Book Review: “Bowling Alone” by Putnam

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a book published in 2000 and I read it 18 years after its publication, in 2018. Yet, the central question the book and Putnam’s research deals with: what explains the decline in civic engagement and trust in US; is still relevant and even more talked about today.

Putnam’s research is largely an empirical sociological study. After posing the trends in decline of ‘social capital’ (defined as “connections among individuals — social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.”) and supporting evidence for it, Putnam begins the exploration of possible causes for such decline. He goes through several possible reasons and analyses, each one backed up by empirical evidence based on various surveys. Before going through them, I listed some of the potential causes I thought contributed to the decline in social capital in the US. I will list them below and also briefly mention how Putnam disproves/ shows that there is no conclusive evidence for most of them. I will also mention some of the more surprising findings from Putnam’s research that stuck with me.

Putnam seemed to indicate (one of his initial hypothesis) that one of the most important reason for such decline is the generational shift,- that the generations born after WWII just happen to be less civic minded, less participant in communities and less trustworthy towards social institutions. Initially, I was very skeptical of this hypothesis, because it sounded to me as a common scapegoat for explaining all kinds of social ills (i.e. a current trend is to bash ‘millennials’ for declining interest to live in democracies according to some surveys. See Youscha Mounk’s research)). I thought that even if some kind of generational effect is clear from the data, no generation is inherently born with certain characteristics. Rather, the time and the events through which they grow up, often shape their socialization and thus their civic engagement and trust. To my relief, Putnam later on, address these questions and provides a similar line of argument to show that generational effect can only reframe the puzzle, but cannot tell the whole story.

But before delving into the ‘generational shift’ question, here are the potential causes I thought about (in descending order):

1. More utilitarian and individualistic social fabric, and increased emphasis on ‘individualism’ through the increasing dominance of capitalist culture. (Later, I came to know that this was the central thesis of the book “Habits of the heart” by Bellah et. al. (1985) which argued that the rise of a new, more utilitarian kind of individualism has the tendency to destroy traditional forms of interaction in the United States based on co-operation and close-knit social ties within small communities.)

2. Rise of internet & other communication media (like social networks, making in-person gathering increasingly rare, with higher ease of communication through cell-phones and internet.)
To be fair to Putnam, internet and social networks became prominent and ubiquitous after the publication of the book in 2000; so Putnam might not be able to state the impact of such technological and life-style shifts.

I will come back to these two explanations later on, as Putnam’s main argument (or, main cause) is related to them (I was happy to know that my hunches based on general observation were not inaccurate!).

Here are the rest of my hunches which Putnam disproved or showed that there isn’t enough evidence to conclusively argue in favor or against:

3. Busy-ness & time pressure. (In my own life, feeling the pressure of ‘inadequate time’ to do all the things I want to do and get involved in, I hypothesized that it is a general trend among people;- people have increasingly gotten busier and hence have less free time to engage in civic programs or to become members of civic organizations. But Putnam provided the surprising evidence on the contrary: among workers, longer working hours are linked to more civic engagement! Besides, time spent in work by Americans, on average, haven’t increased; in fact, decreased a bit!)

4. More mobility for people due to work, education, ease of transport, etc. Thus, people invest less in social relationships at the place they live. (This was not empirically supported, as Putnam shows. People, in fact, did not move more in the 1970s, 80s or 90s, compared to the previous decades. This data was also surprising to me. Perhaps, mobility, specially from rural to urban and sub-urban regions have increased in last 2 decades, specially after the book was published.)

5. Higher immigration and racial integration. This might result to majority Whites, who were the main participants and members of civic programs and organizations, being less participant and less trustworthy of such social organizations. (Although civic engagement and trust declined among all kinds of racial and ethnic groups, Putnam presents the contrary evidence that downturns in civic engagement & trust were greater among African Americans (& other racial minorities) than Whites! Thus, this is inconsistent with the thesis of “white flight” after civil rights movement.)

Besides these, Putnam also discusses four other important hypothesis (which I did not think of initially):

6. Education: Putnam presents evidence that well-educated people are much more likely to be joiners and ‘trusters’. Education has a massive effect on social connectedness, even controlling for social class and economic differences. Why is that? Perhaps, partly because they are better off economically.

But as Putnam points out, This deepens the mystery further, because education boosts civic engagement sharply, and education levels have risen massively in last 3 decades. Thus, it is more puzzling to see the decline in ‘social capital’- civic engagement and trust.

7. Women in workforce: According to Putnam’s initial hypothesis (as he states), the single most important factor is women joining the workforce! But he himself provides data and declares that there is not enough ‘micro-evidence’ for this causal explanation. (Putnam has been severely criticized for this hypothesis. But in Putnam’s defense, he did not provide any normative judgement whether women joining the workforce was a good or bad thing. Rather, he was simply exploring different possible causal explanations for declining social capital. Whether overall it is a good or bad thing, is a separate question, as Putnam points out.)

8. Marriage and family: Putnam provides evidence to argue that single people are less trusting & less engaged civicly than married people, controlling for gender, education, age, race. As the divorce rates rose throughout 60s and 70s, and single parent families increased; the proportion of unmarried American adults climbed from 28% in 1974 to 48% in 1994, coinciding with the declining social capital. However, questions can be raised about the direction of causality;- is it declining social capital that results into less successful marriage, and more single parent families and more single adults? Also, why are married people more civicly engaged?
Putnam points out that decline in successful marriages cannot be the entire story, because even among married people, there was significant decline in civic engagement.

9. Age: According to the data gathered by Putnam, other than education, one factor consistently predicts all form of declining civic engagement and trust. That is age. Putnam finds two separate trends: older people are consistently more engaged and trusting than younger people, and people do not become more engaged and trusting as they age (according to survey results).

This provided Putnam with the central paradox: older people are consistently more engaged and trusting than younger people, yet we do not become more engaged and trusting as we age.

In unpacking this paradox, Putnam describes three contrasting phenomena used by sociologists:
1. Life cycle effects
2. Period effects
3. Generational effect

Putnam argues that both the period effect and generational effect exists to solve the paradox. He contends that the key is to recognize the ‘civic’ generation born between 1910 & 1940, who are more civicly engaged and trusting, compared to the generations that followed. Thus, throughout their life-cycle, in all stages of life, they are more socially engaged and trustworthy towards own community, compared to other generations in the same stages of life (generational effect). Why this is the case can be explained by the period effect: this generation was born with the experiences of two world wars and the great depression, events that shaped their lives and that demanded more community engagement and support in their younger days. Thus, according to Putnam, as he supports his argument with survey evidence, being raised before and after WWII makes a big difference in terms of civic engagement and trust.

But Putnam rightly points out that this only reframes the puzzle- the underlying causes of civic disengagement can be traced from 50s and 60s (post war period), not in the 70s and 80s. If this reinterpretation is true, why did the visible impact of generational disengagement delayed into 70s, 80s and 90s?

Putnam provides two separate explanations: firstly, the post war education boom (in college enrollments) offsetted the generational trends by boosting civic engagement (education effect). Secondly, in order for the generational effects to be visible through surveys, the younger generations needs to become the majority in society, which they did not become until the 70s.

Thus, Putnam comes to the central argument to answer the puzzle. According to Putnam, the culprit is Television! (This surprised me at first. But with some reflection, it made sense. It also goes along my initial hypothesis about the impact of internet, social media and other media consuming increasing amounts of our free time.)

What supports Putnam’s argument? First of all, the timing. The ‘civic’ generation was the last cohort of Americans to grow up without televisions, as in 1950, less than 10% of American households had TV sets, while 90% of American households had TV sets in 1959! Viewing hours grew each subsequent decade, among all levels of educated people. TV consumes more than 40% of an average American’s free time. Controlling for different factors, TV viewing is strongly and negatively correlated to social trust and civic engagement. This is because, as Putnam argues, TV watching comes at the expense of every social activity outside the home. Research also tells us that heavy TV watchers have more skeptical view about others and have increased pessimism about human nature.

Although Putnam provides several evidence to prove his argument, I still think the evidence do not conclusively prove the causality between increased TV watching and declining social capital. But it is a plausible thesis. It also confirms my initial hypothesis about the role of increased ‘individualism’, which can be linked to increased TV watching as TV is the prominent medium for advertisements and spreading consumer based values; and about the role of technology in the form of internet and social media, whose impact might have gotten stronger after 2000.

For Putnam, this loss of civic engagement and social interaction is not only troublesome with regard to social cohesion, but also in terms of its political consequences. Hence, he ends with different suggestions about how social cohesion can be increased. Overall, this is a book that raises important questions, provides impressive research and inspires more research to do in this topic.