Challenging Accepted Explanations of the Decline in American Civic Engagement

• In Event: 474 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 15. Theory-Building for Social Movement Studies

Abstract

Since Putnam’s (1995) Bowling Alone, sociologists have generally agreed that the decline in American civic engagement at the end of the 20th century was a result of rising economic inequality and female employment. According to these narratives, working women have less time for civic activities, and increasingly powerful and ubiquitous multinational corporations (that are indifferent to local affairs) have replaced civic-minded local entrepreneurs. These two theories have appealed to sociologists as a result of their logic and purported claims of empirical support. Although we agree that these two theories partially explain American civic disengagement, we argue that these two factors do not, by themselves, explain the decline in American civic engagement. We believe that the strength of unions is the key to understanding the mechanism behind the decline of civic engagement. Using the 2006 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, this paper demonstrates that the effect of economic concentration is mediated by the strength of unions, while the effect of female employment on civic engagement is not significant in all models. The emergent theory does not abandon accepted knowledge; it illuminates it.

Authors

• Ya-Feng Lin, Louisiana State University

• Joseph Paul Cleary, Lehman College (City University of New York)