top environmental organizations found that they averaged less than three years’ affiliation, that more than half were affiliated with four or more such groups, and that only 8 percent described themselves as “active,” all of which is consistent with a purely “checkbook affiliation.”40 (The remarkable overlap in membership among different groups is due, of course, to direct-mail recruitment, since the groups are prospecting from the same mailing lists.) They are valued supporters and genuine rooters for environmentalism as a good cause, but they are not themselves active in the cause.41 They don’t see themselves as movement foot soldiers in any sense like the young African Americans who sat in lunch counters in Greensboro in 1960, and neither should we.

  Minimal commitment among mail-order members is hardly unique to environmental groups. For example, only one out of five Common Cause members said that they would like to be more active in the group, if given an opportunity. Membership in the National Rifle Association tripled between 1977 and 1996—despite (or because of) a national trend in favor of gun control—but the annual renewal rate of NRA members is barely 25 percent.42 Scarcely half of the “members” of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) describe themselves as members. Three-quarters of NARAL affiliates have no idea how many of their friends are also members, and two-thirds have never encouraged friends to join. As sociologist John McCarthy, who conducted these polls, concluded, the results “strongly suggest that [NARAL members] did not talk with their friends about membership in the organization.”43 And indeed, why should they, if they think of themselves as fans, not players?

  It is sometimes suggested that members of groups like Greenpeace are engaged in “proxy” political participation.44 In fact, neither the groups’ leaders nor the members see the group as a vehicle for participatory democracy. Barely one in every five members of Friends of the Earth and Amnesty International say that “being politically active” is an important reason why they joined.45 As two close students of tertiary groups conclude,

  Mail-order groups permit a form of political participation which can be labeled cheap participation. For a cost below the threshold of serious analysis by the relatively affluent potential member, they can make a political statement of preference, without engaging in the costs (time and money) of “real” participation…. It is the casual nature of the engagement rather than subsequent disillusionment that accounts for turnover.46

  Even early observers of the sixties raised questions about how truly participatory those movements had become. In their classic analysis in the early 1970s, sociologists John McCarthy and Mayer Zald emphasized that “the functions historically served by a social movement membership base have been … increasingly taken over by paid functionaries, by the ‘bureaucratization of social discontent,’ by mass promotion campaigns, by full-time employees whose professional careers are defined in terms of social movement participation, by philanthropic foundations, and by government itself.” By the 1990s, political scientist Ronald Shaiko reported, “The era of flannel-shirted, ‘Flower Power’ antiestablishmentarianism has virtually vanished. Today … public interest organizations are hiring economists, Ivy League lawyers, management consultants, direct mail specialists, and communications directors.”47

  Some critics object to the new tertiary organizations as oligarchic and unresponsive, a product of political betrayal or “selling out.” That is not my view. On the contrary, as political scientist Christopher Bosso explains, “The major environmental groups in fact are playing roles that one expects of mature organizations within a political context that forces groups to grow and professionalize or die.”48 Competition for dues makes tertiary organizations sensitive to their constituents, and those that fail to win support die. Moreover, traditional civic organizations had important oligarchic features. Robert Michels’s famous “iron law of oligarchy,” after all, was coined to describe organizations with active grassroots affiliates.49 My argument is not that direct-mail organizations are morally evil or politically ineffective. It may be more efficient technically for us to hire other people to act for us politically. However, such organizations provide neither connectedness among members nor direct engagement in civic give-and-take, and they certainly do not represent “participatory democracy.” Citizenship by proxy is an oxymoron.

  Only two or three of the dozen or so major environmental organizations whose massive membership growth is charted in figure 43 have any local chapters at all. As the membership director of one explained wearily when we asked about membership activities, “Membership simply means that you gave us some money at least once in the last two years.” Even where a formal structure of state and local chapters exists, it has atrophied. A 1989 membership survey by the Sierra Club itself found that although its members were much more active politically than the average American, only 13 percent had ever attended even a single Sierra Club meeting. The National Audubon Society claims hundreds of chapters nationwide, but of the twenty-eight thousand NAS members in Texas, for example, state officials of the organization estimate that only 3–4 percent are active. In other words, fewer than one Texan in fifteen thousand is active in the one environmental organization with the sturdiest surviving local structure. By comparison, every week twenty times as many Texans gather for lunch at “old-fashioned” Rotary clubs.50

  Close observers of the environmental movement claim that “a fundamental change in environmentalism since 1970 has been a rapid increase in the number and prominence of grassroots organizations.”51 At least on the surface, public support for environmentalism seems strong, although it weakened noticeably as the twentieth century ended. By 1990 three-quarters of Americans told the Gallup poll that we considered ourselves “environmentalists,” although this figure fell sharply and steadily during the 1990s, so that by the end of the decade the number of self-declared environmentalists had fallen by one-third to only 50 percent.52 More than 60 percent of us claim that we often make a special effort to recycle, half claim to have given money to an environmental group in the past five years, 30 percent claim to have signed a petition about an environmental issue, 10 percent claim to be a member of a proenvironmental group, and 3 percent claim to have taken part in an environmental protest or demonstration.53

  There is, however, some reason to believe that these estimates may be exaggerated. Although local groups seem to have become more numerous on issues like toxic waste and land conservation in recent years, I have been able to find no hard evidence that grassroots environmentalism in general has grown. In fact, the only systematic evidence I have found on trends in conservation and environmental organizations at the state and local level and on environmental activism tends to suggest a decline over the last several decade
s. For example, according to annual surveys by Yankelovich Partners, the fraction of Americans who agreed that “I’m concerned about what I myself can do to protect our environment and natural resources” rose unevenly from 50 percent in 1981 to 55 percent in 1990–92 and then fell steadily to 40 percent in 1999, the lowest recording on that barometer in nearly two decades.54 The gentlest verdict on the claim of growing grassroots environmental activism is “not proved.”

  If the evidence for grassroots involvement in “progressive” social movements is weak, the comparable evidence for grassroots vitality among religious conservatives is much stronger. In the 1950s and 1960s McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, White Citizens’ councils, and the Wallace presidential campaign represented mass-based conservative, anti-Communist, and segregationist movements, but each of those groups mobilized at most several hundred thousand participants and many fewer activists. In the 1970s, riding a wave of religious fundamentalism, the Christian Right emerged as a political force, but organizationally it consisted of a few centralized national direct-mail operations, particularly the Moral Majority headed by Jerry Falwell. However, the 1980s saw the formation of several genuinely grassroots conservative evangelical organizations, ranging from the violently antiabortion Operation Rescue to the more mainstream Christian Coalition, headed by Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed, and the nominally apolitical Promise-Keepers. The Christian Coalition and Promise-Keepers each claimed several million active participants, an order of magnitude larger than any previous mass-based conservative movement in the twentieth century. The fate of these specific organizations, each founded less than a decade ago, is uncertain. What they (and other, smaller religiously based organizations of both the Left and Right) signify, however, is much more important—the appearance of a substantial cadre of highly motivated citizen-activists.55

  As part of the religious boom in America after World War II, the center of gravity of Protestant evangelicalism gradually moved from the rural and socially peripheral fringes of fundamentalism toward middle-class suburban communities. Membership in denominations associated with the National Association of Evangelicals (the evangelical equivalent of the mainstream National Council of Churches) more than tripled from the 1940s to 1970s, and as we saw earlier, evangelical churches have been hit less hard by the subsequent decline in religious observance.56 More important, the traditional repugnance of fundamentalism for political involvement was gradually reversed.

  Prior to 1974, as sociologist Robert Wuthnow has pointed out, most studies found evangelicals less disposed to political participation than other Americans—less likely to vote, to join political groups, to write to public officials, and to favor religious involvement in politics. After 1974, by contrast, most studies have found them more involved politically than other Americans.57 This historic change is due in part to the expansion of evangelicalism into social strata more accustomed to political participation, but also evangelicalism itself has become more sympathetic to civic engagement. As Christian Smith, author of the most recent study of evangelical involvement in public life, has observed, “Which Christian tradition is actually doing the work of trying to influence American society? It is the evangelicals who are most walking their talk.”58

  This important change in the social bases of American politics aptly illustrates how social capital, civic engagement, and social movements feed on one another. In part, the political mobilization of evangelicals illustrates the effects of new issues (abortion, sexual morality, “family values”), new techniques (television and other instruments of contemporary political organizing), and a new generation of political entrepreneurs. On the other hand, unlike other newly mobilized groups, such as environmentalists, firm and enduring organizational foundations for the politicization of the evangelical community already existed. As several close observers of the new evangelical activism have noted, “Religious people are enmeshed in webs of local churches, channels of religious information, and networks of religious associations that make them readily available for mobilization.”59 So this social movement is both drawing on and replenishing stocks of social capital in at least one portion of American society.

  In some respects, evangelical activists look very much like other activists in America—older, whiter, more educated, more affluent—but religion is extraordinarily important in their lives. Of one national sample of religious activists, 60 to 70 percent attended church more than once a week, compared with less than 5 percent of other Americans. And in a development that would have astounded and probably appalled their fundamentalist forebears, they are three to five times more active than the average American in virtually all forms of civic and political life.60

  In the 1996 election evangelicals were more than twice as likely as other Americans to discuss the election in church with a friend and to be contacted by a religious interest group. They were, in fact, more likely to be contacted about the campaign by religious groups than by parties or candidates. The most important predictor of this contact was neither demography nor theology, but simply social engagement in the religious community. And these religious contacts—especially talking politics in church with a friend—had a demonstrable impact on who voted and for whom. The link between involvement in the church community and political mobilization was powerful and direct.61 Religious conservatives have created the largest, best-organized grassroots social movement of the last quarter century. It is, in short, among evangelical Christians, rather than among the ideological heirs of the sixties, that we find the strongest evidence of an upwelling of civic engagement against the ebb tide described in earlier chapters.

  What of the broader hypothesis that modes of “elite-challenging” participation introduced by the social movements of the sixties are now conventional across the political spectrum? One measure seems to support this hypothesis, for popular initiatives and referenda came to play a bigger role in politics in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, as figure 44 shows, the frequency of statewide ballot initiatives over the twentieth century is the mirror image of virtually all the other trends in civic engagement we have explored—falling from the first decade of the century until the late 1960s (except for a rise during the Great Depression), then skyrocketing in the last third of the century.62 According to some political rhetoric, this rise of ballot initiatives is an institutionalized form of “all power to the people.”63

  Contrary to their populist pedigree, however, these devices cannot be taken as a reliable sign of widespread civic engagement. In the first place, five states account for more than half of all ballot initiatives nationwide in the twentieth century—California, Oregon, North Dakota, Colorado, and Arizona— and much of the recent growth is attributable to California alone, so the use of referenda is not necessarily a good metric for citizen involvement everywhere.64 Second, although civic activists have sometimes placed issues like coastal management and term limits on the ballot, most scholars agree that

  Figure 44: Initiatives on Statewide Ballots in the United States, 1900–1998

  [in] the past two decades, virtually all successful drives have relied, at least predominantly, on professional circulation firms. One study [by the California Commission on Campaign Financing] concluded, “… Any individual, corporation, or organization with approximately $1 million to spend can now place any issue on the ballot….Qualifying an initiative for the statewide ballot is thus no longer so much a measure of general citizen interest as it is a test of fundraising ability.” 65

  Although one might imagine that such ballot contests might spark widespread political discussion by ordinary citizens, studies show that most signers don’t read what they sign. During the campaign itself, direct-mail and radio and television sound-bite advertising, much of it deceptive, is more important than grassroots activity. It is thus hardly surprising that campaign spending is a strong predictor of the outcome and that surveys indicate “a very low degree of voter sophistication” on referenda issues.66 Based on detailed study of ballot initiativ
es in Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, and California in 1976–1982, political scientist Betty Zisk concluded, “Far from replacing group lobbying efforts vis-à-vis the legislature, the initiative and referenda campaigns seem to provide an alternative channel for the very group activities the reformers denounced…. The opportunity for direct participation does not seem to have galvanized large numbers of voters.”67 In short, the rise of ballot initiatives is a better measure of the power of well-financed special interests than of civic engagement.

  Demonstrations and other public protests in Washington have become somewhat larger and more frequent since the late 1960s, as media-savvy protest organizers have become more sophisticated about how to garner national television coverage.68 On the other hand, the great civil rights and Vietnam marches of the sixties were preceded and followed by continuing activism in communities across the country, whereas a “March on Washington” in the 1990s provided no assurance of continuing, community-based action. For example, less than six months after sponsoring the “Stand in the Gap” rally of half a million men on the Mall on October 4, 1997, said to be the largest religious gathering in American history, Promise-Keepers virtually collapsed, laying off its entire staff.69

  Available survey evidence suggests slight growth in nationwide rates of demonstration and protest over the last quarter century. According to the Roper Social and Political Trends survey archive, the fraction of adults who say that they had ever been in a protest march or sit-in rose from 7 percent in 1978 to 10 percent in 1994. Other surveys, too, during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s consistently estimated participation in demonstrations and protests at roughly one in ten to fifteen adults, with a slight tendency for the estimates to rise over the years. The abortion issue alone appears to account for roughly one-third of all such activities. On the other hand, the explanation for the rising fraction of the population who have ever protested is the departure of the pre-1960s generation of non protesters at the top of the age hierarchy, not the addition of new protesters at the bottom. As figure 45 shows, protesting is less common among twenty-somethings now than it was among people that age in the sixties and seventies, but protesting has become more common among middle-aged and older people, as the sixties generation itself aged. Protest marchers have steadily and rapidly grayed over the past several decades.70