BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  56. Data from the American Bowling Congress.

  57. Figure on annual bowlers from Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1998, table 437, 265. Other sources give the somewhat lower estimate of 54 million for annual bowling participants. The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, “Turnout Dips to 56-Year Low” (Washington, D.C.: CSAE, November 5, 1998), at www.epn.org/csae/cgans4.html reported that 72.5 million Americans voted in 1998.

  58. Attendance at horse and greyhound racing and jai-alai collapsed with the rise of legalized gambling in the 1980s and is excluded from figure 27. We are, it appears, increasingly gambling alone. Seasonally adjusted Roper survey data on whether the respondent had gone out to watch a sports event in the preceding week show a modest increase from roughly 8 percent in the early 1970s to roughly 10–12 percent in the late 1980s. According to a 1993 survey three to five times as many people watch sports on TV as attend games; see Public Perspective 5 (March/April 1994), 98. To some extent the growth in spectatorship at professional sports events (and quasi-professional events, like college football and basketball) is offset by a decline in spectatorship at amateur sports events like high school football and basketball, a trade-off that probably reflects a net decline in community connectedness.

  59. In unpublished analyses of the DBB Needham Life Style survey archive for 1997–1998, Thad Williamson (Department of Government, Harvard University, 1999) found that, controlling for age, sex, education, and financial, marital, and parental status, and general leisure activity level, attendance at live sporting events is positively associated with civic engagement. However, this “pro-civic” effect of sports spectatorship appears confined to amateur sporting events—Little League, high school football, and college soccer.

  60. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style surveys.

  61. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style surveys. According to National Endowment for the Arts surveys of arts participation, lifetime exposure to music lessons declined from 47 percent in 1982 to 40 percent in 1992.

  62. Music USA 1997 (Carlsbad, Calif.: National Association of Music Merchants, 1997): 37–38.

  CHAPTER 7: ALTRUISM, VOLUNTEERING, AND PHILANTHROPY

  1. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 164. See also Theda Skocpol, “America’s Voluntary Groups Thrive in a National Network,” The Brookings Review 15 (fall 1997): 16–19. I am grateful to Gerald Gamm and Celia Borenstein for the story about Providence.

  2. Everett Carll Ladd, The Ladd Report (New York: Free Press, 1999), 131–145.

  3. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review 148 (June 1889), 653–664.

  4. F. Emerson Andrews, Philanthropic Giving (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1950), 141. Professionalization of philanthropy accelerated at the end of the twentieth century; for example, membership in the National Society of Fund Raising Executives grew tenfold from 1,900 in 1979 to 18,800 in 1997.

  5. The Chronicle of Philanthropy, October 30, 1997; Debra Blum, “United States Has 7 Charities per 10,000 People, Study Shows,” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, August 7, 1997. Tax laws help explain the boom in newly organized charities.

  6. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 526. Sources for previous paragraph: Volunteering: Hodgkinson and Weitzman, Giving and Volunteering 1996, 3; they find that informal helping, though perhaps underreported, accounts for less than one-quarter of all volunteering. Philanthropy: Ann E. Kaplan, ed., Giving USA 1998 (New York: AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, 1998). Blood: E. L. Wallace, et al., “Collection and Transfusion of Blood and Blood Components in the United States, 1992,” Transfusion 35 (October 1995): 802–812. According to the Harris Poll #88 (December 24, 1996), 76 percent of blood donors cite “wanting to help others” as the reason for their donation. 1989 survey: Lichang Lee, Jane Allyn Piliavin, and Vaughn R. A. Call, “Giving Time, Money, and Blood: A Comparative Analysis” (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin, 1998). All three estimates are inflated by the public’s desire to appear altruistic, but their relative standing is probably accurate.

  7. Giving and Volunteering: 1996, 35–38, and Jane Allyn Piliavin and Hong-Wen Charng, “Altruism: A Review of Recent Theory and Research,” Annual Review of Sociology 16 (1990): 27–65, esp. 56.

  8. The following generalizations are commonly reported in the scientific literature and confirmed by the author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style and Roper Social and Political Trends archives, as well as Giving and Volunteering survey data for 1996.

  9. Paul G. Schervish and John J. Havens, “Do the Poor Pay More? Is the U-Shaped Curve Correct?” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 24 (spring 1995): 79–90.

  10. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style and Roper Social and Political Trends surveys. (In the DDB Needham Life Style data, regular blood donation is slightly lower in rural areas than in big cities, but that is not the usual finding.) On size-of-place differences in altruism, see Charles Korte and Nancy Kerr, “Responses to Altruistic Opportunities in Urban and Nonurban Settings,” Journal of Social Psychology 95 (April 1975): 183–184; James S. House and Sharon Wolf, “Effects of Urban Residence on Interpersonal Trust and Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (1978): 1029–1043; Thomas C. Wilson, “Settlement Type and Interpersonal Estrangement: A Test of the Theories of Wirth and Gans,” Social Forces 64 (September 1985): 139–150; Nancy Mehrkens Steblay, “Helping Behavior in Rural and Urban Environments: A Meta Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 102 (November 1987): 346–356; Jane Allyn Piliavin, “Why Do They Give the Gift of Life? A Review of Research on Blood Donors Since 1977,” Transfusion 30 (June 1990): 444–459; David Horton Smith, “Determinants of Voluntary Association Participation and Volunteering: A Literature Review,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 23 (fall 1994): 243–263; and Julian Wolpert, Patterns of Generosity in America: Who’s Holding the Safety Net? (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1993).

  11. On age, philanthropy, and volunteering, in addition to the author’s analysis of the DDB Needham Life Style and Roper Social and Political Trends surveys, see the Giving and Volunteering series; Charles T. Clotfelter, Federal Tax Policy and Charitable Giving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Anne Statham and Patricia Rhoton, “Mature and Young Women’s Volunteer Work, 1974–1981” (Columbus, Ohio: Center for Human Resource Research, Ohio State University, February 1986); Richard B. Freeman, “Working for Nothing: The Supply of Volunteer Labor,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 5435 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, January 1996); and Wilson and Musick, “Who Cares?” My interest in philanthropy is as an indicator of altruism and social capital among ordinary Americans, rather than as a sustainer of the nonprofit sector, so I have not concentrated on giving by the wealthy, although unpublished work by Boston College sociologist Paul Schervish suggests that such giving constitutes a growing fraction of American philanthropy. Teresa Odendahl, Charity Begins at Home: Generosity and Self-Interest Among the Philanthropic Elite (New York: Basic Books, 1990), and Francie Ostrower, Why the Wealthy Give: The Culture of Elite Philanthropy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), show that social capital among the wealthy themselves is crucial to their giving.

  12. On work and volunteering, see David Horton Smith, “Determinants of Voluntary Association Participation and Volunteering”; Richard B. Freeman, “Working for Nothing”; and Lewis M. Segal, Four Essays on the Supply of Volunteer Labor and Econometrics (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1993). Both DDB Needham Life Style and Roper Social and Political Trends survey archives confirm that volunteering is higher among part-time employees than among either full-time employees or those with no paid employment.

  13. Giving and Volunteering 1996, 6. This source (at 4-131) reports that the strongest single predictor of how much people volunteer is the strength of their informal ties to others in community organizations.

  14. Fi
gure 28 and the associated discussion are based on the author’s analysis of the DDB Needham Life Style archives and substantiated by the Gallup Poll-Independent Sector Giving and Volunteering data.

  15. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style survey data. These relationships persist under stringent controls for other demographic predictors.

  16. John Wilson and Marc Musick, “Who Cares?”; and John Wilson and Marc Musick, “Attachment to Volunteering,” Sociological Forum 14 (June 1999): 243–272. Family ties—a special form of social capital—are also highly predictive of volunteering. Volunteering runs in families, as does spontaneous helping. See Giving and Volunteering 1996, 4-90; Segal, Four Essays; Freeman, “Working for Nothing,” 8–9.

  17. Giving and Volunteering: 1996, 6, 4-92 to 4-95. Richard D. Reddy, “Individual Philanthropy and Giving Behavior,” in Participation in Social and Political Activities, ed. David Horton Smith and Jacqueline Macaulay (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980), 370–399, summarizes seven studies between 1957 and 1975: the more participation, the more contributions. Roper Social and Political Trends survey data on charitable giving confirm this pattern. In a multiple regression analysis giving is best predicted by civic engagement (especially organizational leadership and attendance at meetings), followed by year of birth and education.

  18. According to the DDB Needham Life Style surveys, 15 percent of regular church- and/or clubgoers are regular blood donors, compared with fewer than 10 percent of nonmembers. According to the Roper Social and Political Trends surveys, 20 percent of people who have served as an officer or committee member of a local organization or who have attended a local public meeting in the last year have also given blood, compared with 10 percent of other Americans. In multiple regression analyses of both DDB Needham and Roper surveys the strongest predictors of blood donation are age and gender (women and the elderly give blood less often, presumably for physiological reasons), full-time employment (presumably because of blood donation at work), church and club attendance, frequency of volunteering, small-town residence, and education, in that order. On philanthropy, altruism, and social capital, see Reddy, “Individual Philanthropy and Giving Behavior”; Piliavin and Charng, “Altruism”; Jane Allyn Piliavin and Peter L. Callero, Giving Blood: The Development of an Altruistic Identity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Amato, “Personality and Social Network Involvement as Predictors of Helping”; and Krzysztof Kaniasty and Fran H. Norris, “In Search of Altruistic Community: Patterns of Social Support Mobilization Following Hurricane Hugo,” American Journal of Community Psychology 23 (August 1995): 447–477.

  19. Gabriel Berger, Factors Explaining Volunteering for Organizations in General, and Social Welfare Organizations in Particular (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1991); and Amato, “Personality and Social Network Involvement as Predictors of Helping.” Without random-assignment experiments—in which some people are required to attend church and civic organizations and others are prevented from doing so—we cannot exclude that some unmeasured “social propensity” wholly explains the linkages among giving, volunteering, and community involvement, but the detailed pattern of correlations makes this unlikely.

  20. See Giving and Volunteering: 1996 and Alvin W. Drake, Stan N. Finkelstein, and Harvey M. Sapolsky, The American Blood Supply (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982). “Being asked” is a powerful determinant of who volunteers, even after controlling for other social and personality traits. See Berger, Factors Explaining Volunteering; Freeman, “Working for Nothing”; and Richard B. Freeman, “Give to Charity?—Well, Since You Asked” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1993).

  21. For evidence on the propositions in this paragraph, see Wilson and Musick, “Who Cares?”; Amato, “Personality and Social Network Involvement as Predictors of Helping”; Harvey Hornstein, Cruelty and Kindness: A New Look at Aggression and Altruism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), esp. 133; and Giving and Volunteering: 1996, 4-88. This source (at 4-129-31) ranks youthful volunteering as the single strongest predictor of adult volunteering, controlling for dozens of other social and psychological factors. The link between social connectedness and giving and volunteering remains powerful under controls for all relevant demographic factors, including education, wealth, age, gender, and marital and work status; in fact, measures of social connectedness often reduce the demographic correlations to insignificance. These conclusions (based on the author’s analyses of DDB Needham Life Style, Roper Social and Political Trends, and Independent Sector data archives, using a score of different measures of community involvement and altruistic behavior) are confirmed by Hausknecht, The Joiners, 100, 109; Paul R. Amato, “Personality and Social Network Involvement as Predictors of Helping Behavior in Everyday Life,” Social Psychology Quarterly 53 (March 1990): 31–43; Smith, “Determinants of Voluntary Association Participation and Volunteering”; Jackson, et al., “Volunteering and Charitable Giving”; and Wilson and Musick, “Who Cares?”

  22. Ladd, “The Data Just Don’t Show Erosion of America’s ‘Social Capital,’” 17.

  23. Data from Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1997.

  24. “Tithe: to contribute or pay a tenth part of one’s annual income.” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992).

  25. All historical estimates of personal philanthropy are somewhat rough, so it is essential to find consistent long-term data series. Sources for figure 3 are given in appendix II. Our analysis concentrates on giving by living individuals, since this is most relevant to social capital. In the finances of the nonprofit sector, a partially offsetting trend has been the growth in charitable foundations and in bequests from wealthy patrons, but those developments reflect the bull market more than changes in altruism. Meanwhile, corporate philanthropy as a share of pretax income rose sharply in the early 1980s and has slumped since then. See Giving USA: 1998 for details on all nonindividual philanthropy. An independent source for the first half of the period covered by figure 31, the U.S. Treasury Department Report on Private Foundations (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965), 67, estimated that between 1929 and 1962 gifts from living individuals as a fraction of adjusted gross income increased by 78 percent. Several independent sources confirm the downward trend in the second half of the period covered by figure 31: 1) the Filer Commission report, Giving in America: Toward a Stronger Voluntary Sector (Washington, D.C.: Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs, 1975), 82–83, which reported a decline of 15 percent in personal philanthropy between 1960 and 1972; and 2) the Department of Labor’s regular Consumer Expenditure Survey, which shows a steady decline in household contributions as a fraction of after-tax income from 3.4 percent in 1984–85 to 2.7 percent in 1996–97, a decline of more than one-fifth in little more than a decade. For technical reasons described in John and Sylvia Ronsvalle, The State of Church Giving through 1995 (Champaign, Ill.: empty tomb, 1997), chapter 6, the Giving USA data used in figure 31 may understate the decline since 1967, but I accept them here, as the methodologically conservative practice. The oscillations in giving in the late 1980s reflect the changes in tax laws affecting deductions for charitable contributions. For example, contributions were made fully deductible for all taxpayers in 1986, a provision that was reversed that same year.

  26. Sources for figure 32 are given in appendix II. According to Roper Reports 95-4 (New York: Roper Starch Worldwide, 1995), 19 percent of Americans gave to United Way in the previous twelve months, compared with 53 percent for churches and synagogues, 23 percent for all medical charities combined, 16 percent for all youth groups, 7 percent for all environmental organizations, and so on. United Way donors are demographically more representative than other major donor groups, which are often concentrated in a single social niche. (For example, environmentalist donors are concentrated among the highly educated, youth group donors among parents of school-age children, and so on.) Thus United Way giving is an un
usually good proxy for national trends in secular generosity. The data on Protestant giving in figure 32 cover ten mainline denominations plus the Southern Baptist Convention. After 1968 data are available for a fuller sample of twenty-nine Protestant denominations, including most of the major evangelical bodies. Those more complete data show an even steeper decline (down 17 percent between 1968 and 1996) than the trend line in figure 32. Each of the time series discussed in this section—total giving, Protestant giving, Catholic giving, and United Way giving—comes from an entirely independent source, so their concurrence on trends in giving over the last four decades is especially probative.

  27. According to John and Sylvia Ronsvalle, The State of Church Giving through 1995, 24–27, between 1968 and 1995 religious giving as a fraction of disposable income fell from 6.1 percent to 4.1 percent among members of eight denominations affiliated with the National Association of Evangelicals and from 3.3 percent to 2.9 percent among members of eight denominations affiliated with the mainline National Council of Churches of Christ.

  28. These figures are based on the full twenty-nine-denomination Protestant sample from John and Sylvia Ronsvalle, The State of Church Giving through 1995, updated through 1997 from John and Sylvia Ronsvalle, The State of Church Giving through 1997 (Champaign, Ill.: empty tomb, 1999), 42.

  29. This figure is calculated from figure 32; a virtually identical decline of 57 percent between 1963 and 1984 in Catholic giving as a fraction of income is given by John and Sylvia Ronsvalle, “A Comparison of the Growth in Church Contributions with United States Per Capita Income,” in Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches: 1989, ed. Constant H. Jacquet Jr. (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1989), 275. Peter Dobkin Hall and Colin B. Burke, “Voluntary, Nonprofit, and Religious Entities and Activities,” in Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), present data on philanthropic giving to the Roman Catholic Church for 1929–59. Though not directly comparable to our data for 1960–89, the Hall data show that giv- ing per Catholic (as a fraction of national per capita income) dropped 49 percent from 1929 to 1945 and recovered by 7 percent between 1945 and 1960. Thus, over the last seven decades of the twentieth century, Catholic and Protestant giving per capita (as a fraction of income) appear to have followed roughly parallel tracks—sharply down during the depression, modestly up after the war, steadily down after 1960.