Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (review)

In Diminished Democracy, Skocpol continues her extraordinary reconstruction of America's political past. Turning from the analysis of public policy, she illuminates the history of civic participation through a rich account of the large voluntary associations that have been recognized as distinctive features of the American political landscape by Tocqueville and innumerable others.¹ Already recognized by multiple awards, this volume has a great many virtues. Diminished Democracy presents a narrative of civic history that is simultaneously novel scholarship and compelling reading for audiences outside the academy. Skocpol is eloquently self-conscious as a scholar, explaining how research has been shaped by theory and method and giving inspiration through tales of creative research done in archives, in antique stores and graveyards, and on ebay. Finally, Diminished Democracy is a work of history with the power to inform deeply our understanding of the present and future of American politics.

Diminished Democracy begins with the key feature of this "nation of joiners," the large voluntary associations that proliferated during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Skocpol mobilized a team of researchers to identify those associations that achieved a membership of 1 percent of the relevant population (all American adults or only men/women for gender-segregated associations) at some point in their history. From the founding of the Ancient and Accepted Free Masons in 1733 to the establishment of the Christian Coalition in 1989, fifty-eight associations are identified as meeting this criterion. Through a reconstruction of their history, Skocpol documents how the number of foundings declined with the twentieth century, and overall membership peaked in the decades after World War II (68).

Skocpol argues that the vitality of these organizations stemmed, in large part, from the ways in which they coordinated with a federal system of government. Their national bodies—based on state associations with their own local chapters—were intensely engaged with an expanding government, not crowded out by it as some have argued. In contrast to Putnam's work, which highlights the importance of community or local social capital, Skocpol's analysis of city directories demonstrates that many of the "local" organizations were affiliates of national organizations and explains how the organizational strategies of the large associations facilitated the spread of membership into new communities.² Federations, Skocpol argues, "were especially vital in building an American democracy in which ordinary people could participate, gain skills, and forge recurrent ties to one another—not just locally but also across communities, states, and regions of a vast and expanding nation." These organizational experiences helped to constitute a distinctive polity as federations "nurtured a style of public leadership based on majority election and the responsibility of officeholders to engage and mobilize their fellow citizens" (124).

What happened to that world? In the aftermath of World War II, membership growth stalled and, more importantly, elites abandoned the mass-membership associations. Skocpol uses Massachusetts data to illustrate that the membership of male state senators in the Elks, Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, and Knights of Columbus dropped precipitously after the 1960s, whereas overall membership declined much more gradually (192–196). Data from the General Social Survey documents a comparable decline in rates of membership among the college educated, a growing proportion of the population. Fueled by the expansion of higher education and professionalization, civic participation increasingly centered on "management models" and staff-dominated organizations, as well as on lobbying and insider tactics, rather than mass mobilization.

For Skocpol, the key transition in civic participation is a process of exit. In the "long 1960s," traditional membership groups were rejected by younger, more educated, and economically advantaged Americans. This exit (or failure to join) was partly driven by objections to the prominence of race, gender, and ethnicity as categories of membership and partly by a preference for new management-oriented models of organizing. Yet, in focusing on the abandonment of membership organizations by these new elites, Skocpol pays less attention to the dilemmas confronted...