Abstract
Inspired by Robert Putnam and referring to Alexis de Tocqueville, many political sociologists have in recent decades focused on expectations of positive effects of participation in voluntary associations on political involvement. However, the literature and analyses of new data sources suggest a very fragile empirical basis for these expectations: Statistical relationships are weak and the causality is disputable. Present-day leisure clubs might not be the civic organisations that Tocqueville wrote about, and present-day citizens might have other sources of drivers for political involvement.
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Social and religious participation = attend religious services at least once a month; belonging to or currently doing unpaid voluntary work for a list of ‘voluntary organizations and activities’ including ‘other groups’, but excluding political parties or groups; local community action on issues like poverty, employment, housing, racial equality; third world development or human rights; conservation, the environment, ecology, animal rights; and the peace movement. Political participation = belongs to or is currently doing unpaid voluntary work for political parties or group, and/or has ever practised any of the three ‘different forms of political action that people can take’: signing a petition, joining in boycotts, and/or attending lawful demonstrations.
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Work for a voluntary or charitable organization = at least once every 6 months in the past 12 months became ‘involved in work for voluntary or charitable organisations’. Political participation = ‘Trying to improve things in (country) or help prevent things from going wrong; has in the last 12 months … contacted a politician, government or local government (official); worked in a political party or action group; worked in another organisation or association; worn or displayed a campaign badge/sticker; signed a petition; taken part in a lawful public demonstration; and/or boycotted certain products.
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I am aware that this is quite vague, but I prefer this vagueness to the use of ‘civic’ as simply not being political, and thus including leisure associations (making soccer clubs ‘civic’; need I say more?). My sense of ‘civic’ comes close to the definition of civic groups by Paul Lichterman (2005, p. 8): ‘…groups in which people relate to each other and to the wider society primarily as citizens or members of society, rather than as subjects of a state administration or as consumers, producers, managers, or as owners in the marketplace. They relate to each other “civically”.’
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This does not contradict expectations about the positive social capital and civic effects of ‘working together’ (Estlund 2003) instead of ‘bowling together’, but the time constraints imposed by the obligations of a job or school might just be stronger than the positive effects for most people.
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Of course, I am referring here to Alexis de Tocqueville. This formulation is probably the not so-often visited source of present-day authors who write about the ‘(neo)Tocquevillian’ idea of voluntary associations as ‘schools of democracy’ in the Almond and Verba sense of nonpolitical associations being the starter for political participation. Ironically, Tocqueville writes here in exactly the opposite direction about the blessings of political associations for civil ones: ‘Political associations may therefore be considered as large free schools, where all the members of the community go to learn the general theory of association’(Tocqueville 1990, vol 2, p. 116).
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See, Van Ingen and Dekker (2012) for a study of the coexistence in all types of voluntary associations of various conditions for being a ‘school of democracy’: opportunities to exercise civic skills; meeting citizens not similar to your own group; informal talk about politics; connections with political institutions. We asked active members about all these aspects for their associations (instead of constructing virtual average organizations). Our main conclusion was that there are virtually no voluntary associations that incorporate all characteristics of a school of democracy.
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This is the title of a book by Eliasoph (1998) about volunteer groups in the USA ‘working hard to keep public-spirited conversation backstage’ (Eliasoph 1998, p. 63) because politics (political divides between volunteers, relationships with dirty politicians etc.) would spoil their work for the common good. Wuthnow (1998, p. 57) observes the same, stating, ‘Setting government to the side of one’s thinking may have become the condition for believing that civic involvement matters at all.’ LeBlanc (1999) signals similar ideas among a group of Japanese female volunteers: ‘… the longer a woman participated in the volunteer world, the more likely she was to blame politics for social situations that she found unacceptable. Nevertheless,…she often remained committed to avoiding politics when possible’ (LeBlanc 1999, p. 112). Again, this is not about leisure associations, but about volunteers for social purposes—but all the more depressing for high expectations about the politicizing effects of social participation.
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Dekker, P. (2014). Tocqueville Did Not Write About Soccer Clubs: Participation in Voluntary Associations and Political Involvement. In: Freise, M., Hallmann, T. (eds) Modernizing Democracy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0485-3_4
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