Diminished Democracy (The Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture Series)

Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture

by Theda Skocpol

Pundits and social observers have voiced alarm each year as fewer Americans involve themselves in voluntary groups that meet regularly. Thousands of nonprofit groups have been launched in recent times, but most are run by professionals who lobby Congress or deliver social services to clients. What will happen to U.S. democracy if participatory groups and social movements wither, while civic involvement becomes one more occupation rather than every citizen’s right and duty? In Diminished Democracy , Theda Skocpol shows that this decline in public involvement has not always been the case in this country―and how, by understanding the causes of this change, we might reverse it.  

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Political Science, Philosophy, American History

388 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003

About the author

Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University and the Director of the Scholars Strategy Network. She is a past president of the American Political Science Association.

Reviews

[Conor Ahern · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was at a Lambda event at some point in law school for prospective students, and those of us who were single were sizing up the "prosp-ies" (prospective students). People seemed aflutter about one of the cuter ones, saying he was brilliant (and apparently they were right: he will be clerking for Justice Sotomayor at some point in the next year or so). Someone more in the know than me said "Well yeah, apparently he's Theda Skocpol's son." Everyone nodded knowingly except me. Who was this person?

Well the name, fun as it is to pronounce ("Scotch-pole") stuck with me over the years, and as I was reading another book about the decline of unions, her name (and this book) kept coming up. The beginning is dry as dust, but it's an interesting follow up to de Tocqueville's rhapsodic exhortation of American civil society, only in the 20th Century. It concludes by regretting the move away from local, civic organizations and toward elites, spokespersons, and fundraising organizations. The decline of the Elks and the rise of the ACLU and the NRA. It makes sense that this top-down type of advocacy style and looser affiliation makes people feel more suspicious of their lesser-known fellow Americans and more eager to consume their spleen about the other side. Far from offering a pollyannaish solution like "let's go back to how it was" (which it explicitly rejects on multiple occasions because, after all, "how it was" was only really great for middle- and upper-class white people, mostly straight, Christian, and male at that), Skocpol suggests we acknowledge the reality of the primacy of money to political and social organizing but incorporate more mobilization elements into such organizations. It got me thinking about the alienation people feel from politics, and how they are willing to give money to "outsiders" like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump as their only meaningful form of participation in politics or protest against the established orders. What if these fundraising impulses were galvanized around issues as opposed to candidates? What could we do if we pegged participation and influence to some nominal figure like $50 and coordinated participation to influence the process of selecting candidates? I wonder...!

[Paul Cloutier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book, though it is a little bit of work. Important context to our current political situation. Described our alienation from our civic duty and posits a way to regain our place as the most civically engaged of nations.

[Josh Preuss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah, I didn't know anything about the extent of voluntary associations (e.g. the Masons) between the civil war and the 1960s, and I guess now I do.

The book was actually a bit vague in areas that I would have liked more information. Theda is very convincing in making sure everybody agrees about the trajectory of voluntary associations, why they became prevalent, what replaced them, and why they died.

They died because of racial / gender integration (which these associations vehemently opposed, against the wishes of the younger generation), a movement of political leverage into DC from the states and localities, a growing disinterest in patriotism, an replacement of civic acts for self improvement to mostly being used for advocacy. etc.

They grew and spread as people moved around to new areas of the USA, and as the kind of glue that held otherwise atomized units of people together. People love hanging out.

On the activism side, these groups were replaced by groups like EDF or NAACP, or AARP which are "professional" "advocacy" institutions that mostly communicate with members thru mail.

Voluntary associations tended to meet in their one place, and act as a federalist democracy, in a kind of cloned format of the national democracy. They had lots of elections, and did things like dinners, and drills, and reading groups and stuff. However, one of the points that I didn't really understand about these groups, was what activities they "really" were built around. Like what did the Elks "do" mostly? Was it converse? hold elections for things? what were they voting on?

Then the other issue I came away confused about was like, ok Skocpol makes it clear that the voluntary associations had leverage over every level of politics in the USA. Was it primarily through having senators as members of the associations? Was it through elections and then just voting, given their huge numbers? Unclear.

Generally, it seems really great to maybe restart a group cohesion where lots of like-minded people get together regularly, to discuss civic matters in a dignified manner, and to pursue the furtherment of virtues in each of their lives. The book does not give a great pattern to follow to bring these back though!

The closest thing in my life that I have similar to this are Effective Altruism Movement, and Fractal.

EA is different in myriad ways to a voluntary association - it's global primarily instead of national, there aren't really associational meetings for general purposes, instead there are meetings held to further specific directions of inquiry. The main glut of the association is now online instead of in person.

If I were to take EA and move it one step further towards being something like the Masons, I would say I could attend and pursue getting others to attend regular meetings, with elections on some sort, and debates about those elections.

EDIT: Now that I actually finished the book, upgrading to a 5. It's rare to see a book describe a problem so thoroughly and then give a good perspective on how to form a solution. Theda talks about 2 salient points I would like to reflect here.

Instead of polls, politicians and the media should lean more on people who have a reasonable claim to represent a body of the politic. Since Theda wrote this, elite opinion has turned even further away from polling.

There are certain laws that prohibit associations from flying too close to overtly political actions. Skocpol says we should rid ourselves of these.

Skocpol hammers home how if we don't re-align elite thrusts of politics with the ordinary man's desires, we're going to be worsening the gap between what our populace wants to see in politics and what actually happens. One harmful outcome of this, is that often the two parties will argue over a trivial matter that doesn't directly affect people's lives, while leaving important issues untouched that are more directly relevant. This happens because enfrothening the masses through hot button issues gets them to donate more, but these aren't the issues that will come out of a healthier representation.

Link to a "prospectus" of the book https://prospect.org/special-report/n...

I was tempted into reading this by Tanner Greer, who I'm a huge fanboi of https://scholars-stage.org/pining-for...

[Chuck Kollars · Rating 4 out of 5]

...another book that I found dispiriting although that wasn't the author's intention.

Author Theda Skocpol is an instructor and researcher at Harvard. Her book reports her research into the mass membership organizations (Elks, Grange, IOOF, etc.) that were ubiquitous in the previous century. It's framed as a response to Robert Putnam's 'Bowling Alone', pointing out many additional factors and alternative views. The upshot is she comes to somewhat different conclusions from most of those concerned about civic renewal. The book's comments about 9/11 -which had just happened- are of course now badly dated, but the larger conclusions seem to me to be as relevant as ever.

Those mass organizations generally had a structure similar to our government. They had at least three levels (often local, state, and national). They were as much bottom-up as top-down. And they had an intimate exchange of political activity (but not money) with the government in both directions.

Her conclusions are "academically constrained", but my own crude interpretation of her book is more blatant: replacing mass organizations with lobbying groups run by "experts" and "professionals" gave us much more efficient organizations, and addressed several minority issues that would otherwise not have been addressed. But it came at a very steep cost: Lobbying is now over-centralized ("if your cause doesn't have a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., it doesn't exist"). The rank and file no longer feel connected to their government ("why should I vote? they do what they want anyway"). Inequality is high and growing ("the eggheads who control things all live in their own neighborhood, not around here"). And our extreme polarization is at least partly the result of the new advocacy groups jockeying for contributions ("this solicitation says we're going to hell in a handbasket ...I'll let fear drive my voting just in case that's really true").

Most trenchantly, she concludes that all the local civic community building in the world won't help much if the connections between civic organizations and the federal government aren't somehow rebuilt.

Without at all intending to, she paints a picture of everything being connected to everything else so tightly that nowadays any intentional reorienting of our polity is effectively impossible. (Just one example: she opines that the ability of mass organizations to affect our federal government can't happen unless we also a] change our tax laws and b] dramatically reorient our mass media.)

Here's a quotation from the book: 'When U.S. professionals and business-people constituted tiny, geographically dispersed strata of the national population, they understood themselves as "TRUSTEES OF COMMUNITY" ...'. Nowadays with the elites competing with each other in their own world, most communities are effectively abandoned with nobody left to steer the ship.

[Kevin Kodama · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is about how the nature of civic participation in the USA has changed. While current civic organizations are more professionalized and wonkish, the organizations of years past were more community-focused and often led by working class people. In the last century, we've seemingly forgotten about the vast network of grassroots associations that used to exist in America: something that used to be the envy of the world but has now all but died out.

It had some interesting moments, but overall the book was pretty dry. It starts with a really evocative anecdote about seeing a gravestone decorated with all sorts of honors from civic organizations, leading the author to speculate how fundamentally different civic life must have been in a previous era. But even though it contains lots of facts and figures about how the associations of this time were different (more direct involvement, more cross-class membership, more robust hierarchies), the book failed to convey the difference in how these sorts of organizations were perceived. I mean, I understand that people were trying to "rank up" in these organizations and that they cared enough about them to campaign on them and put them on their gravestones. But I just can't imagine modern Americans getting excited about things like that— from reading the book it just feels like the people of 1800s America were just fundamentally different in some way. I was hoping the book could clarify why this mentality shifted, and it didn't really do that for me. And the reforms that it suggests (addressing economic inequality, simplifying campaign finance law, making election day a holiday) aren't exactly groundbreaking. But it does call attention to something that we've lost touch with (our civic heritage), and I appreciate it for that.

[Zak Yudhishthu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really rich and thorough overview of transformations in American civic life, and why they mattered. The book still feels fresh 2 decades later, and I think most of the analysis withstands the internet age. The book does suffer a bit from the last chapter problem, where the proposed policies don’t seem very satisfying for such a big challenge (Skocpol is aware of this though).

I didn’t read this book because of an interest in the methodology of her historical research, but there were a lot of cool primary source analyses.

[Lucas Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very Political Science-y, but based in very rigorous historical research. While it is not the sexiest of topics, I found the authors arguments deeply compelling.

As is increasingly often the case, I wonder how much of this books argument is affected by the election of Trump in 2016. I still think that rebuilding American civic life through an increased focus on membership in some sort of group is powerful.

I want to join something. I want to pay dues and develop a network. Recommended.

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its a little dated because it was written in 2003 and emotionally is thinking about the post 9/11 period but since it's mostly historical it still works. The analysis of why cross-"class" (income/wealth) large membership organizations brought something vital to American civil society, how that changed and what we have lost is all still super relevant. What's less clear is the prescription, especially with the culture war/political divide and chaos of social media.

[Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would feel really weird being the only person to ever give this one star so I’ll give it two. It was so dry. So so so dry. I felt like I was dying of thirst. Maybe I’m just not a joiner, or I’m a lone wolf or something, but I really don’t feel like the NRA and the KKK are really doing anything great for American civic life.

[Adam Kanter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful and readable. Organized in a logical, coherent way, and concludes with recommendations on how to fix the problems discussed. Great resource and one that I will continue to reference and revisit.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Brooks mentioned this book, which mentions how people have diminished community involvement.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting complement to Putnam's "Bowling Alone". Skocpol traces the rise and fall of large membership organizations throughout American History to the early 2000s and the rise of professionally managed, top-heavy groups to influence policy beginning in the 1960s/1970s.

In the end, I agree with more than a couple of her conclusions, though I'm still more so in the Putnam camp of "we need more face-to-face interaction at the local level to build social ties" - combined with - the conclusions offered, especially that there is a place for professionally managed groups of experts to provide information and support to the local, state, national, democratically constituted organizations of cross-class citizens.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not giving this book 5 stars because I'm completely convinced by Skocpal's arguments or prescriptions. But this is an extremely well written book. So glad to read a social scientist who responsibly engages history. Anyone who cares about American civic life will want to read this book, absorbing some of the points and responding to others.

[Stephanie Quesnelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skocpol looks at the historical role of fraternal associations in U.S. civic life. The book then transitions to an analysis of current organizations, much less associations and many more professional lobbying groups. It's an interesting perspective and brought some important issues to light. In associations, people could be equal. Professional lobbying groups only represent those who can pay.

[Scott Ford · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very intersting look at the history of civic groups in the US (e.g. The Masons, The Knights of Columbus, The ODD Fellows, 4-H, etc.), their demise, and the role of government as the services they provided communities were replaced.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

theda skocpool surveys the decline in participatory democracy in the U.S. since the 60s. not the most exciting read, but informative.

[Zach Blume · Rating 5 out of 5]

A starting point to the understanding of associations in American history outside unions. The only problem was a good comparison with union and union practices.