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Robert David Putnam (born January 9, 1941 in Rochester, New York) is a political scientist and professor at Harvard University, well-known for his writings on civic engagement, civil society, and social capital. Putnam also developed the influential two-level game model that assumes international agreements will only be successfully brokered if they also result in domestic benefits.
His most famous (and controversial) work, Bowling Alone, argues that the United States has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life (social capital) since the 1960s, with serious negative consequences. Though he measured this decline in data of many varieties, his most striking point was that virtually every traditional civic, social, and fraternal organization -- typified by bowling leagues -- had undergone a massive decline in membership.
Putnam makes a destinction 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-etnic 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 from another football team. Putman argues that those two kinds of social capital, bonding and bridging, do strengthen each other.
Biography
Putnam graduated from Swarthmore College in 1963, won a Fulbright Fellowship to study at Oxford University, and went on to earn master's and doctorate degrees from Yale University, the latter in 1970. He taught at 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.
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.
In 1995 he published "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" in the Journal of Democracy. The article was widely read and garnered much attention for Putnam, including an invitation to meet with then-President Bill Clinton. It was not without its critics, however, some of whom argued that Putnam was ignoring new organizations and forms of social capital; others argued that many of the included organizations were responsible for the supression of civil rights movements and the reinforcement of anti-egalitarian social norms. Perhaps the most widely noted observation in the article was the fact that 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.
Since then, he has focused 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 focuses on a series of case studies of vibrant and new forms of social capital building in the United States
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)
- Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nannetti, 1993)
- Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)
- Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contempory Society (Edited by Robert D. Putnam), Oxfort University Press, (2002)
- Better Together: Restoring the American Community (with Lewis M. Feldstein, 2003)
Reference
- Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
External links
- Bio page at the Saguaro Seminar
- Saguaro Seminar
- Official website for Bowling Alone
- Better Together, an initiative of the Saguaro Seminar
1941 births | Living people | Political scientists | Community building | Civil society
"Robert Putnam"