Robert D. Putnam

Robert David Putnam (born January 9, 1941) is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics.

He is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Putnam developed the influential two-level game theory that assumes international agreements will only be successfully brokered if they also result in domestic benefits.

Robert David Putnam was born on January 9, 1941, in Rochester, New York, and grew up in Port Clinton, Ohio, where he participated in a competitive bowling league as a teenager.

His most famous 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.

Critics such as the 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) Putnam 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.

Putnam theorizes a relation in the negatives trends in society.

He envisions a uniting factor named social capital; originally coined (no evidence provided) by social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville as a strength within America allowing democracy to thrive due to the closeness of society, "trends in civic engagement of a wider sort".

Putnam observes a declining trend in social capital since the 1960s.

The decreasing in social capital is blamed for rising rates in unhappiness as well as political Apathy.

Low social capital, a feeling of alienation within society is associated with additional consequences such as:

Putnam graduated from Swarthmore College in 1963 where he was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity.

In 1963, Putnam married his wife Rosemary, a special education teacher and French horn player.

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.

He won a Fulbright Fellowship to study at Balliol College, Oxford, and went on to earn a master's degree and doctorate from Yale University, the latter in 1970.

He taught at the University of Michigan until joining the faculty at 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.

published in 1993.

It is a comparative study of regional governments in Italy that 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.

Putnam writes that northern Italy's history of community, guilds, clubs, and choral societies led to greater civic involvement and greater economic prosperity.

Meanwhile, the agrarian society of Southern Italy is less prosperous economically and democratically because of less social capital.

Social capital, which Putnam defines as "networks and norms of civic engagement", allows members of a community to trust one another.

When community members trust one another, trade, money-lending, and democracy flourish.

Putnam's finding that social capital has pro-democracy effects has been rebutted by a sizable literature which finds that civic associations have been associated with the rise of anti-democratic movements.

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 and a spot in the pages of People.

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

Putnam distinguishes two kinds of social capital: bonding capital and bridging capital.

Bonding occurs among similar people (same age, same race, same religion, etc.), while bridging involves the same activities among dissimilar people.

He argues that peaceful multi-ethnic societies require both types.

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.

In March 2015, he published a book called Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis that looked at issues of inequality of opportunity in the United States.

According to the Open Syllabus Project, Putnam is the fourth most frequently cited author on college syllabi for political science courses.

In 2016, Putnam explained his inspiration for the book, by saying,

"We've [Americans] been able to run a different kind of society. A less statist society, a more free-market society, because we had real strength in the area of social capital and we had relatively high levels of social trust. We sort of did trust one another, not perfectly, of course, but we did. Not compared to other countries. And all that is declining, and I began to worry, 'Well, gee, isn't that going to be a problem, if our system is built for one kind of people and one kind of community, and now we've got a different one. Maybe it's not going to work so well.'"