BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  28. Across entire GSS sample, our interval scores correlate R = .99 with those generated by an entirely independent algorithm that I discovered after defining mine (Michael Hout and Andrew Greeley, “Exchange on Overreporting of U.S. Church Attendance,” American Sociological Review 63 [1998]: 116).

  29. 2nd edition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1999). I am grateful to Professor Robinson for making selected data from the 1995 wave of this study available for my analysis.

  The Story Behind This Book

  THE EXISTENCE of this book refutes its central premise. My argument claims, among other things, a decline of generalized reciprocity—the practice of helping others with no expectation of gain. Yet without unsolicited, unexpected, and unrequited generosity beyond imagining, I could not have written this book. I want to describe here just how indebted I am to others.

  In retrospect, work on this book began in earnest in 1992, as I was completing Making Democracy Work, a twenty-year study of local government in Italy. I was fresh from a stint as dean of the Kennedy School of Government, where I had focused on the problems of American democracy. It gradually dawned on me that one of the conclusions of the Italian research—that democracy depended on social capital—might have implications for contemporary America.

  Over the next two years, with support and encouragement from the late Joel Orlen and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I convened a series of academic workshops on social capital and its implications for economic development, urban poverty, and American democracy. Eventually Peter B. Evans, Susan Pharr, and Theda Skocpol joined me in guiding this project, and I learned a great deal from their conceptual perspectives, which differed in important respects from my own. Our work was generously supported by the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. I am grateful to Alberta Arthurs, Clifford Chanin, Barbara Finberg, Peter Goldmark, David Hamburg, Michael Lipsky, Geraldine Mannion, and their colleagues for their willingness to invest in ideas whose theoretical rigor and practical payoff were uncertain. I am also grateful to them—and to three chance acquaintances from the world of journalism, David Boldt, Jonathan S. Cohn, and Paul Solman—for gently but firmly pressing me to carry the discussion beyond academic circles.

  I began idly to explore what statistical evidence I could find that might reveal trends in civic engagement in America, not at all sure whether hard data would substantiate my hunch. Harold A. Pollack, my “research team” at that point, rounded up the initial evidence with skill, energy, and “show me” skepticism. By early 1994 we had accumulated enough data on things like membership in the PTA and fraternal organizations to move beyond the stage of pure anecdote. Over breakfast that spring a generous friend, Peter Ackerman, mentioned that trends in league bowling seemed to fit my evolving generalization. A few weeks later, hearing that story, my colleague Jack Donahue mused that Americans seemed to be “bowling alone,” and we agreed that that might be a nice title for a paper I was then mulling. I was already getting by with more than a little help from my friends.

  As had been my habit in previous research projects, I planned to compose a preliminary version of my argument, listen to critical commentary from my colleagues, and then reformulate a more refined version. At the invitation of Axel Hadenius, Dietrich and Marilyn Rueschemeyer, and Björn Wittrock, I agreed to present some initial reflections at a pair of academic conferences in August 1994 in Uppsala, Sweden. By May I wrote a friend that I hoped “to spend 1995 finishing a slim volume on this topic for more than an academic audience.” (Readers of this tome will know that I missed that target in more ways than one.) In January 1995 an abridged version of the Uppsala paper was published in a respected but little-known periodical, the Journal of Democracy. Without warning, a deluge struck.

  Until January 1995 I was (as one critic later observed with perfect accuracy) “an obscure academic.” Although I had published scores of books and articles in the previous three decades (many of them, I immodestly believed, of greater scholarly elegance than “Bowling Alone”), none had attracted the slightest public attention. Now I was invited to Camp David, lionized by talk-show hosts, and (the secular equivalent of canonization in contemporary America) pictured with my wife, Rosemary, on the pages of People. The explanation was not late-blooming genius, but the simple fact that I had unwittingly articulated an unease that had already begun to form in the minds of many ordinary Americans. (This period quickly taught me the power of the media spotlight to elicit personal reactions: spontaneous generosity from friends, relatives, colleagues, and total strangers soon made me the proud owner of one of the country’s finest collections of bowling tchotchkes—from bowling pins and towels to bowling ties and salt-and-pepper sets.) The hubbub was intoxicating, but as I wrote to two friends in February 1995, “Pretty heady stuff, but it has kept me away from my computer, where I’m supposed to be working out a fuller version…. We may be running a risk of our marketing operation getting too far out in front of our product development.”

  I was acutely aware that the thesis with which I was now associated rested on limited evidence. To deepen the argument, I needed more time and more help. Generous supporters, including the Aspen Institute’s Nonprofit Sector Research Fund, Colin Campbell (and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund), Craig Dykstra and Susan Wisely (and the Lilly Endowment), Charles Heck (and the Trilateral Commission), Paul Light and Rebecca Rimel (and the Pew Charitable Trusts), and Frank Weil (and the Norman Foundation), stepped in to offer encouragement and crucial resources. I am especially grateful that although the benefactors who supported this stage of the project were eager for conclusions about “what is to be done,” they showed great respect for the importance of getting the facts straight before moving too quickly to possible solutions.

  To get the facts straight, I needed to acquaint myself with many new literatures. Much of my argument—and indeed much of this book—involved simply integrating masses of relevant research that had already been honed by experts in a dozen separate fields over several decades. To accomplish that task in less than a lifetime required help. I doubt that any research project has ever been blessed with a more resourceful, thoughtful, and energetic group of collaborators than this one. Steadily refreshed with new recruits over the years, the team developed a tradition of regular meetings at which individual reports were presented, and the ensuing debates were among the most intellectually rewarding of my life. Although virtually all the participants shared a conviction that we were exploring a topic of considerable importance, some of the most searching criticisms of my theories came from this group. By 1999 the roster of researchers had lengthened to nearly half a hundred, including Cindy Adams, Neil Allison, Maryann Barakso, Ben Berger, Jay Braatz, Melissa Buis, David E. Campbell, Brad Clarke, Zoe Clarkwest, Ben Deufel, Dan Devroye, Karen Ferree, Kate Fitzpatrick, Archon Fung, Arkadi Gerney, Kristin Goss, Louise Hayes, Isadora Helfgott, Adam Hickey, Scott Jacobs, Bertram Johnson, Jeffrey Kling, Lisa Laskin, Kristen Lasky, Jonathan Leeman, Kimberly Lochner, Karen Mapp, Stephen Marshall, Jason Mazzone, Victor Mendiola, Rob Mickey, Elizabeth Morton, Chad Noyes, Amy Perlmutter, David Pinto-Duschinsky, John Rector, A.J. Robinson, Emily Ryo, Alexandra Samuel, Andrew Schneller, Rustin Silverstein, Zach Stern, Hannah Stires, Maurits van der Veen, Geoffrey Vaughan, Christian Warren, Mark Warren, Aaron Wicks, and Steve Yonish. Of this group, several deserve special mention for the duration and intensity of their involvement and the extraordinary creativity of their contributions at virtually all stages of the project: Melissa Buis, David Campbell, Ben Deufel, Arkadi Gerney, Kristin Goss, Adam Hickey, Jason Mazzone, and Steve Yonish. Working from my rough notes and outline, Kristin Goss deftly drafted the initial version of much of what became Section IV of this book.

  The first wave of publicity that had greeted my argument as 1995 opened was excessively complimentary, not least because other scholars, such as Steve Knack, Wendy Rahn, Michael Walzer, and Robert Bellah and his coauthors of Habits of the Heart, had already exp
ressed similar concerns about civic disengagement. On the other hand, the very notoriety of “Bowling Alone” invited others to offer contrary interpretations of a still slender body of evidence that was, admittedly, ambiguous. The inevitable backwash as 1995 closed was not pleasant—“Bowling Alone Is Bunk,” ran one memorable headline—but the criticism was instructive and ultimately more productive than the praise.

  In the debate that followed I learned much from my critics, including writers like Carles Boix, Bob Edwards, Michael W. Foley, Charles Heying, Patricia Landolt, Nicholas Lemann, Daniel N. Posner, and Alejandro Portes. More gratifying, in the ensuing years some of the most incisive public critics also provided wise and time-consuming private counsel. For this unusual collegiality, well beyond the norm in our contentious profession, I am especially grateful to Marshall Ganz, Kenneth Newton, Pippa Norris, Michael Schudson, Theda Skocpol, Richard M. Valelly, and Robert Wuthnow. As the evidence became clearer, some critics and I converged toward a shared diagnosis, but differences remained. The conventional addendum to acknowledgments that those kind enough to have offered advice bear no responsibility for the result is uniquely pertinent here.

  My own confidence in the argument of “Bowling Alone” was unexpectedly shaken early in 1996 when John Helliwell, an economist friend with whom I was collaborating on related research, and I discovered that the published version of the General Social Survey (on which I had relied for some crucial evidence) was flawed. Correcting the computational errors had the effect of diminishing the apparent decline in formal group membership. My only consolation was that we had uncovered the error before my critics. Throughout this period I valued not merely John’s friendship and scholarly acumen, but also his steady commitment to following the evidence where it led.

  Meanwhile, continuing to be lucky in my collaborations, I began work with Gerald Gamm, a political historian, on the evolution of civic associations in America since Tocqueville’s time. Over the next several years Gerald patiently tutored me in the cautious subtleties of the historian’s craft, while sharing my enthusiasm for our unexpected discoveries.

  The most commonly cited weakness of “Bowling Alone” had been clear to me from the start—by drawing primarily on evidence about declining membership in specific formal groups, I had ignored the possibility of offsetting increases in other groups or in informal types of connectedness. For some alleged counterexamples, like soccer matches and softball games, hard work unearthed hard evidence, and they turned out mostly to be illusory, but that momentary clarification left undiminished the possibility that other overlooked forms of social capital were expanding. I simply could think of no source of systematic evidence on civic engagement in general, and still less on such ephemera as picnics and card games. My colleagues Kristin Goss and Steve Yonish spent hundreds of hours in endlessly resourceful (but usually fruitless) searches for systematic evidence of what we called “unobtrusive indicators” of social connectedness.

  One initial breakthrough came when we learned of the possibility that a hitherto unanalyzed survey treasure trove—what I describe in appendix I as the Roper Social and Political Trends archive—might be retrievable. Henry Brady, head of the Survey Research Center at the University of California, while firmly agnostic about my claims of civic disengagement, generously agreed to share the task of acquiring the data and readying them for analysis. The archive proved much dustier than we had expected, but a year’s hard work by Steve Yonish at Harvard and Dorie Apollonio, Andrea Campbell, and Laurel Elms at Berkeley eventually yielded an archive of unparalleled value. Even skeptics in our group were impressed by this massive new evidence of civic disengagement.

  Ironically, an even more startling discovery first appeared in mid-1997 in a footnote to a graduate student critique of “Bowling Alone” sent to me by Wendy Rahn. I profited from dozens of such missives, but none turned out to be more instructive than this paper by Dhavan Shah, then a student of William Wells at the University of Minnesota, which alerted me to the existence of the DDB Needham Life Style survey archive. Steve Yonish gained access to these data, and with the help of Jim Crimmins, Chris Callahan, Marty Horn, and Doug Hughes of DDB Needham and Sid Groeneman of Market Facts, as described in appendix I, a truly unique resource was added to our repertoire. Someone had been keeping track of picnics and card games, after all, and to our collective astonishment the new data seemed to show that “Bowling Alone” might actually have understated the depth and breadth of the social transformation under way in America. To validate and analyze the new evidence would add two years to the project but deepen our confidence that we were on to something.

  Throughout these years I felt torn between the twin imperatives of accuracy and action. To Tom Rochon, a longtime friend and unconvinced critic, I had written in April 1994:

  Though it proves nothing, I have to report a striking distinction between the reactions of academic audiences and of public audiences. Academics always want to know whether it’s really true that we are disengaging— what about the new social movements? the Internet? 12-step groups? new age encounter groups? etc., etc. They almost never have any comments on what could be done about it, if it were true. Public audiences almost never ask whether it is true, because it rings so true to their own experience. They are always deeply concerned about how to fix the problem. Their questions are tougher.

  Already I had begun casual conversations about the practical implications of my theories with Lewis Feldstein, president of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, whom I had met through mutual friends. By the following spring those conversations ripened into a formal proposal for what came to be the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America. Over the next five years my collaboration with Lew blossomed into one of the most enjoyable and productive of my professional life. Drawing on a lifetime of practical idealism, he inspired me to see our evolving research in a broader framework. Lew also had practical skills in planning and managing an incipient social movement that I utterly lacked. Lew bears no responsibility for where my argument has ended up, but no one is more responsible for its focus not merely on what has happened, but also on what we should do about it.

  By 1997, in collaboration with Tom Sander and, somewhat later, Chris Gates, president of the National Civic League, Lew and I had recruited a blue-ribbon group of civic leaders and scholars from across the country to join the Saguaro Seminar. (We settled upon that name because the southwestern saguaro cactus, which grows mostly unseen for decades before throwing up those marvelous trunks that in turn host myriad plant and animal communities, seemed a suitable metaphor for social capital.) The Saguaro Seminar was generously supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Lilly Endowment, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund. The Saguaro participants were unstinting with their time, their experience, and their creativity as we struggled together to define an actionable national agenda for civic revitalization. My colleagues in the Saguaro Seminar are identified in chapter 24, which also draws heavily on the inspiration of our meetings. A fuller report on our conclusions will appear shortly after this book.

  Throughout this research I reveled in unexpected support and wisdom from a wide range of acquaintances, old and new. Rafe Sagalyn, my exceptional literary agent, proved to be a sturdy thick-and-thin friend and guide, sharing and yet channeling my enthusiasms toward a publishable manuscript. Nick Mitropoulos, who embodies the classic Hellenic virtues of good friendship and good citizenship along with the classic Beantown virtues of loyalty and connections, materialized at my elbow at every difficult moment over the last decade to offer encouragement and solve problems. Angela Glover Blackwell, then vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation and deeply skeptical about aspects of my argument, nevertheless provided crucial support, while working patiently to help me understand her insights. The late Michael Bruno, vice pre
sident and chief economist at the World Bank, Partha Dasgupta, chair of the Faculty of Economics and Politics at Cambridge University, and Ismail Serageldin, vice president for Sustainable Development at the World Bank, all generously provided encouragement for a novice trespassing disciplinary boundaries. William A. Galston, a distinguished political philosopher and senior adviser in the White House, shared and encouraged my enthusiasm for liberal communitarianism, while cautioning me to be sure I had the facts straight. Michael Woolcock, whom I originally “met” as the anonymous author of a brilliant (but critical) journal article I had been asked to review, became a good friend and co-conspirator in the nascent social capital movement. When I sought to understand how social capital was being re-created at the grass roots, Ernie Cortes introduced me to Texas, Milda Hedblom and Rip Rapson to Minnesota, and Ethan Seltzer and Lynn Youngbar to Oregon. Marcia Sharp offered crisp, valuable advice at several key junctures. Ed Skloot of the Surdna Foundation and Simon & Schuster’s Alice Mayhew—each supportive yet eager for more rapid progress than I was capable of—provided constant stimulation; I regret that in different ways I caused each of them frustration. Last, but far from least, the most ruthlessly candid, intellectually demanding, and constructively creative editor of every page of this book—as of all my work for the last decade and more—was my daughter, Lara Putnam.

  Hundreds of scholars, researchers, and ordinary citizens wrote with encouragement and critical thoughts—too many to acknowledge individually, but all made an impact. Only a pair of improbable illustrations will have to serve: General Bernard Trainor penned a long account of the history of U.S. Marine Corps efforts to ensure small-unit solidarity, with an eye toward potential lessons for civilian life; while Professor David Scott of Texas A&M wrote me out of the blue about his research on the sociology of bridge, an exchange that led eventually to the opening lines of this book. I deeply regret that I cannot acknowledge individually each of the contributions that arrived “over the transom,” for more than any bit of statistical evidence they convinced me that America’s springs of civic renewal still run strong.