Chapter One

COUNTING OUR SOCIAL CAPITAL

The United States is an individualist democracy. "Let government do it" has never been our thing. We've counted on individuals doing it -- by accepting responsibility for building and maintaining a good society.

Somewhat paradoxically, an individualist democracy is unusually dependent on harnessing collective or cooperative energies. Individual citizens can't manage a society -- can't possibly address its manifold needs in any satisfactory fashion -- through solitary labors. We must come together in associations large and small where we learn and practice citizenship. Our ideal has been and remains an America of active civic and social organizations, churches, philanthropies, and voluntarism -- not just to help concretely with a myriad of social needs and problems but, even more important, to sustain vibrant community life. That the "me" will become too insistent, at the expense of the "we," is a persistent American worry. And engaging citizens in civic affairs is the persistent American answer to how a narrowly self-serving individualism can best be avoided.

No one has ever thought it would be easy, though. A "collectivist" individualism built around community engagement can release enormous civic energy, but it asks a lot of millions of citizens. It's not surprising that many in each succeeding generation of Americans have worried that vigorous community participation through groups and charities and voluntary service is somehow losing ground.

THE TWILIGHT OF CIVIC AMERICA?

These worries are very much evident today. The U.S. economy is hugely successful, but isn't "community" suffering even amidst these burgeoning material resources? Aren't we too transfixed by what I need, to make me happy at the expense of what we need, as in our family life, for real individual fulfillment? Aren't we losing the level of confidence and trust in one another that's essential to the health of our democracy? Aren't we retreating into private pursuits, or to use a metaphor that has resonated in recent years, aren't we now increasingly "bowling alone"?

Polls pick up the current angst. For example, surveys taken by ABC News and the Washington Post regularly ask respondents if they think "things in this country are generally going in the right direction, or...have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track?" Much of the time large majorities answer that we're heading the wrong way: 57 percent said this in late summer 1997, even though the economy was doing nicely, compared with just 39 percent who thought the country was moving in the right direction. The Los Angeles Times had asked this same question in a 1995 survey and got similar results -- 55 percent said we were off on the wrong track, only 35 percent that things were on the whole moving positively. What's most instructive, when the newspaper's pollsters followed up by asking those who had said the country was somehow going the wrong way rather than progressing why they felt this way, 50 percent talked about crime, family breakdown, and a weakening of religious commitments and standards (while just 19 percent mentioned anything to do with the economy).

Such concerns are often expressed in terms of our "social capital" account. The traditional reference to capital involves economics, of course. My dictionary defines the term as "the wealth, whether in money or property, owned or employed in business..."; and as "any form of wealth employed or capable of being employed in the production of more wealth." Drawing on this root, "social capital" encompasses any form of citizens' civic engagement employed or capable of being employed to address community needs and problems and, in general, to enhance community life. The Great Social Capital Debate addresses this question: Are we spending down our supply of social capital? Many think that the balance is now dangerously low and worry about the consequences.

Are we right to so worry? In the pages that follow I will argue that the answer is yes from one important perspective, but an emphatic no from another. Social capital is crucial, and it's undergoing some major changes of form. But at the same time, an extensive record shows that we're building up our supply of social capital, not depleting it.

The Ladd Report explores in full detail the web of private sector, voluntary participation in groups or associations, highly organized or informal, to advance common goals and shared interests. The book is about, then, the status of contemporary American citizenship. In examining the level and character of our engagement, I seek to avoid the excesses of both Pollyanna and Cassandra. Are current trends in fact shifting against us, forcing us to, in effect, run uphill in civil life? Or instead, is the ground now sloping, at least a bit, in the direction all friends of civic America would wish? The reader will find here, I hope, guidance on this matter from the head rather than from the heart.

I've assembled and assessed the empirical record on the current state of the country's civic engagement. After examining in Chapter 2 various claims advanced in the debate of recent years, I review in Chapter 3 what we actually know about trends in America's associational life. The Elks and the Boy Scouts are less prominent and active now than they were a half century ago; but the Sierra Club is much more so. Bowling leagues are down, but U.S. Youth Soccer has emerged de novo and engages more than two million boys and girls, together with an army of adult volunteers. Individual groups matter to their devotees -- but it's the health of the forest that's really important, not that of each tree. What's the health of our forest of civic associations?

Chapter 4 then looks at forms of citizens' involvement that are more demanding than mere group membership -- the volunteering of time and labor to work with others for community causes and to meet community needs, and contributing financially to these ends. In Chapter 5, I shift from the contemporary record of civic participation to a key element that underlies it -- the degree of citizens' trust in those with whom we must work if we are to enhance the quality of American life, and our confidence in the social and political structure that is the setting for our activities.

Finally, in Chapter 6, I look at how American civic life compares with that of other industrial democracies. A century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville saw America's liberal, individualist democracy as being open to many popular excesses. But he also believed it generated enormous civic energy -- by encouraging an unprecedented sense of responsibility among individual citizens for social improvement, and an active, richly pluralistic community life. An exception in the way it had come to experience modernity, America stood out, Tocqueville thought, in the reach of its idea of citizenship. Where do we stand in cross-national comparison now on the eve of a new century?

This book seeks, then, to round up, measure, and analyze our civic health. I hope that, upon reviewing the record, readers will conclude that I've achieved in some substantial measure what I intended to do when this project began: let the data themselves argue the case. If civic America is being eviscerated or at the least weakened appreciably, each of us and those who come after us will inevitably reap the unfortunate consequences. On the other hand, if the country's civic life isn't declining, but rather churning, transforming itself to meet modern conditions without losing positive energy, we should acknowledge it and get on with the task of building upon the new. An insipid nostalgia, which looks to a past that never was and laments the absence of a perfect present which can never be, can only detract fr