Robert Putnam - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Robert David Putnam is a political scientist

Political science

Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...

and professor of public policy at the Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

John F. Kennedy School of Government

The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University is a public policy and public administration school, and one of Harvard's graduate and professional schools...

. He is also visiting professor and director of the Manchester Graduate Summer Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester

University of Manchester

The University of Manchester is a public research university located in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is a "red brick" university and a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive British universities and the N8 Group...

(UK). Putnam developed the influential two-level game theory

Two-level game theory

Two-level game theory is a political model of international conflict resolution between liberal democracies derived from game theory and originally introduced in 1988 by Robert Putnam....

that assumes international agreements will only be successfully brokered if they also result in domestic benefits. His most famous (and controversial) work, Bowling Alone
Bowling Alone
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a book by Robert D. Putnam. It was originally a 1995 essay entitled Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital.-Summary:...

, argues that the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life (social capital

Social capital

Social capital is a sociological concept, which refers to connections within and between social networks. The concept of social capital highlights the value of social relations and the role of cooperation and confidence to get collective or economic results. The term social capital is frequently...

) since the 1960s, with serious negative consequences.

Background and early work

Putnam graduated from Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....

in 1963, won a Fulbright Fellowship

Fulbright Program

The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...

to study at Balliol College, Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

, and went on to earn master's

Master's degree

A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...

and doctorate

Doctorate

A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to teach in a specific field, A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder...

degrees from Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, the latter in 1970. He taught at the University of Michigan

University of Michigan

The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

until going to Harvard in 1979, where he has held a variety of positions, including Dean of the Kennedy School, and is currently the Malkin Professor of Public Policy. Putnam was raised as a religiously observant Methodist. Around the time of his marriage, he converted to Judaism, his wife's religion.

His first work in the area of social capital was Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, a comparative study of regional governments in Italy which drew great scholarly attention for its argument that the success of democracies depends in large part on the horizontal bonds that make up social capital.

"Bowling Alone" and its critics

In 1995 he published '"Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital

Bowling Alone

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a book by Robert D. Putnam. It was originally a 1995 essay entitled Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital.-Summary:...

" in the Journal of Democracy
Journal of Democracy
The Journal of Democracy is a quarterly academic journal established in 1990 and an official publication of the National Endowment for Democracy...

. The article was widely read and garnered much attention for Putnam, including an invitation to meet with then-President Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

and a spot in the pages of People magazine. Some critics argued that Putnam was ignoring new organizations and forms of social capital; others argued that many of the included organizations were responsible for the suppression of civil rights movements and the reinforcement of anti-egalitarian social norms. Over the last decade and a half, the United States had seen an increase in bowlers but a decrease in bowling leagues.

In 2000, he published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, a book-length expansion of the original argument, adding new evidence and answering many of his critics. Though he measured the decline of social capital with data of many varieties, his most striking point was that many traditional civic, social and fraternal organizations — typified by bowling league

Bowling league

A bowling league is a group event where several teams bowl against each other. Most bowling leagues consist of four team players that meet up once a week and usually at the same time and day. Teams of three or five players are also common. Leagues can be set up as male-only, female-only, or mixed....

s — had undergone a massive decline in membership while the number of people bowling had increased dramatically.

Putnam makes a distinction between two kinds of social capital: bonding capital and bridging capital. Bonding occurs when you are socializing with people who are like you: same age, same race, same religion, and so on. But in order to create peaceful societies in a diverse multi-ethnic country, one needs to have a second kind of social capital: bridging. Bridging is what you do when you make friends with people who are not like you, like supporters of another football team. Putnam argues that those two kinds of social capital, bonding and bridging, do strengthen each other. Consequently, with the decline of the bonding capital mentioned above inevitably comes the decline of the bridging capital leading to greater ethnic tensions.

Critics such as sociologist Claude Fischer argue that (a) Putnam concentrates on organizational forms of social capital, and pays much less attention to networks of interpersonal social capital; (b) neglects the emergence of new forms of supportive organizations on and off the Internet; and (c) the 1960s are a misleading baseline because the era had an unusually high number of traditional organizations.

Since the publication of Bowling Alone, Putnam has worked on efforts to revive American social capital, notably through the Saguaro Seminar, a series of meetings among academics, civil society leaders, commentators, and politicians to discuss strategies to re-connect Americans with their communities. These resulted in the publication of the book and website, Better Together, which provides case studies of vibrant and new forms of social capital building in the United States

Diversity and trust within communities

In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30 000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both between and within ethnic groups. Although limited to American data, it puts into question both the contact hypothesis

Contact hypothesis

In criminology, psychology, and sociology, the contact hypothesis has been described as one of the best ways to improve relations among groups that are experiencing conflict. Gordon W. Allport is often credited with the development of the Contact Hypothesis, also known as Intergroup Contact Theory...

and conflict theory

Conflict theory

Conflict theories are perspectives in social science that emphasize the social, political or material inequality of a social group, that critique the broad socio-political system, or that otherwise detract from structural functionalism and ideological conservativism...

in inter-ethnic relations. According to conflict theory, distrust between the ethnic groups will rise with diversity, but not within a group. In contrast, contact theory proposes that distrust will decline as members of different ethnic groups get to know and interact with each other. Putnam describes people of all races, sex, socioeconomic statuses, and ages as "hunkering down," avoiding engagement with their local community—both among different ethnic groups and within their own ethnic group. Even when controlling for income inequality and crime rates, two factors which conflict theory

Conflict theory

states should be the prime causal factors in declining inter-ethnic group trust, more diversity is still associated with less communal trust.

Lowered trust in areas with high diversity is also associated with:

Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in one's own influence.
Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
Higher political advocacy, but lower expectations that it will bring about a desirable result.
Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action
Collective action
Collective action is the pursuit of a goal or set of goals by more than one person. It is a term which has formulations and theories in many areas of the social sciences.-In sociology:...

(e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
Less likelihood of working on a community project.
Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
Fewer close friends
Friends
Friends is an American sitcom created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, which aired on NBC from September 22, 1994 to May 6, 2004. The series revolves around a group of friends in Manhattan. The series was produced by Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, in association with Warner Bros. Television...

and confidants.
Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
More time spent watching television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

and more agreement that "television is my most important form of entertainment".

Putnam published his data set from this study in 2001 and subsequently published the full paper in 2007.

Putnam has been criticized for the lag between his initial study and his publication of his article. In 2006, Putnam was quoted in the Financial Times as saying he had delayed publishing the article until he could "develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity" (quote from John Lloyd of Financial Times). In 2007, writing in City Journal, John Leo

John Leo

John Leo is a writer and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He edits , the Institute's web site on America's universities, and is a contributing editor of City Journal. He is also a Visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college in Savannah.From 1988 to 2006 his weekly column...

questioned whether this suppression of publication was ethical behavior for a scholar, noting that "Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings." On the other hand, Putnam did release the data in 2001 and publicized this fact. The proposals that the paper contains are located in a section called "Becoming Comfortable with Diversity" at the end of his article. This section has been criticized for lacking the rigor of the preceding sections. According to Ilana Mercer

Ilana Mercer

Ilana Mercer is a writer, born in South Africa to Rabbi Ben Isaacson and raised in Israel, where the family decided to move after Rabbi Ben Isaacson's anti-apartheid preaching and activism led to their harassment by South African security forces...

"Putnam concludes the gloomy facts with a stern pep talk".

Recognition

Robert Putnam has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

(1980), and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations

Council on Foreign Relations

The Council on Foreign Relations is an American nonprofit nonpartisan membership organization, publisher, and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs...

(1981), the National Academy of Sciences

United States National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...

(2001), and the American Philosophical Society

American Philosophical Society

The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pa., is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,...

(2005). He was the President of the American Political Science Association

American Political Science Association

The American Political Science Association is a professional association of political science students and scholars in the United States. Founded in 1903, it publishes three academic journals...

(2001–2002). He has received honorary degrees from Stockholm University

Stockholm University

Stockholm University is a state university in Stockholm, Sweden. It has over 28,000 students at four faculties, making it one of the largest universities in Scandinavia. The institution is also frequently regarded as one of the top 100 universities in the world...

, Ohio State University

Ohio State University

The Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...

, University of Antwerp

University of Antwerp

The University of Antwerp is one of the major Belgian universities located in the city of Antwerp. The name is sometimes abbreviated as UA.-History:...

, University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...

, and LUISS Guido Carli (Rome) among others. He is the recipient of the Wilbur Cross

Wilbur Lucius Cross

Wilbur Lucius Cross, Ph. D. was an American educator and political figure who was the 71st Governor of Connecticut for eight years.-Biography:Born in 1862 in Mansfield, Connecticut, Cross graduated from Yale University Wilbur Lucius Cross, Ph. D. (April 10, 1862 – October 5, 1948) was an American...

Medal of Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

The Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1847, is one of the oldest graduate schools in the United States. It conferred the first Ph.D...

for outstanding career achievement (2003). In 2006 Robert Putnam received the Johan Skytte Prize for the most valuable contribution to political science.

Published works

The Beliefs of Politicians: Ideology, Conflict, and Democracy in Britain and Italy (1973)
The Comparative Study of Political Elites (1976)
Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies (with Joel D. Aberbach and Bert A. Rockman, 1981)
Hanging Together: Cooperation and Conflict in the Seven-Power Summits (with Nicholas Bayne, 1984, revised 1987)
Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games. International Organization. 42 (Summer 1988): 427-460.
Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti, 1993)
Bowling Alone
Bowling Alone
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a book by Robert D. Putnam. It was originally a 1995 essay entitled Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital.-Summary:...

: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)
Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society (Edited by Robert D. Putnam), Oxford University Press, (2002)
Better Together: Restoring the American Community (with Lewis M. Feldstein
Lewis M. Feldstein
Lewis M. Feldstein is the Co-Chair of The Saguaro Seminar along with Robert D. Putnam and current President of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation...

, 2003)
"E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century -- The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize." Scandinavian Political Studies 30 (2), June 2007
Age of Obama (co-written with Tom Clark and Edward Fieldhouse), Manchester University Press (2010)
American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (co-written with David Campbell) , Simon & Schuster (2010)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.