Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 4 (Winter 2000)

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
By Robert D. Putnam. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Reviewed by Robert Y. Shapiro

Should those already familiar with Putnam's articles or road show read this book? Yes, absolutely. Both his funders and readers get their money's worth in a treatise of 24 chapters, 96 figures, and 100 pages of appendixes and detailed endnotes. The book is nicely organized and engagingly written. Putnam responds to the criticisms he sought and received beginning with his 1995 "Bowling Alone" article, including finding some incorrect data.

"Bowling alone" is a metaphor for declining civic and social activity. Putnam acknowledges that solo bowling has not actually increased, though driving alone through suburban sprawl evidently has. This decline has led to a corresponding decrease in "social capital," which "refers to connections among individuals--social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them" (p. 19). Putnam now makes the clear distinction between social capital "bonding" people within narrow groups, which can have a "darker side," versus "bridging" social capital that can produce broader societal connectedness, trust, and reciprocity. The first known use of "social capital" was "by a practical reformer of the Progressive Era" (p. 19), and the book's last two chapters (which some readers may find a bit utopian) reflect on how that social capital-producing era provides lessons for today. Putnam argues that the production of social capital leads to good economic, social, psychological, and political outcomes, and that the decline in most group activity since the 1960s has deprived Americans of these benefits.

While the decline in voter turnout and political participation is Putnam's lead-in, the book is sweepingly sociological and broad, so that his political behavior critics will still have more to say. The book's strongest evidence is its wide variety of data consisting of different measures that impressively and persuasively track essentially the same decline in civic and social engagement and its possible causes and consequences. Putnam's survey data sources include the General Social Surveys, conducted since 1972 by the National Opinion Research Center (though p. 419 incorrectly reads: "Roughly every other year since 1974 the National Opinion Research Corporation at the University of Chicago . . . . "); the rich but less well known Roper Organization's (now Roper Starch Worldwide) Social and Political Trends data; and virtually unknown to academics, the DDB Needham Life Style surveys. (Putnam effectively shows how these self-selected "mail panels" provide reliable data for his purpose.)

Chapters 2-5 show all of the strikingly similar declines since the 1960s and 1970s in many forms of political, civic, religious, and work-related participation and social engagement. These declines occurred after prior increases, which is also central to Putnam's case. Chapter 8 shows that these trends are indicative of declining social capital; they go together with increases in public cynicism toward interpersonal trust, reciprocity, and honesty. While Putnam rightly emphasizes the decline in comparison to earlier in the twentieth century, religious participation still remains objectively high and Americans still participate in many activities at higher levels than their counterparts in other countries. At worst, this might be a fall-off to a societal norm that is still a comparatively high level of social engagement.

Putnam shows that there is also a fall-off in informal socializing and connectedness (Chapter 5), paralleling that for organized group activity. In contrast, there have been some changes in opposition to this tide: a noticeable rise in altruistic or charitable volunteer activity, particularly among youths (chapter 7); a rise in activity by evangelical conservative groups, self-help support groups, and other new small groups that Putnam had left out earlier (there may still be other groups unaccounted for, but critics will have to find them); and the growth of the internet and other communication technology, the effects of which on social capital are still unclear (Chapter 9). Thus far, however, these trends fall short of offsetting the more pervasive decline in social connectedness.

Chapters 10-15 examine the possible explanations for civic disengagement. While TV and the TV generation are still prominent explanations (contributing to an estimated 25 percent of the decline), the most far-reaching and profound ones are the disappearance of the highly mobilized and civic-minded World War II generation (explaining as much as 50 percent of the decline!), pressures on two-career families (10 percent), and increasingly relevant, the increase in commuting time and other changes that come with suburbanization and sprawl (10 percent). Putnam rules out much effect of the growth of all domestic government spending on private activity, but surely the growth of social welfare spending since the 1960s (including especially Social Security and health care) should have lessened the need for charitable activity and giving, which makes the rise in volunteering even more impressive. Clearly, from a pure rational choice perspective, social engagement and group activity have to become increasingly attractive in terms of benefits versus costs to compete with people's other alternatives, time constraints, and generational predispositions; it's not just TV.

Chapters 16-22 examine the many positive effects of social capital: better education and child welfare, safer and better off neighborhoods, economic prosperity, physical and psychological health and happiness, and democratic values and equality. Even though there are lingering questions about what's causing what (the book does not use statistical methods that can disentangle two-way causation), there is little doubt that social capital has many positive effects. While Putnam uses state-level data to show the expected cross-sectional correlations, he does not report declines over time for many of the outcome indicators. Other influences, such as improvements in medical care and the physical quality of life in the case of objective health indicators, can offset any effects of declining social capital. The "so what" question is a complex one, and the trends for outcome measures do not all parallel those of social capital. There is still lots left to answer and argue over at the end of this great book.

Robert Y. Shapiro
Columbia University