8. Thanks to Kimberly Lochner for bringing the history of Roseto to my attention and for introducing me to the literature on the health effects of social connectedness. The key studies of Roseto are J. G. Bruhn and S. Wolf, The Roseto Story: An Anatomy of Health (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979); S. Wolf and J. G. Bruhn, The Power of Clan: The Influence of Human Relationships on Heart Disease (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1993); B. Egolf, J. Lasker, S. Wolf, and L. Potvin, “The Roseto Effect: A Fifty-Year Comparison of Mortality Rates,” American Journal of Epidemiology 125, no. 6 (1992): 1089–1092.
9. L. F. Berkman and S. L. Syme, “Social Networks, Host Resistance and Mortality: A Nine Year Follow-up of Alameda County Residents,” American Journal of Epidemiology 109 (1979): 186–204.
10. J. House, C. Robbins, and H. Metzner, “The Association of Social Relationships and Activities with Mortality: Prospective Evidence from the Tecumseh Community Health Study,” American Journal of Epidemiology 116, no. 1 (1982): 123–140. This finding held for men only.
11. House, Robbins, and Metzner (1982); this finding held for women only. T. E. Seeman, G. A. Kaplan, L. Knudsen, R. Cohen, and J. Guralnik, “Social Network Ties and Mortality among the Elderly in the Alameda County Study,” American Journal of Epidemiology 126, no. 4 (1987): 714–723; this study found that social isolation predicted mortality only in people over sixty.
12. D. Blazer, “Social Support and Mortality in an Elderly Community Population,” American Journal of Epidemiology 115, no. 5 (1982): 684–694; K. Orth-Gomer and J. V. Johnson, “Social Network Interaction and Mortality,” Journal of Chronic Diseases 40, no. 10 (1987): 949–957.
13. L. Welin, G. Tibblin, K. Svardsudd, B. Tibblin, S. Ander-Peciva, B. Larsson, and L. Wilhelmsen, “Prospective Study of Social Influences on Mortality,” The Lancet, April 20, 1985, 915–918; Frederick J. Manning and Terrence D. Fullerton, “Health and Well-Being in Highly Cohesive Units of the U.S. Army,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 18 (1988): 503–519.
14. Sheldon Cohen et al., “Social Ties and Susceptibility to the Common Cold,” Journal of the American Medical Association 277 (June 25, 1997): 1940–1944.
15. A. Colantonio, S. V. Kasl, A. M. Ostfeld, and L. Berkman, “Psychosocial Predictors of Stroke Outcomes in an Elderly Population,” Journal of Gerontology 48, no. 5 (1993): S261–S268.
16. Young and Glasgow, “Voluntary Social Participation and Health.”
17. Angus Deaton and C. H. Paxson, “Aging and Inequality in Income and Health,” American Economic Review 88 (1998): 252, report “there has been no improvement, and possibly some deterioration, in health status across cohorts born after 1945, and there were larger improvements across those born before 1945.”
18. R. C. Kessler et al., “Lifetime and 12-Month Prevalence of DSM-III-R Psychiatric Disorders in the United States, Archives of General Psychiatry 51 (1994): 8–19; C. J. Murray and A. D. Lopez, “Evidence-Based Health Policy—Lessons from the Global Burden of Disease Study,” Science 274 (1996): 740–743; L. I. Pearlin et al., “The Stress Process”; G. A. Kaplan et al.,” “Psychosocial Predictors of Depression”; A. G. Billings and R. H. Moos, “Life Stressors and Social Resources Affect Posttreatment Outcomes Among Depressed Patients,” Journal of Abnormal Psychiatry 94 (1985): 140–153; C. D. Sherbourne, R. D. Hays, and K. B. Wells, “Personal and Psychosocial Risk Factors for Physical and Mental Health Outcomes and Course of Depression among Depressed Patients,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 63 (1995): 345–355; and T. E. Seeman and L. F. Berkman, “Structural Characteristics of Social Networks and Their Relationship with Social Support in the Elderly: Who Provides Support,” Social Science and Medicine 26 (1988): 737–749. I am indebted to Julie Donahue for her fine work on this topic.
19. L. I. Pearlin, M. A. Lieberman, E. G. Menaghan, J. T. Mullan, “The Stress Process,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 22, no. 4 (1981): 337–356; A. Billings and R. Moos, “Social Support and Functioning Among Community and Clinical Groups: A Panel Model,” Journal of Behavioral Medicine 5, no. 3 (1982): 295–311; G. A. Kaplan, R. E. Roberts, T. C. Camacho, and J. C. Coyne, “Psychosocial Predictors of Depression,” American Journal of Epidemiology 125, no. 2, (1987), 206–220; P. Cohen, E. L. Struening, G. L. Muhlin, L. E. Genevie, S. R. Kaplan, and H. B. Peck, “Community Stressors, Mediating Conditions and Well-being in Urban Neighborhoods,” Journal of Community Psychology 10 (1982): 377–391; David G. Myers, “Close Relationships and Quality of Life,” in D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwartz, eds., Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).
20. Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Happiness (London: Metheun, 1987); Ed Diener, “Subjective Well-being,” Psychological Bulletin 95 (1984): 542–575; Ed Diener, “Assessing Subjective Well-being,” Social Indicators Research, 31 (1994): 103–157; David G. Myers and Ed Diener, “Who Is Happy?” Psychological Science 6 (1995): 10–19; Ruut Veenhoven, “Developments in Satisfaction-Research,” Social Indicators Research, 37 (1996): 1–46; and works cited there.
21. In these data and in most studies the effect of marriage on life happiness is essentially identical among men and women, contrary to some reports that marriage has a more positive effect on happiness among men.
22. Income in successive Life Style surveys is measured in terms of income brackets, defined in dollars of annual income. To enhance comparability over time, we have translated each of these brackets in each annual survey into its mean percentile ranking in that year’s income distribution. The effect of income measured in percentiles on contentment is not linear, but that is offset by the fact that the translation of income in dollars to income percentiles is also not linear. Thus the “happiness equivalent” of any particular change in income is accurate in its order of magnitude, but not in detail.
23. The results here are based on multiple regression analyses on the DDB Needham Life Style sample, including age, gender, education, income, marital status, as well as our various measures of civic engagement. The results are essentially identical for men and women, except that the effects of education and of social connections on happiness are slightly greater among women. Income, education, and social connections all have a greater effect among single people than among married people. For example, the effects of club meetings on the happiness of single people is twice as great as on the happiness of married people. In other words, absent marriage, itself a powerful booster of life contentment, other factors become more important. Conversely, even among the poor, uneducated, and socially isolated, marriage provides a fundamental buffer for contentment.
24. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style and Harris poll data.
25. Martin E. P. Seligman, “Boomer Blues,” Psychology Today, October 1988, 50–55.
CHAPTER 21: DEMOCRACY
1. Though this bon mot is widely attributed to Wilde, I have been unable to confirm that attribution.
2. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Harper and Brothers, 1942).
3. Jefferson to Kercheval, July 12, 1816, in Merrill Peterson, ed.,Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1227, quoted in James P. Young,Reconsidering American Liberalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 86.
4. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 511.
5. Text from John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), at english-www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/mill-representative-govt.txt.
6. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, as cited in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 314.
7. James Madison, Federalist, 10.
8. Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Free Press, 1998), 55.
9. See, for example, Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: From State to Civil Society (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1977; 1996).
10. Tocqueville, Democracy in Americ
a, 190.
11. Amy Gutmann, “Freedom of Association: An Introductory Essay,” in Amy Gutmann, ed., Freedom of Association (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 3.
12. Karl-Dieter Opp and Christiane Gern, “Dissident Groups, Personal Networks, and Spontaneous Cooperation: The East German Revolution of 1989,” American Sociological Review 58 (1993): 659–680.
13. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 515.
14. William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959), 73.
15. Verba, Schlozman, Brady, Voice and Equality, 304–333.
16. William A. Muraskin, Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 27.
17. Verba, Schlozman, Brady, Voice and Equality, 378.
18. Frederick C. Harris, “Religious Institutions and African American Political Mobilization,” in Paul Peterson, ed., Classifying by Race (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 299. The evidence suggests that churches organized congregationally, such as Protestant denominations, tend to provide more opportunities for parishioners to build civic skills than do hierarchically organized churches, including Catholic and evangelical denominations. Protestants are three times as likely as Catholics to report opportunities to exercise civic skills. Verba, Schlozman, Brady, Voice and Equality, 321–322, 329.
19. Verba, Schlozman, Brady, Voice and Equality, 385.
20. Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Amy Gut-mann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); J. Bohman, Public Deliberation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); C. Nino, The Constitution of Deliberative Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996).
21. Gutmann “Freedom of Association,” 25.
22. See, for example, Will Kymlicka, “Ethnic Associations and Democratic Citizenship,” in Gutmann, Freedom of Association, 177–213.
23. See Michael Walzer, “The Civil Society Argument,” in Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
24. Michael Hanks, “Youth, Voluntary Associations, and Political Socialization,” Social Forces 60 (1981): 211–223.
25. David Sally, “Conversation and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: A Meta-Analysis of Experiments from 1958 to 1992,” Rationality and Society 7, no. 1 (1995): 58–92.
26. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 52–53.
27. See, for example, Nancy Rosenblum, Membership and Morals (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); Daniel Schulman, “Voluntary Organization Involvement and Political Participation,” Journal of Voluntary Action Research 7 (1978): 86–105.
28. Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York: Norton, 1969); Jonathan Rauch, Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government (New York: Times Books, 1994).
29. Michael Walzer, “The Civil Society Argument,” in Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
30. See, for example, Hausknecht, The Joiners; Verba, Schlozman, Brady, Voice and Equality; and David Horton Smith, “Determinants of Voluntary Association Participation and Volunteering: A Literature Review,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 23, no. 3 (fall 1994): 243–263.
31. E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960).
32. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960); Samuel Stouffer, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties (New York: Doubleday, 1955); Sheri Berman, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic,” World Politics 49 (April 1997): 401–429.
33. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Democratic Distemper,” The Public Interest 41 (fall 1975): 9–38.
34. Rosenblum, Membership and Morals, 155.
35. Morris P. Fiorina, “Extreme Voices: The Dark Side of Civic Engagement,” in Skocpol and Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy. Fiorina’s anecdote is insightful, and his concluding call for more civic engagement is correct. Unfortunately, some passages of his essay confuse a) a high degree of citizen participation in a community with b) a system of representation or a decision-making process that privileges citizen participation, however few the participants may be. The former is a behavioral characteristic, the latter an institutional one. (The two may be linked causally or historically, but they are not the same thing.) Confusingly, Fiorina uses the term civic engagement to refer to both, but his essay demonstrates the “dark side” of b), not the dark side of a). Contrary to the essay’s title, his evidence shows the dark side of civic dis engagement.
36. Generalizations in this and the following paragraph are drawn from the author’s analysis of Roper Social and Political Trends archives. Ideological self-description is based on this question: “Now, thinking politically and socially, how would you describe your general outlook—as being very conservative, moderately conservative, middle-of-the-road, moderately liberal, or very liberal?”
37. I have calculated the linear trend between 1974 and 1994 for each of the twelve basic forms of participation for each of the five categories of ideological self-identification and expressed the net change over the twenty-one years as a fraction of the participation rate in 1974. This approach is less sensitive to annual outliers than other possible measures and allows easier comparisons across the different forms of participation, but any reasonable metric yields the same conclusion: The more extreme the self-declared ideological position, the smaller the relative decline in participation rates over these two decades.
38. Gabriel Weimann, “On the Importance of Marginality: One More Step in the Two-Step Flow of Communication,” American Sociological Review 47 (December 1982): 764–773; Gabriel Weimann, “The Strength of Weak Conversational Ties in the Flow of Information and Influence,” Social Networks 5 (1983): 245–267; Matthew A. Crenson, “Social Networks and Political Processes in Urban Neighborhoods,” American Journal of Political Science 22, no. 3 (August 1978): 578–594. Michael MacKuen and Courtney Brown, “Political Context and Attitude Change,” American Political Science Review 81 (June 1987): 471–490; Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague, Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication: Information and Influence in an Election Campaign (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
39. Cathy J. Cohen and Michael C. Dawson, “Neighborhood Poverty and African American Politics,” American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 286–302.
40. Michael Schudson, “What If Civic Life Didn’t Die?”The American Prospect 25 (1996): 17–20, quotation at 18.
41. Tarrow, Power in Movement, 133.
42. Theda Skocpol, “Advocates without Members: The Recent Transformation of American Civic Life,” in Skocpol and Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy, 505–506.
43. Peter Skerry, “The Strange Politics of Affirmative Action,” Wilson Quarterly (Winter 1997): 39–46.
44. James T. Hamilton, “Testing for Environmental Racism: Prejudice, Profits, Political Power?,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 14, no. 1 (1995): 107–132.
45. Robert D. Putnam with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
46. Daniel Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States (New York: Crowell, 1966).
47. Ira Sharkansky, “The Utility of Elazar’s Political Culture,” Polity 2 (1969): 66–83.
48. The Pearson’s r correlation coefficient is 0.77, where 1.0 signifies a perfect linear relationship.
49. Charles A. Johnson, “Political Culture in American States: Elazar’s Formulation Examined,” American Journal of Political Science 20 (1976): 491–509; Ira Sharkansky, Regionalism in American Politics (Indianapolis, Ind.: B
obbs-Merrill, 1970); Richard A. Joslyn, “Manifestations of Elazar’s Political Subcultures: State Public Opinion and the Content of Political Campaign Advertising,” John Kincaid, “Political Culture and the Quality of Urban Life,” and Susan Welch and John G. Peters, “State Political Culture and the Attitudes of State Senators Toward Social, Economic Welfare, and Corruption Issues,” all in Political Culture, Public Policy and the American States, John Kincaid, ed. (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982), 59–80; 121–149; 151–159; Tom W. Rice and Alexander F. Sumberg, “Civic Culture and Government Performance in the American States,” Publius 27 (1997): 99–114; Maureen Rand Oakley, “Explaining the Adoption of Morality Policy Innovations: The Case of Fetal Homicide Policy,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Atlanta, Ga., September 1999).
50. Patronage politics are often based on bonding social capital. While they may lead to inefficient government and reinforce ethnic cleavages, they are often highly effective at political mobilization.
51. Margaret Weir, “Power, Money, and Politics in Community Development,” in Ronald F. Ferguson and William T. Dickens, eds., Urban Problems and Community Development (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999).
52. Jeffrey M. Berry, Kent E. Portney, and Ken Thomson, The Rebirth of Urban Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1993).
53. In a regression analysis predicting compliance rates across states, only the Social Capital Index proved to be a statistically significant variable. Other variables—per capita income, income inequality, racial composition, urbanism, education—were not significant. On the role of social capital and trust in undergirding compliance, see Tyler, “Trust and Democratic Governance.”
54. Young-dahl Song and Tinsley E. Yarbrough, “Tax Ethics and Taxpayer Attitudes: A Survey,” Public Administration Review 38 (1978): 442–452; Steven M. Sheffrin and Robert K. Triest, “Can Brute Deterrence Backfire: Perceptions and Attitudes in Taxpayer Compliance,” in Why People Pay Taxes: Tax Compliance and Enforcement, Joel Slemrod, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 193–222; Scholz and Lubell, “Trust and Taxpaying”; and Scholz, “Trust, Taxes, and Compliance.”
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