It is hard to think of an academic term whose rise has been quite as spectacular as "social capital." Like a virus escaped from a laboratory, it has spread from Harvard's school of government to the think tank world, and then to politicians, civil servants and beyond. Architects and planners are no longer exhorted to design safe and attractive communities but to "promote social capital." Where personnel manuals once provided guidance on maintaining a good work atmosphere they now instruct on "sustaining high levels of social capital."
The key figure in social capital's spectacular rise has been Robert Putnam, ten years ago an anonymous Harvard social scientist and now one of the US's leading communitarian intellectuals. People of all classes and political persuasions have long worried about the decline of community, but Putnam did three things to give their concerns academic respectability.
First of all, he unpacked the concept of community-or as he called it, social capital-analysing it in terms of the "networks" and associated "norms of reciprocity and trust" that facilitate collective action. He then distinguished between different forms: "bridging" and "bonding," "formal" and "informal," "weak" and "strong." Social capital is said to be high where we can draw on a wide network of individuals to help us achieve individual or collective goals, and low where we cannot. Social capital networks can be supplied by formal organisations-political parties, gentlemen's clubs, a birdwatching society, a local church, an addicts' support group or a school governing body-or informal: a circle of friends, a group of friendly neighbours, a casual reading group, or babysitting circle. Social capital manifests itself in small ways-nodding to a stranger in a lift, raising a hand to a driver who stops at a zebra crossing-and large: risking one's life to save a drowning stranger or donating a life's savings to a good cause.
Second, Putnam made large claims for social capital's importance. He argued that communal networks and norms protect us against loneliness, depression and anomie; they help people into jobs and promote health, prosperity, and security. And they are a vital engine of democracy. Social capital, in the form of high levels of participation in voluntary organisations and political groups, Putnam argued, gives ordinary citizens a voice, brings them into contact with people with diverse points of view, teaches them civic skills, stops them falling prey to extremism, and fosters considered public debate.
Finally, Putnam claimed to be able to show what most Americans suspected anyway-that "community" is in peril. Whether social capital is measured by formal membership of associations, informal sociability, or perceptions of trust, the pattern of decline from the middle of the 20th century to the end is much the same. "During the first two thirds of the century, Americans took a more and more active role in the social and political life of their communities-in churches and union halls, in bowling alleys and club rooms, around committee tables and card tables and dinner tables." And then they began to withdraw. The baby boomers, born between 1945 and 1965, were less engaged with their fellow citizens than the "civic generation" (born between 1910 and 1940) before it, and generation X, born between 1965 and 1985, have proved less socially active still.
Putnam's argument has been very influential. Its impact can be felt, more or less directly, in Clinton's AmeriCorps programme, Bush's call for people to "do something for each other," and countless New Labour initiatives aimed at promoting neighbourliness, volunteering and "active citizenship."
I do not want to challenge all of the claims that Putnam makes for social capital, or his analysis of its fate in the US. But I believe that British experience should make us question assumptions made by Putnam and his fellow researchers. Social capital thinking has important limitations-especially when applied to Britain.
Like other communitarians, Putnam attaches enormous importance to local face to face interaction. He thinks that social capital is created and sustained by everyday exchanges between relatives, neighbours, colleagues and friends. True, he suggests that the second world war played a crucial role in creating the great deposits of social capital found among the "long civic generation." But he is vague about how exactly this occurred. And when it comes to accounting for the breakdown of social capital, the one thing all the main "culprits" have in common-television, changing work patterns and suburbanisation-is that they work to undermine local communal interaction. Similarly, most of Putnam's prescriptions for promoting social capital revolve around boosting local face to face contact-by encouraging volunteering, especially among young people, decreasing time spent commuting, and promoting team sports, "group dancing... songfests and rap festivals," and local churches.
The same bias in favour of face to face community is evident in much of the British writing on social capital. Most of the policies explored or commended in the paper on social capital produced by Downing Street's strategy unit-creating "home zones" and mixed-use developments, encouraging volunteering and time banks, state support for reading groups-have a local, civil flavour. The almost unquestioned assumption that local engagement will of itself generate national civil and political renewal is such that the leading British surveys of citizenship now treat membership of sporting clubs and self-help groups as expressions not of social capital but of "active citizenship" itself.
Yet the example of Britain should make us wary of face to face community as the cure for all our ills. It seems clear that Britain does not face a crisis of community. Most recent survey evidence-much of it stimulated by Putnam's work-appears to point in the same direction: on the measures that really matter, social capital is faring relatively well. There is, admittedly, a real shortage of it where it is needed most: in deprived, socially-excluded communities (though even here, the evidence is open to interpretation). And it is also true that in some cases we have high levels of social capital but of the "wrong" sort: tight networks of mutual support among the upper middle class or "own group" ethnic solidarity in areas of high ethnic mix.
But across the board, we are not doing so badly. Membership of voluntary associations has continued at roughly stable levels since the 1950s, with the falls in church membership offset by increases in membership of environmental organisations and charities. As the 2001 British Social Attitudes survey put it, "The well-documented decline of social capital in the US and the associated decline in social trust are not mirrored in Britain... To a significant-and sustained-extent, British people tend to trust one another, help each other out, and spend portions of their discretionary time in the service of community goals."
The latest polling does appear to show that, after remaining fairly steady for many years, personal trust is falling. But we should be wary of reading too much into this. People's conduct-their habits of membership and association-is a more telling indicator than their "attitudes" as reported to a pollster. And measured by conduct, Britain does not appear to have undergone a collapse in association life.
At the same time-and in a way that communitarian thinking cannot explain-we have seen extraordinarily dramatic declines in levels of political engagement and democratic participation. At 59 per cent, turnout for the 2001 election was the lowest since 1918. And the decline in turnout over the last three elections is far greater than the largest declines across three consecutive elections registered in any established western democracy since 1945. Low turnouts have also been the norm in recent local and European elections-and, more surprisingly, in elections for the new Scottish, Welsh and London parliaments. Even the dramatic electoral fight that pitted Ken Livingstone against Frank Dobson for mayor of London couldn't attract more than 34 per cent of voters.
It is sometimes argued that if people are giving up voting, it is in part because they have found better means of having their say. Survey evidence at first sight seems to bear this out. It shows a small but significant increase over the last two decades in the proportion of respondents who reported having signed a petition, gone on a demo or contacted their MP. It turns out, however, that the increase largely occurs within the dwindling group that votes.
Decline in voting, moreover, is mirrored in falls in party and trade union membership and identification with political parties. A staggering 98.5 per cent of voters now have no formal connection to a political party. I have suggested that we should not attach too much significance to surveys that claim to measure "trust," but it is worth noting that if personal trust is showing signs of falling, trust in political institutions and politicians has fallen further. Recent Mori evidence shows that where 79 per cent of citizens trust their local hospital, only 48 per cent trust their local council and even less-43 per cent-the British government. Politicians and political parties are viewed with special wariness. Only 18 per cent of Britons trust politicians, giving them the same ranking as journalists and putting them well below business leaders (28 per cent) and trade union officials (33 per cent).
One reaction is to dismiss the decline in levels of political participation as a sign of contentment. But the fall in involvement is most pronounced among those groups who have most to gain from change-the working classes, black and ethnic minority groups and young people. Prosperous, well-educated broadsheet readers, on the other hand, tend to keep voting.
What is going on here? Fall in electoral turnout and party membership can, it is true, be traced partly to the political parties moving to the centre of the political spectrum, and the fact that one party has maintained a clear lead in the polls in the last two general elections. But these factors can't explain everything. They don't account, for instance, for higher rises in disengagement among some groups rather than others, or the unprecedented character of the recent fall in turnout.
Rather, we are almost certainly dealing with deeper changes at the level of culture, and the fit between culture and political structures. Voters once felt that they had a deep stake in the political decisions being made in their name and that these decisions really mattered. With the end of the cold war and the rolling back of the state, perhaps government is simply less important. Perhaps it is also true that 50 years of peace and relative prosperity have undermined the collective identities that foster political engagement. (There is nothing like war, as Putnam half acknowledges, to spur people to get involved.) Perhaps the first past the post system, and the two-party structure it encourages, doesn't give the increasingly educated, individualised electorate the sort of eclectic choices it wants. It is no longer aggregating opinion in an effective manner
The truth is we don't really understand what is going on. But one thing does seem certain: policies aimed at restoring local communal life will not of themselves tackle the decline in political life. And that is the problem that is really ailing Britain-a problem that could create a crisis of legitimacy for Britain's political institutions.
