The Robert Putnam Thesis

The 2024 Election and the Breakdown of Social Capital

Like many others, I’ve been pondering the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election. I’ve read a lot of takes, most of which are overblown. I’ve come away with some initial frames for thinking about our current moment. I’ll be unpacking them on this newsletter all week (and quite likely beyond).

Here are the three ideas I want to take on. Today, I want to explore the breakdown in social capital that has made the Consitution’s Pursuit of the General Welfare (Common Good) so challenging. On Wednesday, I plan to take on the problem of our small-d democratic information infrastructure, how it hampers the political process, and what we could possibly do about it. On Friday, I want to dispose of the “liberals adopted woke policies and look down on real Americans” claim and then look at the real problem underlying it, which is the breakdown of institutional trust. Clearly, these problems are interconnected, but addressing them all at once is just too daunting.

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Saturday I watched the Netflix documentary about Robert Putnam, “Join or Die”. Made by one of Putnam’s students (it borders on hagiography), it tells the story of how Putnam’s central thesis evolved from his work on Italian regionalization as a young scholar through the Bowling Alone years and to the present day.

Most readers are probably aware of the popularized version of the Bowling Alone thesis. Before the 1970s, people at bowling alleys were there as organized leagues. These leagues represented church groups, labor unions, neighborhoods, and other non-profits. Each week people would show up in their fancy bowling shirts (never to be worn anywhere else) and interact with the teams from the other groups. He claims that the bowling alleys didn’t make their money from the dues paid or lane fees but because of beer and food sales, where the real markups happened. But by the late 1980s, bowling alleys were more dependent on individuals and families coming to bowl. Bowling was not about group-ness and was just about another commercial enterprise for people with discretionary income.

What was lost in this transition was far more than lessened revenue for bowling alleys. It was the destruction of social capital, the glue that connected people to one another. And it wasn’t just bowling — participation rates in all kinds of voluntary associations fell over this time period as well.

A variety of factors played into these changes. Putnam mentions several: the economic shifts and rising inequality beginning in the Reagan administration, the process of suburbanization — especially with modern neighborhoods where we drive into our garages and never see our neighbors, and the role of television and social media consumption. On this latter point, he demonstrates a high negative correlation between hours of television watched per week and involvement in social organizations.

Putnam acknowledges that he didn’t invent the term “social capital”. He says that it has shown up in various forms over the years, but he was a popularizer. The first Bowling Alone articles garnered acclaim and a visit to the White House. Then the thesis was attacked by conservatives. He did five more years of research before turning Bowling Alone into book form.

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I first became aware of something like social capital when I took at grad course in social network analysis. We read “The Strength of Weak Ties” by Mark Grannovetter published in 1973. It argued that while much of social networks are about how people are connected with each other through friendship ties, some activities like job searches were better understood as functioning through looser connections. Think of LinkedIn as the modern day equivalent.

Which brings to mind the biggest research mistake I ever made. In 1990, I was interested in studying how congregational networks might mediate voluntary association behavior. I had a grant from the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (via Lilly) to examine three congregations in Hutchinson, Kansas. I mapped the friendship/kin relationships within each congregation and the individual's connections to a variety of social organizations. My mistake was that I neglected to measure Grannovetter’s weak ties. In other words, I measured Bonding Capital and neglected Bridging Capital. I realized that the latter was far more important in connecting people to solve problems. What I really needed to know if how members of the congregation would react to someone in need. I simply forgot to include that as part of the survey (note to self: this is why you should work with a team).

Here’s why these two forms of Social Capital are significant. As much as the media talks about Thanksgiving Dinner with family members of differing political views, what we really need to grasp are the ways in which we might be more loosely connected to one another.

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Watching “Join or Die” brought to mind another element of the recent election. Like many other people, I spent some time canvassing for the Democratic ticket. The campaign official, who may have been an out of towner, sent me to a neighborhood about six miles from my house. I would knock on the door, wait for someone to response (which rarely happened) and then engage in a very short conversation about the ballot.

It wasn’t a good use of time. Most people, if they were home and willing to answer the door, didn’t want to talk to a stranger. Given a lack of connection, they wanted to end the chat as quickly as possible. The Harris campaign had an absolute army of people doing what I did.

But answering the door and engaging in conversation in itself requires a modicum of social capital. If that’s lacking and one distrust anyone outside the immediate social circle, it’s hard to engage in the hard work of listening to one another to pursue our common welfare.

As Putnam argues, there are many factors that have broken our social bonds. Economic inequality is key, especially when the cost of living is high. Social media consumption and balkanized news sources make things worse. We don’t really know our neighbors, much less strangers.

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There is a plethora of opinion pieces available to second-guess what the Harris campaign should have done to come up with a win two weeks ago. Everyone has their pet theory; largely what they were advocating for before the election. They have ideas on what lessons the Democrats need to learn and what strategic changes they should undertake for 2026 and 2028.

Nearly all of those prognostications are doomed to fail. While some thought that focusing on “the threat to democracy” was a key message for 2024, it seems to me that the truth runs far deeper than that. Democrats need to invest in the reconstruction of both Bonding and Bridging Social Capital, address the problems of our information infrastructure, and rebuild trust in the core institutions.

All three of theses key elements are likely to be under attack in the next year. The trick will be to avoid responding to the latest outrage from the Trump administration and proactively engage the rebuilding of our social contract.