22. Marshall Ganz, “Voters in the Crosshairs: How Technology and the Market Are Destroying Politics,” The American Prospect 16 (winter 1994): 100–109; Aldrich, Why Parties?; and R. Kenneth Godwin, “The Direct Marketing of Politics,” in The Politics of Interests, ed. Mark Petracca (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 308–325. Data on campaign spending from Stephen J. Wayne, The Road to the White House 1996: The Politics of Presidential Elections (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 30, 46; Herbert B. Asher, Presidential Elections and American Politics: Voters, Candidates, and Campaigns Since 1952, 5th ed. (Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, 1992), 210–211; and Common Cause (August 1999). One exception to the decline of grassroots organization—the Christian Right—is discussed in chapter 9.
23. John Aldrich and Richard G. Niemi, “The Sixth American Party System: Electoral Change, 1952–1992,” in Broken Contract: Changing Relationships Between Americans and Their Government, ed. Stephen C. Craig (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), 87–109.
24. Verba, Schlozman, and Brady,Voice and Equality, 71–73; 77; 518. Members of a political club fell from 8 percent to 4 percent of the adult population, while contributors to a party or candidate rose from 13 percent to 23 percent.
25. The Roper Social and Political Trends polls continued after December 1994, but the raw data are no longer available to academic researchers. Moreover, the wording and format of the crucial questions changed significantly in January 1995, so that direct comparison with the earlier data is no longer possible. However, trends in the data gathered after the change in format show continued decline on virtually all items at least through 1998. For details on this archive, see appendix I.
26. Within sampling error, the results from the Roper surveys in figure 4 and the National Elections studies in figure 3 are quite consistent. Each data point in the Roper graph is based on roughly ten times as many interviews as each data point in the NES graph, and thus the trends in the Roper data are much smoother than those in the National Election Studies. Mediamark Research annual surveys show a comparable drop of 38 percent between the early 1980s and the late 1990s in the frequency of “actively work[ing] for a political party or candidate.” I am grateful to Mediamark and Julian Baym for sharing these data.
27. Of the 64,210 randomly chosen Americans interviewed by Roper over the four years between 1973 and 1976, exactly 500 (or 0.78 percent) reported that they had been an office seeker or officeholder in the previous 12 months. By 1991–94 that figure had sunk to 0.66 percent. Because of the very large samples involved, there is less than one chance in twenty-five that the time trend is a statistical fluke.
28. Author’s analysis of Roper Social and Political Trends data. Mediamark Research surveys show a drop of roughly 25 percent between the early 1980s and the late 1990s in the frequency of “taking an active part in some local civic issue” and a drop of 35 percent in the frequency of “addressing a public meeting.”
29. For further discussion of ballot initiatives, see chapter 9. The Roper data on petition-signing contradict evidence, in Dalton,Citizen Politics, 76, that petition signing became more common between 1975 and 1990. The Roper surveys are much larger and more frequent than those cited by Dalton. Another possible explanation for the divergence is that the surveys cited by Dalton inquired whether the respondent had “ever” signed a petition, whereas the Roper question was focused on “the last twelve months.” Since younger respondents are more likely to have signed a petition, slow growth in Dalton’s “lifetime” figure might be consistent with decline in the “annual” rate measured by Roper. Nine national surveys conducted between 1974 and 1985 by the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) on behalf of the nation’s supermarkets found a decline from 46 percent in 1974–77 to 30 percent in 1983–85 in the proportion of people who said they had sought to get neighbors to sign a petition;Consumer Attitudes and the Supermarket (Washington, D.C.: Food Marketing Institute, 1983, 1985, 1994, 1995, 1996). These three are the only sources of which I am aware that provide time-series data on petitioning. Roper data on letters to Congress appear inconsistent with data in Verba, Schlozman, and Brady,Voice and Equality, 73, but FMI surveys tend to confirm the Roper results, for the FMI data show a 40 percent decline between 1974–75 and 1984–85 in the proportion of respondents who had “written a letter to Congress demanding that the government do something.” Some researchers report an increase in mail received in Congress, but that is consistent with decreased writing by individuals, if (as seems true anecdotally) a growing fraction of Congressional mail represents mass mailings by lobbying organizations; see Malcolm E. Jewell and Samuel C. Patterson,The Legislative Process in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1977), 306–307; Stephen E. Frantzich,Write Your Congressman: Constituent Communications and Representation (New York: Praeger, 1986); David Thelen,Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). The Roper data suggest a 14 percent decline in letters to the editor between 1973 and 1994, but the DDB Needham data suggest a roughly 10 percent increase in this activity between 1987 and 1998. Mediamark Research surveys show a drop of 15 percent between the early 1980s and the late 1990s in the frequency of writing a letter to the editor, a roughly 20 percent drop in writing an elected official “about a matter of public business,” a 30 percent drop in the frequency of “personally visit[ing] an elected official to express a point of view,” and a 35–40 percent drop in writing or telephoning a radio or TV station. All in all, the balance of the evidence strongly suggests that over the last two to three decades Americans grew less likely to express their views on public matters.
30. The Roper data contradict claims by Everett Carll Ladd, “The Data Just Don’t Show Erosion of America’s ‘Social Capital,’” Public Perspective 7 (June/July 1996): 17, citing evidence in Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality, that the proportion of Americans involved in community collaboration increased between 1967 and 1987. Verba and his colleagues themselves have not claimed (and say privately they do not believe) that evidence from a single pair of surveys should outweigh evidence of continuous change measured in the more than two hundred separate Roper polls conducted monthly over twenty years.
31. Stephen Knack, “Civic Norms, Social Sanctions and Voter Turnout,” Rationality and Society 4 (April 1992): 146–47, argued that the decline in voting represents weaker social connectedness. Knack was one of the first scholars to call attention to the general weakening of social attachments in recent years. See his “Why We Don’t Vote—Or Say ‘Thank You,’” Wall Street Journal, December 31, 1990, and Norval D. Glenn, “Social Trends in the United States,” Public Opinion Quarterly 51 (winter 1987): S109–S126.
32. Lori Weber,The Effects of Democratic Deliberation on Political Tolerance (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1999), 24–42, reports that “social” forms of participation (such as attending meetings) are associated with increased political tolerance, whereas “individual” forms of participation (such as contacting officials) are not.
33. In 1947 the median American adult had completed nine years of formal schooling; in 1998 that figure was about thirteen. According to the Census Bureau, the fraction of adults who had completed high school rose from 31 percent in 1947 to 82 percent in 1998.
34. Author’s analysis of Harris polls archived at the University of North Carolina Institute for Research in the Social Sciences.
CHAPTER 3: CIVIC PARTICIPATION
1. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 513–517.
2. A Gallup poll in 1981 ranked America at the top of twelve industrialized democracies in the frequency of membership in voluntary associations; the 1991 World Values Survey found that among thirty-five nations, the United States tied with Norway for fourth, lagging behind Sweden, Iceland, and the Netherlands. See Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality, 80, and Robert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6 (January 1995): 65–78.
3. Murray Hauskne
cht, The Joiners (New York: Bedminster Press, 1962); Nicholas Babchuk and Alan Booth, “Voluntary Association Membership: A Longitudinal Analysis,” American Sociological Review 34 (February 1969): 31–45.
4. Gale Research Company, Encyclopedia of Associations, as quoted in the Statistical Abstract of the United States (various years); Allan J. Cigler and Burdett A. Loomis, eds., Interest Group Politics, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1991), 11; Kay Lehman Schlozman and John T. Tierney, Organized Interests and American Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); Jack L. Walker, Mobilizing Interest Groups in America: Patrons, Professions, and Social Movements (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); Frank R. Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech, Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. 102–106.
5. David Horton Smith, “National Nonprofit, Voluntary Associations: Some Parameters,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 21 (spring 1992): 81–94. I confirmed Smith’s findings, comparing random samples of two hundred associations with individual members from various editions of the Encyclopedia of Associations (Detroit: Gale Research Co, 1956, 1968, 1978, 1988, and 1998). Average membership per association fell from 111,000 in 1956 to 13,000 in 1998. I am grateful to Adam Hickey for his able assistance on this and other assignments.
6. In 1971, 19 percent of all national nonprofit associations had their headquarters in Washington; by 1981 29 percent did, according to Robert H. Salisbury, “Interest Representation: The Dominance of Institutions,” American Political Science Review 78 (March 1984): 64–76. See also Cigler and Loomis, Interest Group Politics, 3rd ed., and Smith, “National Nonprofit, Voluntary Associations.”
7. Theda Skocpol, “Advocates without Members: The Recent Transformation of American Civic Life,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, eds. Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 461–509.
8. Jeffrey M. Berry, Lobbying for the People: The Political Behavior of Public Interest Groups (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 42. After canvasing major national newspapers, the Congressional Quarterly, the Encyclopedia of Associations, and a wide array of registered lobbyists, Berry (p. 14) concluded that “this survey represents an extremely high percentage—surely above 80 percent—of the true number of public interest groups that existed at the time of the interviewing (September 1972–June 1973).”
9. These figures are calculated from the survey reported in Walker, Mobilizing Interest Groups in America. Among the citizens’ groups, the correlation between date of founding and the presence of chapters with individual members was r = -.17, statistically significant at the .01 level. On the anomaly of public-interest groups without members, see Frank J. Sorauf, The Wall of Separation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976); Berry, Lobbying for the People; Michael T. Hayes, “The New Group Universe,” in Interest Group Politics, 2nd ed., ed. Allan J. Cigler and Burdett A. Loomis (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1986), 134; and Theda Skocpol, “Civic America, Then and Now,” in Putnam, Dynamics of Social Capital in Comparative Perspective.
10. Charles R. Morris, The AARP: America’s Most Powerful Lobby (New York: Times Books, 1996), 23–43. Cristine L. Day, What Older Americans Think: Interest Groups and Aging Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 66.
11. Sociologists use the term primary associations to refer to one’s most intimate connections—the family and intimate friends—and secondary associations to refer to less intimate connections, such as churches, unions, and community organizations. For a prescient analysis, see Bernard Barber, “Participation and Mass Apathy in Associations,” in Studies in Leadership, ed. A. W. Gouldner (New York: Harper, 1950).
12. Some of these organizations, of course, provide their members with commercial services, like group insurance or high-fashion T-shirts, but in this role they are indistinguishable from other mail-order firms.
13. Data on membership in veterans organizations from the General Social Survey, 1974–94; data on number of living veterans from the Veterans Administration. Data on membership in unions from the Department of Labor annual survey; data on numbers of labor unions from the Encyclopedia of Associations.
14. Christopher J. Bosso, “The Color of Money: Environmental Groups and the Pathologies of Fund Raising,” in Interest Group Politics, 4th ed., ed. Allan J. Cigler and Burdett A. Loomis (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1995), 101–130, esp. 117, and interviews with staff members. On direct-mail marketing by “citizens groups,” see Jeffrey M. Berry, The Interest Group Society, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 1997), 77–80; and Paul E. Johnson, “Interest Group Recruiting: Finding Members and Keeping Them,” in Interest Group Politics, 5th ed., ed. Allan J. Cigler and Burdett A. Loomis (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1998), 35–62.
15. Figure 8 is intended only as a rough summary of the experiences of more than thirty separate organizations; interested readers are urged to consult the separate charts for each organization, given in appendix III. Given the inevitable uncertainty about membership data extending across an entire century and the unavoidable arbitrariness about which groups to include, the details of figure 8 should not be overinterpreted. I have sought to encompass all large national chapter-based civic organizations in the 1950s and 1960s plus any that came into existence thereafter (none did) plus a selection of smaller “niche” organizations, like Hadassah, NAACP, Optimists, and the 4-H. (Labor unions and professional associations are excluded from figure 8 but discussed in chapter 5.) Because the broad outlines of figure 8 are echoed in most of this diverse group of organizations, I am fairly confident that it represents broad historical trends in the membership of such organizations. In order to bias figure 8 against my hypothesis—declining membership in the last third of the twentieth century—I excluded several large nineteenth-century associations that moved toward extinction in the first half of the twentieth century, such as the Redmen fraternal group, though I included a few that remained strong after World War II, such as the Odd Fellows. Including all such groups would diminish the apparent growth in associational vitality in the first half of the twentieth century and magnify the decline thereafter. These inclusions or exclusions would not, however, decisively alter the broad profile of figure 8. For each organization listed in appendix III I calculated annual national membership as a fraction of the relevant population— PTA membership per one thousand families with children, American Legion membership per one thousand veterans, Hadassah membership per one thousand Jewish women, and so on. For missing years, I interpolated membership from adjacent years. To weight each organization equally, regardless of its size and market share, I computed “standard scores” for each organization, comparing its market share in a given year to its average market share over the century as a whole, and then averaged the standard scores of all organizations in a given year. Because of this standardization method, the vertical axis measures not absolute membership rates, but trends relative to the century-long average. I am grateful to Professor Theda Skocpol for many illuminating discussions about the history of associations in America, as well as for generously sharing data collected in her own research project on this theme. However, I alone am responsible for the evidence and conclusions presented here. See Theda Skocpol, with the assistance of Marshall Ganz, Ziad Munson, Bayliss Camp, Michele Swers, and Jennifer Oser, “How America Became Civic,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, eds. Skocpol and Fiorina, 27–80.
16. Though quantitative data on nineteenth-century associationism are scarce, it appears that the only period of unambiguous decline in associational activity between 1865 and 1965 was from 1930 to 1935. For some evidence and relevant historiography, see Gerald Gamm and Robert D. Putnam, “The Growth of Voluntary Associations in America, 1840–1940,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (spring 1999), 511–557. John Harp and Richard J. Gagan, “Changes in Rural Social Organ
izations: Comparative Data from Three Studies,” Rural Sociology 34 (1969): 80–85, report that organizational density was unchanged between 1924 and 1936 and then increased by 50 percent by 1964— independent confirmation of figure 8.
17. American civic life also quickened after 1865 and after 1918, but both those postwar booms proved reasonably durable, even in the face of substantial economic dislocation, whereas the slump after 1960 began and persisted in periods of prosperity. In other words, the post-1960 slump should not be interpreted as merely some reversion to prewar “normalcy.”
18. Babchuk and Booth, “Voluntary Association Membership,” 34.
19. Susan Crawford and Peggy Levitt, “Social Change and Civic Engagement: The Case of the PTA,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Skocpol and Fiorina, 249–296, quotation at 250–251.
20. PTO gains could account at most for only a fraction of PTA losses. The Third PTA National Education Survey (Los Angeles: Newsweek, 1993) found that two-thirds of all households that belonged to any school-based group belonged to the PTA, so even on the utterly improbable assumption that there were no nonaffiliated PTOs in 1960, the hypothetical increase in nonaffiliated groups could not equal the decline in PTA-affiliated membership. Moreover, at least one of the largest nonaffiliated local groups—the United Parents Associations of New York City—itself experienced massive membership drops after the early 1960s. See Sam Dillon, “A Surge in Advocacy Within Parent Groups,” New York Times, October 13, 1993.
21. Tom W. Smith, “Trends in Voluntary Group Membership: Comments on Baumgartner and Walker,” American Journal of Political Science 34 (August 1990): 646–661, quotation at 647 (emphasis added).
22. Frank R. Baumgartner and Jack L. Walker, “Survey Research and Membership in Voluntary Associations,” American Journal of Political Science 32 (November 1988): 908–928; Smith, “Trends in Voluntary Group Membership.”
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