13. John R. Seeley, Alexander R. Sim, and Elizabeth W. Loosley, Crestwood Heights: A Study of the Culture of Suburban Life (New York: Basic Books, 1956); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); Glenn Loury, “A Dynamic Theory of Racial Income Differences,” in Women, Minorities, and Employment Discrimination, ed. P. A. Wallace and A. LeMund (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1977), 153–188; Pierre Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1983), 241–258; Ekkehart Schlicht, “Cognitive Dissonance in Economics,” in Normengeleitetes Verhalten in den Sozialwissenschaften (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1984), 61–81; James S. Coleman, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): S95–S120; and James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). See also George C. Homans, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 378–98. Except for a brief acknowledgment by Coleman of Loury’s work, I can find no evidence that any of these theorists were aware of any of the preceding usages. For a comprehensive overview of the conceptual history of “social capital,” see Michael Woolcock, “Social Capital and Economic Development: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis and Policy Framework,” Theory and Society 27 (1998): 151–208.
14. Ronald S. Burt, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Ronald S. Burt, “The Contingent Value of Social Capital,” Administrative Science Quarterly 42 (1997): 339–365; and Ronald S. Burt, “The Gender of Social Capital,” Rationality & Society 10 (1998): 5–46; Claude S. Fischer, “Network Analysis and Urban Studies,” in Networks and Places: Social Relations in the Urban Setting, ed. Claude S. Fischer (New York: Free Press, 1977), 19; James D. Montgomery, “Social Networks and Labor-Market Outcomes: Toward an Economic Analysis,”American Economic Review 81 (1991): 1408–1418, esp. table 1.
15. In earlier work I emphasized this public dimension of social capital almost to the exclusion of the private returns to social capital. See Robert D. Putnam, “The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Affairs,” The American Prospect 13 (1993): 35–42, on which the present text draws. For a literature review that highlights the private returns almost to the exclusion of the collective dimension, see Alejandro Portes, “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 22 (1998): 1–24.
16. Robert Frank in private conversation.
17. Xavier de Souza Briggs, “Social Capital and the Cities: Advice to Change Agents,” National Civic Review 86 (summer 1997): 111–117.
18. U.S. News & World Report (August 4, 1997): 18. Fareed Zakaria, “Bigger Than the Family, Smaller Than the State,” New York Times Book Review, August 13, 1995: 1, pointed out that McVeigh and his co-conspirators spent evenings together in a bowling alley and concluded that “we would all have been better off if Mr. McVeigh had gone bowling alone.” Sometimes, as in certain cults or clans, even the internal effects of social capital can be negative, but these are less common than negative external effects.
19. In Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), I ignored the possibility that social capital might have antisocial effects, but I recognized this possibility explicitly in “The Prosperous Community,” published that same year.
20. So far as I can tell, credit for coining these labels belongs to Ross Gittell and Avis Vidal, Community Organizing: Building Social Capital as a Development Strategy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1998), 8.
21. Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973): 1360–1380; Xavier de Souza Briggs, “Doing Democracy Up Close: Culture, Power, and Communication in Community Building,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 18 (1998):1–13.
22. As quoted in Richard D. Brown, “The Emergence of Voluntary Associations in Massachusetts,” Journal of Voluntary Action Research 2 (April 1973): 64–73, at 69. See also Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).
23. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 506. See also Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), and Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
24. David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
25. Barry Wellman, “The Community Question Re-Evaluated,” in Power, Community, and the City, Michael Peter Smith, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction 1988), 81–107, quotation at 82–83. Pamela Paxton, “Is Social Capital Declining in the United States? A Multiple Indicator Assessment,” American Journal of Sociology 105 (1999): 88–127.
26. The Public Perspective 8 (December/January 1997): 64; Robert Wuthnow, “Changing Character of Social Capital in the United States,” in The Dynamics of Social Capital in Comparative Perspective, Robert D. Putnam, ed. (2000, forthcoming); The Public Perspective 10 (April/May 1999): 15; Wall Street Journal, June 24, 1999, A12; Mark J. Penn, “The Community Consensus,” Blueprint: Ideas for a New Century (spring 1999). Respondents with no opinion are excluded.
27. For example, figures 31–33 present data from six independent sources on trends in philanthropy, but I have also discovered four additional sources that confirm the basic pattern, and those sources are mentioned briefly in the notes. For additional discussion of methodology, see the appendixes.
28. Emma Jackson, “Buddy Had Kidney to Spare,” Ann Arbor News (January 5, 1998). Thanks to Michael Dover for his elegant posting of this story in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Action listserv, www.arnova.org/arnova_l.htm, January 6, 1998.
CHAPTER 2: POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
1. In the mid-1970s Americans were about twice as likely to take an active role in political campaigns as were citizens in Britain, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands; Samuel H. Barnes, Max Kaase, et al., Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979), 541–542. Nearly twenty years later Americans tied for third place among forty democracies (old and new) in the frequency with which we sign petitions, though Americans ranked twentieth out of forty in the frequency with which we discuss politics with our friends; Russell Dalton, Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Western Democracies, 2nd ed. (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1996), 74. On turnout, see Dalton, Citizen Politics, 45.
2. Turnout figures here are from the Statistical Abstract of the United States (various years), based in turn on surveys by the Census Bureau. The numbers in figure 1, based on actual returns from the various states and state-by-state calculations of the eligible electorate, are probably slightly more accurate. However, every source describes essentially the same relative decline. On local turnout, see Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 69. Strictly speaking, voting can be a highly individual act, and in that sense it need not embody social capital. On the other hand, much evidence (beginning with the earliest studies of voting) makes clear that voting is almost always a socially embedded act and that turnout and social engagement are highly correlated. That fact plus the ready availability of measures of turnout across both time and space make it a very useful proxy measure of social involvement.
3. Dalton, Citizen Politics; Raymond E. Wolfinger and Steven J. Rosenstone, Who Votes? (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980); Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Why Americans Don’t Vote (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). Ruy Teixeira, The Disappearing American Voter (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1992), 29–30, summarizes the facts through
1992, before the introduction of motor voter registration. Data on motor voter spending from National Association of Secretaries of State. Stephen Knack, “Drivers Wanted: Motor Voter and the Election of 1996,” PS: Political Science and Politics 32 (June 1999): 237–243, finds that without motor voter, turnout in 1996 would have fallen even further.
4. Figure 1 is confined to presidential elections, but the pattern for off-year elections is the same. I am grateful to Professor Walter Dean Burnham for his latest unpublished estimates of electoral turnout throughout American history. For earlier estimates, see Walter Dean Burnham, “The Turnout Problem,” in Elections American Style, ed. A. James Reichley (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1987), 113–114. In addition to the exclusion of blacks from voting rolls, one-party control in the South lowered white turnout, too. See V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Knopf, 1949), and Piven and Cloward, Why Americans Don’t Vote, ch. 3.
5. James DeNardo, “The Turnout Crash of 1972,” in Politicians and Party Politics, ed. John G. Geer (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 80–101.
6. According to Burnham, turnout in the 1998 election in the states outside the old Confederacy was the lowest since 1818. The decline in turnout in the North in the early years of the twentieth century was also attributable to political reforms, such as registration requirements, that increased obstacles to turnout, whereas the post-1960 decline has occurred in an environment conducive to high levels of voting. The three-decade decline after 1896 was exaggerated by the introduction of women’s suffrage in 1920, which temporarily depressed the turnout for the next two elections. In 1971 the voting age was lowered to eighteen, but that played only a minor role in the overall decline in turnout over the last four decades.
7. See Philip E. Converse, The Dynamics of Party Support: Cohort Analyzing Party Identification (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1976); Glenn Firebaugh, “Methods for Estimating Cohort Replacement Effects,” in Sociological Methodology 1989, ed. C. C. Clogg (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 243–62; and William G. Mayer, The Changing American Mind: How and Why American Public Opinion Changed Between 1960 and 1988 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). A third process of change—life cycle change—often masks, or masquerades as, aggregate change. However, unless the age structure of the population changes, pure life cycle change produces no social change at all, since children simply reproduce the cycle traced by their parents. Over the last half of the twentieth century changes in the age structure of the U.S. population were directly opposite to the aggregate changes in political and social participation; that is, participation increased when the proportion of the population in their peak joining years was declining because of the baby boom (1945–65), and participation decreased when the proportion of the population in their peak joining years was growing as the boomers matured (1965–2000). In other words, taking life cycle factors into account more explicitly would actually magnify the participation trends I discuss.
8. Author’s calculation from Roper Social and Political Trends archive.
9. Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks,The New American Voter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 69, conclude the most exhaustive study of this question: “Generational differences in voting rates… translated into a continual national decline in turnout because of the demographic machinery of generational replacement.”
10. Stephen Knack, “Social Altruism and Voter Turnout: Evidence from the 1991 NES Pilot Study” (College Park: University of Maryland, 1992), M. Margaret Conway, Political Participation in the United States, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1991), 135; James A. McCann, “Electoral Participation and Local Community Activism: Spillover Effects, 1992–1996” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, September 1998) and the research cited there.
11. Verba, Schlozman, Brady, Voice and Equality, 23–24 et passim. On the decline in turnout, see Brody, “The Puzzle of Political Participation”; Wolfinger and Rosenstone, Who Votes?; Teixeira, The Disappearing American Voter; Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993); and Miller and Shanks, The New American Voter.
12. Verba, Schlozman, Brady, Voice and Equality, 362 et passim, and Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 116–134, 196–199.
13. Throughout this book, since the frequency of activities varies widely, I generally emphasize the rate of decline rather than the absolute amount of decline. In other words, both a change from 50 percent to 40 percent of the population engaging in some activity, and from 5 percent to 4 percent, represent declines of one-fifth, or 20 percent. Because our samples are generally very large, even small absolute differences are statistically highly significant. In the Roper data the long-run linear trend in the fraction of the public expressing “a good deal of interest” in current events fell from roughly 50 percent in 1974 to roughly 38 percent in 1998. In the DDB Needham Life Style surveys agreement that “I am interested in politics” slumped from 52 percent in 1975–76 to 42 percent in 1998–99. A separate series of Roper questions (available in Roper Reports [New York: Roper Starch Worldwide, 1995–1998]—not in the Roper Social and Political Trends survey archive) found that the number of Americans who discussed politics “in the last week” fell more or less steadily from 51 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1996.
14. When political interest in the DDB Needham Life Style surveys and interest in current events in the Roper surveys are each regressed on year of birth and year of survey, the regression coefficient for year of birth is quite high, while the coefficient for year of survey is virtually insignificant. In other words, the trends are entirely attributable to intercohort, not intracohort, change. On this methodology, see Firebaugh, “Methods for Estimating Cohort Replacement Effects,” 243–62. Stephen Earl Bennett, “Young Americans’ Indifference to Media Coverage of Public Affairs,” PS: Political Science & Politics 31 (September 1998):540, 539, reports that “individuals between 18 and 29 years of age are less likely than those over 30 to read, listen to, or watch political news stories, and less likely to pay close attention to media coverage of public affairs.” See also Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics, 170.
15. Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, “The Age of Indifference” (Washington, D.C.: Times Mirror Center, June 28, 1990). Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics, 172, confirm that “the knowledge gap … is driven more by generational than life cycle processes.”
16. According to the National Election Studies, in the two presidential elections of the 1950s, 37 percent of voters over 60 and 27 percent of voters under thirty said they were “very much interested” in the election. In the two presidential elections of the 1990s, the equivalent figures were 40 percent for those over sixty and 15 percent for those under thirty.
17. Joseph A. Schlesinger, “The New American Political Party,” American Political Science Review 79 (December 1985):1152–1169; Larry Sabato, The Party’s Just Begun (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1988); John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. 15, 260. Author’s analysis of National Election Studies, 1952–96.
18. Sabato, The Party’s Just Begun, 76. Figure 2 is based on the number of political organizations nationwide liable for Social Security taxes, adjusted for the growth in national population.
19. On declining party identification, see Miller and Shanks, The New American Voter, ch. 7; Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy, ch. 5; and Russell J. Dalton, “Parties without Partisans: The Decline of Party Identifications Among Democratic Publics,” (Irvine: University of California at Irvine, 1998). Independents are much less attentive to politics and public affairs and much less likely to participate. See Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren
E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960), and Miller and Shanks, The New American Voter.
20. Participation has declined in presidential election years more than in midterm years. Roughly half of the decline in presidential year activities and virtually all of the downward trend in midterm activities is due to generational replacement. Two other forms of campaign involvement are also measured in the National Election Studies: 1) displaying one’s political preferences, by wearing a button, putting a campaign sticker on one’s car, or putting up a sign at one’s house; and 2) making a campaign contribution. Both show irregular changes, due in part perhaps to changes in question wording.
21. Author’s analysis of National Election Studies. The question on party contacting is: “Did anyone from one of the political parties call you up or come around and talk to you about the campaign?”
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