Lacking Causation: Putnam and Civic Disengagement
St. Thomas University
2 March 2006
In his article, Civic Disengagement in Contemporary America, Robert D. Putnam is arguing that there has been a huge disengagement in civic life. He claims that people are not as socially connected as they once were, and that this is having a lot of negative effects.
Putnam’s basic argument is that “social capital…the social norms and networks that enhance people’s ability to collaborate on common endeavours” (125), is drastically decreasing in the United States. He claims this capital “makes individuals-and communities-healthier, wealthier, wiser, happier, more productive and better able to govern themselves peaceably and effectively” (125). This greater ability to self govern is due to social capital bringing people together so they can be more productive through trust for one another and a collective pooling of skills.
Putnam cites several surveys that he believes deal with social capital. An American National Election Studies survey shows that there has been a drastic decline in people’s trust of government, and Putnam claims there has been a similar decline in regards to “the performance of religious institutions and unions and business and universities and so on”(125), and even in relationships with other individuals. Also, Putnam says that membership in bowling leagues, Parent Teacher Associations, fraternal organizations, and other clubs or organizations that promote “civic engagement” has gone down. He goes on, using bowling as an analogy, to explain exactly how meeting in groups promotes this “civic engagement”. Sitting around and talking while waiting for your turn to bowl often leads to the deliberation of important civic matters, matters that might not otherwise be discussed.
Putnam goes on to give more empirical evidence of civic disengagement. He begins to talk about the membership of organizations like 4-H and the Knights of Columbus, saying that it was steadily increasing in the early and mid 20h century, with the exception of the depression years. However, the percentage of eligible members joining these clubs began to decline after the 1960s.
Playing the devils advocate, Putnam says “that evidence in itself does not prove anything. Although suggestive, it is not conclusive insofar as membership data from specific organizations do not necessarily reflect an underlying propensity to join groups in general” (128). He says that it is possible that “this analysis is limited to old fashioned organizations on their way out” (128), and that “maybe Americans are no longer formerly joining groups … but people are still hanging out together, maybe even more then they used to” (128). Because there was no way to test for this, Putnam was up against a wall, until he found datasets from several different surveys asking questions relevant to engagement in many forms of group and social activities. According to the survey, every aspect of civic and political engagement it tested for has seen a huge decline.
Putnam found that participation in some sorts of activities was not down nearly as much. “The sorts of activities that a citizen can do alone without coordinating with anyone else… are down just 10 to 15 per cent” (129), where as public meetings and activities like picnicking are down forty to fifty percent. Card playing, what Putnam claims was once a very important social activity, is also down.
According to Putnam, the disengagement from social activities has been replaced by engagement in much less social ones. There has been a rise in casino gambling, internet card playing, and uncivil behaviour like giving the finger and cheating on taxes. Putnam also cites the decline in families eating together, claiming it could be a “troubling trend” (131) because it is a tradition stretching back millennia.
Putnam then goes on to explain why civic engagement is down. He claims that it is the same across all demographics, except for the elderly, and this makes it difficult to pin point what is causing the decline. This is because there can be no applicable analysis of changes within a single group that could have caused a decline in civic engagement. Putnam also claims that because people in their sixties or seventies participate today, but there is no indication that people who will be in there sixties or seventies will participate tomorrow, there will be a further decline in civic engagement. He says “the process of ‘generational replacement’ is the single most important reason for the erosion of social capital and civic participation. It accounts for about half of the overall decline” (132-3) He believes that the rest of civic disengagement is made up in small part by an increase in work hours, urban sprawl (because more time spent in transit means less time spent investing in social capital) and television. The urban sprawl problem “has fragmented citizens’ sense of community” (133), and Putnam correlates television with a decline in civic participation because it sucks up a lot of free time, and became popular around the same time the decline began. Putnam says television replaces the feeling that social bonds give people, and this “keeps people… in their living rooms” (133)
Putnam cites a study done in Italy which he claims proves that a decline in social capital is a big problem. It was proven that communities with a lot of choral societies were wealthier then communities with fewer of these societies. Putnam claims that because the communities had about the same economic status before developing the choral societies, those societies help to make communities with more of them wealthy. As such, Putnam believes civic engagement leads to prosperity, and thus disengagement leads to decline.
In the early 1900s America had very little social capitol. Putnam believes that the creation of new institutions led to a boom in civic engagement back then, and that the same thing will work today if it is carefully thought out and implicated.
Putnam has written an interesting article. He has managed to show a strong correlation between civic engagement and prosperity, but he has not shown causation. As he himself said, it is difficult to find empirical evidence to support his theories, and it seems that more is needed to prove what he is trying to say. Putnam’s solution to the problems he associates with a decline in civil engagement makes sense, but we live in a very different society from that of one hundred years ago, and creating more, and more appealing, organizations sounds like a quick fix. Also, the article is somewhat unconvincing that there really is a true civic disengagement in the United States. Membership in clubs is down, as is attending PTA meetings and having picnics, but Putnam does not really address new activities that could also generate social capitol. Things like discussions on the internet, relationships at work, hanging out at the mall are all left out of the article. There also does not seem to be a lot of proof that civic disengagement leads to decline in society, the article could use more evidence. Although there is a correlation between the amount of choral societies in a town and the town’s general wealth, Putnam fails to establish causation.
Bibliography
Putnam, Robert D. “Civic Disengagement in Contemporary America.” Braving the New World. Ed. Thomas Bateman. Canada: Nelson, 2004. 124-137
