American civil society at mid-century

In mid-twentieth-century American civil society, business associations coexisted with broad-based, popularly rooted voluntary membership associations. In terms of sheer numbers of groups, business associations predominated. Groups representing businesses or businesspeople constituted about half of all nationally visible associations in 1950 and more than 40 percent in 1960.⁸

This situation helps explain why political scientists saw business dominance within the Washington lobbying community at mid-century.⁹

Yet if we examine voluntary groups with large individual memberships, we see another side of mid-century civic life. Compared with citizens of Britain and Germany—the two other advanced-industrial nations surveyed in Almond and Verba's book The Civic Culture—mid-twentieth-century Americans of both genders and all educational levels were more likely to join and hold office in voluntary associations.¹⁰

What is more, Americans were involved in distinctive types of groups. Americans, Britons, and Germans joined occupationally based associations at roughly equal levels (although the British were more often members of labor unions and did not join farm groups). And respondents of all three nationalities were comparably involved in social and charitable groups. But Americans were unusually likely to claim one or more memberships in church-related associations, civic-political groups, and fraternal groups—and were also significantly involved in cooperative and military veterans' associations. The “fraternal” category especially stands out, in that Almond and Verba tallied it only for the U.S. case.¹¹

As late as the early 1960s, in short, Americans were avid participants in “fellowship associations”—groups emphasizing and expressing solidarity among citizens, or among “brothers” or “sisters” who see themselves as joined in shared moral undertakings. In 1955, more than two dozen very large membership federations enrolled between 1 percent and 12 percent of American adults apiece.¹²

Rooted in dense networks of state and local chapters that gave them a presence in communities across the nation, major fraternal groups, religious groups, civic associations, and veterans' associations predominated among very large membership associations (apart from the AFL-CIO). Smaller nationwide membership federations also flourished in the immediate post–World War II era—including elite service groups such as Rotary and the Soroptimists; civic associations such as the League of Women Voters; and dozens of fellowship and cooperative federations with memberships restricted to African Americans or to particular ethnic groups.¹³

Most of the business associations that were so numerous in the 1950s and early 1960s grew up over the course of the twentieth century; and the same was true of professional associations, also numerous by mid-century. But massive, popularly rooted fellowship federations had much deeper historical roots. They started to proliferate in the fledgling United States between the Revolution and the Civil War and then experienced explosive growth in the late nineteenth century, as civic organizers—some of whom had met during the Civil War struggles—fanned out across the United States, organizing state and local chapters in every nook and cranny of a growing nation. Millions of nineteenth-century Americans joined women's federations, fraternal and veterans' groups, and reform crusades. By the early twentieth century, the kinds of membership groups that had the most consistent presence, apart from churches, in towns and cities of all sizes were chapters of nation-spanning fellowship federations.¹⁴

Of course, particular voluntary federations rose and fell over time. But as the United States industrialized between the 1870s and the 1920s—an epoch during which business and professional groups and labor unions grew in this country as they did in other industrializing nations—fellowship federations remained a strong presence. In addition to the Civil War, World Wars I and II promoted the growth of fellowship federations, which worked closely with the federal government to mobilize Americans for wars.¹⁵

In an important sense—and this is a key point—the United States continued pre-industrial patterns of civic voluntarism through much of the industrial era, adding occupational and class-specific associations to its universe of associations while retaining older cross-class federations.

Although fellowship associations may seem to have been apolitical, in fact they were often involved in public affairs. Half to two-thirds of the 20 largest membership associations of the 1950s were directly involved in legislative campaigns or public crusades of one sort or another.¹⁶

This is perhaps obvious for the AFL-CIO and the American Farm Bureau Federation. But beyond these, the PTA and the General Federation of Women's Clubs were active in a variety of legislative campaigns having to do with educational and family issues.¹⁷ The Fraternal Order of Eagles championed Social Security and other federal social programs.¹⁸ And the American Legion drafted and lobbied for the G.I. Bill of 1944.¹⁹ These are just a few of many possible examples.

Contemporary civic reorganizations

Although business groups and popular membership federations held sway in U.S. civil society as of the mid-twentieth century, sudden and remarkable changes occurred thereafter. Three intertwined transformations remade the American civic universe between the 1960s and the 1990s.

First, while business groups continued to proliferate in absolute terms, they lost proportional ground in the universe of nationally visible voluntary associations. The total number of U.S. national associations expanded from about 6,000 in 1960 to reach a new plateau of about 23,000 in 1990 and after. Yet as this expansion happened, the share of business associations shrank from 42 percent to 17.5 percent, while associations devoted to addressing issues in the realms of “social welfare” and “public affairs” burgeoned from 6 percent to 17 percent of all nationally visible associations.²⁰

Expanding categories included citizens', or public interest, associations—that is, nonprofit organizations that aim to further value-laden understandings of the public good: for instance, environmental groups, antipoverty groups, pro-choice and pro-life groups, family values groups, and associations dealing with the rights of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and other vulnerable categories of Americans.²¹ The balance of organized voice in U.S. public affairs shifted markedly in the late twentieth century, as many new kinds of associations came to be heard, speaking for more causes and constituencies than ever before.

Second, previously hefty blue-collar trade unions and fellowship federations went into sharp decline. This fact has been empirically documented both in my own research and in the research of Robert Putnam.²²

As Putnam has argued, all kinds of membership associations experienced a considerable drop from the 1960s on. Tellingly, however, as Figure 1 shows, the post–World War II declines have been greatest for blue-collar trade unions and chapter-based voluntary federations, especially once-vibrant women's associations and fraternal groups. Elite professional societies have experienced much less membership decline than have most popularly rooted membership associations. And if we take into account affiliations with recently proliferating specialized professional organizations, educated Americans have certainly increased their overall involvement with professional membership groups.²³

The third and final contemporary transformation involves shifts in the structures of voluntary groups and institutions. Although thousands of new, nationally visible groups were created between the 1960s and the 1990s, many—such as public law groups, think tanks, foundations, and political action committees—are not membership groups at all.²⁴

Others are staff-centered associations that recruit masses of individual adherents through the mail. With a few exceptions—such as the 35-million-member AARP—most contemporary mailing-list groups have followings in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, not millions.²⁵

Recently proliferating associations have other telling features. Even when they claim substantial numbers of adherents, most recently founded associations rarely have chapters—or they have very sparse networks of subnational affiliates.²⁶

In addition, many recently founded or recently growing groups are heavily invested in professional staffing. There are as yet no definitive studies on staffing levels for all groups across time. But there are suggestive studies of environmental groups and other kinds of public interest associations, showing a sharp trend toward expanded professional staffs.²⁷

Over the past four decades, in sum, American associational life has become more pluralistic and less business-focused, yet it has shifted away from popularly rooted membership associations and toward professionally managed organizations, many with no members or chapters at all.

To the degree that there is any exception to the civic trans-formations I have just recounted, it is on the conservative side of U.S. civil society. Professionally managed advocacy groups have proliferated across the board, but conservatives have, at the same time, done more than liberals to renew or reinvent massively large, popularly rooted federations. The National Right to Life Committee, the Christian Coalition, and the National Rifle Association are all extensive chapter-based membership federations that have flourished in recent times. Inspired by moral and ideological world views, they have recruited people across class lines (through church networks or sports clubs, for example), linking local units to one another and into the penumbra of the Republican Party.²⁸

The one unabashedly liberal membership federation to experience comparable massive growth in recent decades is the National Education Association, a teachers' union.

Rights revolutions and civic transformation

The key social changes that propelled civic reorganization in late-twentieth-century America were associated with the “rights revolutions” of the 1960s and 1970s. Because most traditional U.S. fellowship federations were racially exclusive and gender-segregated, new attitudes and practices about race and gender hit them like a tornado. Virtually all fellowship federations at mid-century had explicit or implicit racial exclusion built into their constitutions, membership requirements, and organizational practices. In addition, especially among whites, longstanding, chapter-based membership associations were typically either gender-specific or organized into separate sections for men and their female relatives. Traditional gender roles tended to be assumed, with women not only organizing their own voluntary associations but also serving as helpmates to male organizations.

In a 1997 survey, a representative sample of Americans told sociologist Robert Wuthnow about the kinds of associations they would be “very unlikely” to join. Ninety percent said that they would not join groups “with a history of racial discrimination,” and a clear majority (58 percent) also said that they would be very unlikely to join an association that “accepts only men or women.”³³

These attitudes reflect a half century of rapid changes among Americans.³⁴ With the dawn of new racial attitudes, many traditional groups were understandably delegitimated in the eyes of younger people, especially the well educated, so these associations found it hard to recruit new members. Likewise, traditional associations were under-cut by the rise of feminism, the entry of more and more women into the paid labor force, and the proliferation of female-led families. Women were no longer available as help-mates for men's groups; and changes in work and family life hurt membership groups that needed to coordinate people's availability for recurrent meetings.³⁵

The civil rights struggle and other rights revolutions also raised questions about forms of organization favored by old-line chapter federations. Across much of U.S. civic history, membership associations trumpeted constitutions paralleling U.S. government and celebrated representative modes of decision making. But such structures traditionally embodied compromises between the racially segregationist South and the rest of the nation. Movements aiming to enhance the rights of minorities and promote value changes were naturally skeptical of existing majoritarian practices and organizational arrangements. To this day, many Americans whose youthful political consciousness was shaped by the rights struggles tend to think of majoritarian institutions as cumbersome, bureaucratic, and unresponsive—remembering that in the 1960s and 1970s such institutions often were obdurate when first faced with demands for racial and gender equality.

Instead of the old majoritarian, federated ways of doing things, the new rights movements depended initially on activist cadres and, later, on professionals—types of leaders who could readily get out in front of laggard majorities. Old-line membership federations such as African American churches, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the General Federation of Women's Clubs played visible roles in the rights revolutions of the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. But even in an era of popular protests, the key roles were often played by newly launched vanguard organizations, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded in 1957; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), founded in 1960; the National Organization for Women (NOW), founded in 1966; the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL), founded in 1968; and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (now called NARAL Pro-Choice America), created in 1973 as a reorientation of an earlier group. Of the above-named organizations, SCLC was a coordinating group of activist African American ministers, and SNCC was a coordinating group of student civil rights activists.³⁶

In due course, NOW developed chapters and a modest-sized national membership, and WEAL and NARAL eventually developed modest-sized mailing-list memberships. Yet these and other women's rights organizations started out as “leadership and not membership based.”³⁷ Activists devoted to organizing protests and lobbying the federal government were the key founders and association builders.

A new political opportunity structure

This brings us to the second set of factors that propelled civic reorganization. National government activism of broader scope and greater intensity spurred the formation and professionalization of voluntary groups.³⁸

A sudden “bulge” of important federal legislative enactments started in the late 1950s and peaked in the 1960s and early 1970s.³⁹

This constituted what political scientist Hugh Heclo has aptly called a new “age of improvement,” in which the federal government aimed to influence new realms of American social and economic life—ranging from women's and minority rights to the health of the environment to the well-being of the poor and the elderly.⁴⁰ As Figure 2 suggests, the emergence of thousands of new nationally focused associations followed slightly after heightened federal legislative activism. In specific policy areas as well as overall, innovative federal measures tended to precede the bulk of voluntary group proliferation.⁴¹ For example, new advocacy associations speaking for women and minorities sprang into being most rapidly not before but after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the establishment during the next few years of federal agencies to enforce affirmative action regulations.⁴²

After liberal rights and public interest associations emerged in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, business associations and conservative public interest groups proliferated during the 1980s.⁴³

This should not surprise us, because new government interventions not only help to define new values, social identities, and economic interests; they also change the stakes for groups on all sides of every issue, encouraging organization and counterorganization to influence further government policy making. On all sides, moreover, federal tax rules prompted the development of clusters of cooperating associations—as 501(c)(3) groups engaged in research and public education, sister 501(c)(4) groups lobbied government, and affiliated political action committees raised money for elections.⁴⁴

Late-twentieth-century changes in the structures and activities of the federal government similarly encouraged the professionalization of associations.

One inducement to add professionals to group staffs is perhaps obvious. From the 1960s, the federal courts showed a new willingness to entertain class action suits, and they became intensely involved in adjudicating issues arising from legislation on federal rights, the environment, and social regulation.⁴⁵

Fighting federal lawsuits became an important way to influence social policy making—and this naturally encouraged the proliferation of public interest law firms and stimulated many other advocacy groups to add lawyers to their staffs.

The professionalization of Congress likewise proceeded apace from the 1960s through the 1980s. During this period, congressional representatives were increasingly likely to be college graduates; and thousands of new employees staffed the offices of individual members, providing expert assistance to congressional committees and subcommittees, which grew in number after reorganizations in the early 1970s.⁴⁶

Many of these new congressional employees were professionals, college-educated students, or former students—persons with the skills and expertise needed to help representatives cope with the intensive and specialized legislative environment.

At the same time, the “age of improvement” brought changes in the federal bureaucracy. National government employment did not increase very much—even after the mid-1960s, it increased at a much less spectacular rate than federal spending and regulations did.⁴⁷

But the “upper and upper-middle levels of officialdom” did expand, while “employees in the field and in Washington” who performed “routine chores” became relatively less numerous.⁴⁸ Federal agencies added technical and supervisory personnel to oversee new regulations and implement programs with assistance from private groups as well as state and local officials.

Not surprisingly, reorganization of federal employment.⁴⁹

After all, there were now more decision makers to contact about policy concerns, new levers to pull in Washington, D.C. And it was usually a matter of professionals contacting fellow professionals, people with similar policy interests, or perhaps fellow college classmates. Associations added professionals to their D.C. offices—people who could do policy research, monitor legislation in Congress, and interact with officials as new laws were administratively defined and implemented. “Issue networks” with lots of interacting experts formed in every aspect of federal policy making—and advocacy group professionals were avid participants.⁵⁰ Environmental policy making is an excellent case in point. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 man-dated the preparation of “environmental impact statements” by government agencies. This created an incentive for environmental associations to hire policy experts who could influence such statements—and thus the staffs of associations grew at an even faster rate than the sheer number of environmental groups did after 1969.⁵¹

During the “age of improvement,” finally, the federal government engaged in administration “by remote control”⁵²

in a fashion that greatly encouraged the growth of state and local government and the professionalization of nonprofit agencies. Instead of expanding the federal bureaucracy to directly administer new programs, the new laws of the 1960s and after typically used regulations and subsidies to induce nonfederal actors to pursue desired goals. Federal supervisors hired private contractors or consultants; federal agencies channeled moneys to governors or mayors. In turn, either the federal government or state and local governments often designated private nonprofit agencies to run new social programs established by the war on poverty, the Great Society, and Nixon-era social legislation. The 1967 amendments to the Social Security Act, for example, included hefty inducements for state governments to contract out social programs to nonprofit agencies.⁵³ In response to the new opportunities, thousands of nonprofit social agencies were created, while older service associations expanded their activities, especially activities administered by service professionals.

Many unanticipated civic effects followed from the indirect administration of expanded federal and state programs in late-twentieth-century America. Local chapters of old-line voluntary membership federations became less engaged in the provision of social services through mutual aid or voluntary community efforts. Meanwhile, proliferating professionally run nonprofits expanded their staffs—and aimed to recruit civically active politicians, businesspeople, and public figures to their supervisory boards. It is not incidental, I would suggest, that from the mid-1960s on, prestigious forms of civic activity in localities across the United States became less a matter of joining and leading a membership association and more a matter of either working with or serving on the board of a nonprofit service agency. Social service employees, occasional volunteers for local agencies, and members of the boards of service agencies—these are the kinds of people we usually consider the preeminent civic activists today.⁵⁴

Interestingly, the stress I have placed on changing political opportunities can help us to understand why conservatives remained more reliant on traditional forms of voluntarism. Back in the 1965–1980 period, when professional advocacy was taking hold as a prestigious associational model, conservatives often felt excluded from the Washington “establishment.” Although this would change later, conservatives originally did not see as many opportunities as liberals did to mount lawsuits or lobby Congress and executive agencies. Instead, organizers in the Christian right, the anti–gun control movement, and the pro-life movement, and around the populist edges of the Republican Party, experimented with melding new methods of professional advocacy and fund-raising with membership federations networked across many congressional districts.

In very recent times, nonconservatives have begun to feel excluded from centers of power. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that we see new experiments with federated community organization and popular mobilization in, for example, the labor movement and the environmental movement.

New technologies and models of association building

New technologies and models of association building constitute the third and final set of trends propelling civic reorganization in the late twentieth century. Obviously, the current vogue for professionalized, staff-led civic associations has been shaped by changes parallel to those affecting political parties since the 1950s—an era during which decentralized party organizations have largely been displaced by a coterie of professional fund-raisers, pollsters, and media managers.⁵⁵

Like old-line politicians who relied upon state and local party networks to pull as many eligible voters to the polls as possible, the organizers of old-line U.S. voluntary federations took it for granted that the best way to gain national influence was to recruit mass memberships and spread a network of chapters. There were good reasons why this model came to be taken for granted in classic civic America from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s. After the start-up phase, the budgets of voluntary federations usually depended heavily on membership dues. Supporters had to be continuously recruited through person-to-person contacts. And if leverage over government was desired, a voluntary federation had to be able to influence legislators, citizens, and newspapers across many legislative districts. For these reasons, classic civic organizers with national ambitions moved quickly to recruit activists and members in every state and across as many towns and cities as possible. Like Frances Willard of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union—who was always on the train and hardly ever “at home” in Evanston, Illinois⁵⁶

—leaders traveled around the country, convened face-to-face meetings, and recruited and encouraged intermediate leaders who could carry on the work of member recruitment and retention. “Interact or die” was the watchword for classic American association builders.

Today, nationally ambitious civic entrepreneurs proceed in quite different ways. When Marian Wright Edelman got the inspiration to found the Children's Defense Fund, she turned to private foundations for funding and then recruited an expert staff of researchers and lobbyists.⁵⁷

Ever since the Ford Foundation launched the trend in the late 1950s, foundation grants have been especially important to the funding of U.S. public interest associations, encouraging their professionalization and allowing many of them to avoid reliance on membership dues.⁵⁸ Liberal foundations moved first, but in the past two decades conservative foundations have been major players as well. The late Jack Walker and his associates surveyed hundreds of associations with headquarters in Washington, D.C., and found that foundation grants were especially important for the founding and maintenance of recently established public interest (citizens') groups.⁵⁹

Alternatively, contemporary advocacy groups can use patron support to get started and then turn to computerized direct-mail solicitations to develop continuing support from individual adherents. To name just a few examples, this technique has been effectively used by Common Cause, big environmental groups, the Concord Coalition, and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Civic entrepreneurs need generous seed grants to start direct-mail solicitation, because appropriate lists must be purchased and hundreds of thousands of letters repeatedly mailed.⁶⁰

And staff expertise is equally necessary, because mailings must be honed and deployed again and again.⁶¹ The Internet is modifying these realities, but only modestly.

Ready access to national media outlets is the final circumstance allowing advocacy associations to forgo recurrent contacts among leaders and members. Rather than coming up through small media markets, elite television, newspaper, and magazine reporters today are often recruited directly from universities and operate from the start out of major metropolitan centers.⁶²

In punditry hubs like Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., reporters, politicians, and advocacy spokespersons participate in endless talk shows; and print reporters are always on the phone to advocates as well as politicians. National media outlets want to stage debates among dramatically polarized sets of spokespersons; and advocacy associations need to keep their causes and accomplishments visible. By dramatizing causes through the national media, advocates can enhance their legitimacy and keep contributions flowing from patrons or direct-mail adherents.

The very model of civic effectiveness has, in short, been upended since the 1960s. No longer do civic organizers think of constructing vast federations and recruiting interactive citizen-members. When a new cause appears, activists envisage opening a national office and managing association-building as well as national projects from the center. Contemporary organization-building techniques encourage public interest groups—just like trade and professional associations—to concentrate their efforts in efficiently managed headquarters located close to the federal government and the national media. Even a group aiming to speak for large numbers of Americans does not need “members” in any meaningful sense of the word.

Dwindling avenues for participation

As long-standing popularly rooted unions and fellowship federations have faded while professionally run public interest associations—along with business and professional groups—have proliferated, avenues for citizen participation have become more constricted. We can see this by contrasting the modi operandi and class appeal of these two types of associations.

Scholars studying political participation have established that a combination of resources, motivation, and mobilization explains variations in who participates, how, and at what levels.⁶⁶

Individuals from privileged families have advantages of income and education, and also tend to be regularly contacted by civic organizers or election campaigners. What is more, people in managerial and professional careers are likely to gain skills at work that can be transferred to public activities. Nevertheless, such socioeconomic disparities can be partially counteracted if popularly rooted political parties, unions, churches, and associations mobilize and motivate average citizens and spread skills that facilitate participation.

Along with unions and farm groups, traditional U.S. fellowship federations have been organizational mechanisms for widely distributing civic skills and motivation. Back in 1892, Walter B. Hill published a humorous piece in The Century Magazine purporting to explain to a foreign friend how the United States could encourage every boy to aspire to be president and “every American girl to be the [p]resident's wife” when, in fact, there were not that many public offices to go around. The “great American safety valve,” he wrote, is that “we are a nation of presidents” with “an enormous supply of official positions” at the local, state, and national level in a “thousand and one societies.”⁶⁷

Hill's observations about “the significance of the non-political office-holding class in our country” identified a crucial aspect of traditional American civic life.⁶⁸

Countless churches and voluntary groups of all sizes needed volunteer leaders. Indeed, the largest, nation-spanning voluntary federations could have as many as 15,000 to 17,000 local chapters, each of which needed 12 to 18 officers and committee leaders each year. Considering just the 20 largest voluntary federations in 1955, my research group estimates that some 3 percent to 5 percent of the adult population served in leadership roles in that year. Additional recruits were needed each year thereafter, as members moved through ladders of positions and into “past officer” status. And hundreds of smaller federations also needed regular rounds of volunteer leaders.

As they cycled millions of Americans through official responsibilities, classic voluntary federations taught people how to run meetings, handle moneys, keep records, and participate in group discussions. So many officers and activists were required that there were plenty of opportunities for men and women from blue-collar and lower-level white-collar occupations.⁶⁹

Local activists, furthermore, got on leadership ladders that could lead to responsibilities at district, state, and national levels. Some who moved up were ordinary citizens, and even those who were from more elite backgrounds and occupations had to interact with a cross-section of fellow citizens to prove their worthiness for higher associational offices.

Not only did popularly rooted unions, farmers' groups, and cross-class federations spread civic skills widely in the population; they also conveyed politically relevant knowledge and motivation. Many membership organizations were directly involved in electoral or legislative campaigns. But even associations that largely stayed out of politics conveyed knowledge and motivation that could be transferred to other endeavors. The constitutions of voluntary federations taught people about parliamentary rules of discussion; about legislative, judicial, and executive functions; about elections or other forms of representative governance; and about the relationship between taxation and collective services. All traditional voluntary associations reinforced ideals of good citizenship, stressing that members in good standing should understand and obey laws, volunteer for military service, engage in public discussions—and, above all, vote. Alan Gerber and Don Green show that people are more likely to turn out to vote in response to face-to-face appeals, and America's traditional popular associations routinely provided such appeals.⁷⁰

Additionally, fellowship federations, in particular, stressed people's value as citizens, quite apart from their roles in the market economy. “As I looked over this audience tonight,” explained William Jennings Bryan in a 1903 speech to the Modern Woodmen of America, a fraternal group of which he was a member, “I could not help thinking of the representative character of the men here assembled…. [I]n the camp we learn that worth does not depend upon the amount of money a man has, that it does not depend upon the degrees he receives from a college, that it does not depend on his pedigree or the distinction of his ancestors. We learn in the camp…to measure men by the manner in which they discharge the duties of citizenship, and this fraternity and fraternities like it have been doing…wonderful work, not only here, but everywhere, in bringing the people together and making them know each other.”⁷¹

Contrast the workings of traditional, popularly rooted associations with today's professionally run associations. To be sure, as the Children's Defense Fund exemplifies, certain kinds of advocacy groups can enlarge our democracy by speaking on behalf of vulnerable groups that could not otherwise gain voice. Nevertheless, in an associational universe dominated by business groups and professionally managed public interest groups, the mass participatory and educational functions of classic civic America are not reproduced. Because patron grants and computerized mass mailings generate money more readily than modest dues repeatedly collected from millions of members, and because paid experts are more highly valued than volunteer leaders for the public functions of today's public interest groups, the leaders of these groups have little incentive to engage in mass mobilization and no need to share leadership and organizational control with state and local chapters.⁷²

Why hold membership meetings or invest in building a dense network of chapters if peer networks are not critical to recruitment or resource mobilization? Professional managers have a greater need to pay attention to foundations and wealthy patrons. And they must cultivate access to government professionals in order to be able to claim to their public audiences that they have an impact on public policy making.

In the case of mailing-list organizations, most adherents are seen as consumers who send money to buy a certain brand of public interest representation. Repeat adherents, meanwhile, are viewed as potential big donors.⁷³

Only a tiny fraction of recipients respond to mass mailings, and of those who do send money a first time, only a fraction renew their contributions in later years. Huge and well-targeted mailings can recruit enough of a changing mass of adherents to help keep the professional organization going—especially if respondents can later be winnowed to find substantial repeat donors, people who contribute much more money than nominal “dues.”

Indeed, the focus on donors is critical to understanding the socioeconomic moorings of many public interest associations. Professional advocacy organizations have become more and more money-hungry operations. This tendency interacts with the increasing inequalities in wealth and income in the United States since the 1970s.⁷⁴

Let me be clear: Rising economic inequalities did not in any simple way cause civic reorganization. But the new socioeconomic disparities reinforce the tendency of professionally led associations to orient their appeals toward potential wealthy contributors. Economically privileged supporters are the constituents many associations and nonprofit institutions seek today. America is full of civic organizations that look upward in the class structure—holding constant rounds of fund-raisers and always on the lookout for wealthy “angels.”

Another important difference between traditional fellowship federations and contemporary public interest associations is worth underlining. In the past, ordinary Americans joined voluntary membership federations not only because of their political clout—that did matter to many people—but also in search of sociability, recreation, cultural expression, and social assistance. Recruitment occurred through peer networks, and people usually had a mix of reasons for joining. Men and women could be drawn in, initially, for nonpolitical reasons yet later end up learning about public issues or picking up skills or contacts that could be relevant to legislative campaigns or electoral politics or community projects. People could also be drawn in locally yet end up participating in statewide or national campaigns.

But today's public interest associations are much more specialized and explicitly devoted to particular causes—like saving the environment, or fighting for affirmative action, or opposing high taxes, or promoting “good government.” People have to know what they think and have some interest in national politics and the particular issue before they send a check. Today's advocacy groups, in short, are not very likely to entice masses of Americans indirectly into democratic politics.

For the reasons just discussed, adherents of contemporary public interest associations are heavily skewed toward the highly educated upper-middle class. Of course, well-educated and economically privileged Americans have always been differentially engaged in voluntary associations. But there used to be many federations seeking huge numbers of members; and in a country with thin strata of higher-educated and wealthy people, mass associations could thrive only by reaching deeply into the population. Nowadays, we live in a country where the top quarter of the population hold college degrees, because higher education expanded enormously in the late twentieth century.⁷⁵

In consequence, groups seeking mailing-list followings in the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands can focus recruitment on the higher-educated—aiming to attract the very Americans who are most likely to know in advance that they care about public issues. These are the people who appreciate the mass mailings that public interest groups send out. And because higher-educated Americans have experienced sharply rising incomes in recent decades, they are also the folks who can afford to write big checks.

Available evidence on the membership size and characteristics of professionally run public interest associations is congruent with this interpretation. In 1980, Americans with college degrees constituted 10.7 percent of the national electorate, and those with postgraduate education constituted another 5.5 percent—adding up to 16.2 of the national electorate at that time. Around then, data were collected on the membership sizes and characteristics of a number of public interest advocacy groups, including Common Cause, the good-government association; NARAL; and five major environmental associations. As Figure 3 shows, in six cases out of seven, associational memberships in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands were highly skewed toward Americans with college or postgraduate degrees. Of all the groups included in Figure 3, only the largest group, the National Wildlife Federation, had significant chunks of its membership in the “high school graduate or less” and “some college” categories. At the time, this association placed relatively little emphasis on policy appeals to members, and it offered social incentives through a relatively dense nationwide network of state and local chapters. It was also the only major environmental association that relied heavily on material “selective” benefits to attract members. The others stressed policy representation (although the Sierra Club also offered opportunities for social activities to some of its members through a modest-sized network of chapters).⁷⁶

Normative as well as cognitive factors, finally, illuminate the link between citizens' associations and the well-educated. The proliferation of citizens' associations run by experts has developed hand in hand with new understandings of what it means for the best-educated Americans to be civically involved and responsible.⁷⁷

Before the 1950s, when higher-educated Americans were but a thin, geographically dispersed stratum of the national population, they understood themselves as “trustees of community.” Working closely with and for less-educated fellow citizens in thousands of towns and cities, lawyers, doctors, ministers, and teachers once found it quite natural to join—and eventually lead—locally rooted voluntary federations that included broad swatches of their fellow citizens. In the post-1960s United States, by contrast, higher-educated people are much more numerous and more specialized, and live lives that are at once more cosmopolitan and more socially self-enclosed. Top-ranked high school graduates are recruited into leading universities, often located far from native regions to which they may never return.⁷⁸ After many years of education and career development, large numbers of professionals and man-agers live and work among themselves, crowded in or near metropolitan centers.

Understandably, higher-educated Americans today are likely to see themselves as individually meritorious experts who can best contribute to national or local well-being by working with other professional specialists to tackle complex technical or social problems. For reasons of cultural affinity as well as cognitive sophistication, therefore, support for public interest advocacy associations that especially proliferated between the 1960s and the 1990s has come disproportionately from higher-educated Americans, whose ranks expanded markedly in the same era.

Upward-tilted public agendas and policy making

Apart from the participatory effects of recent civic transformations, what about their broader impact on agendas of public discussion and public policy making? Here the evidence is spotty, and some of what I will say should be seen as posing hypotheses.

Even for the middle class, professionally led associations with virtual constituencies may not deliver as much representational clout as we sometimes imagine. In a conceptually very interesting comparison of “pro-life” and “pro-choice” mobilizations in U.S. abortion controversies, sociologist John McCarthy first measures public “sentiments” as reflected in national opinion surveys.⁷⁹

At the time he wrote, such results showed that pro-choice sentiments were considerably stronger in the U.S. public, yet organized mobilization magnified the pro-life impact on public agendas and legislation far beyond what was achieved by the more popular pro-choice efforts. To see why, McCarthy argues, we must notice the gap between social movements that can build on already existing social institutions and social networks—as the pro-life movement and other contemporary New Right movements can—and “thin infrastructure” movements run by “professional social movement organizations” that use direct-mail techniques. Although McCarthy does not deny that such “thin infrastructure” organizations can make some headway in translating widespread mass sentiment into publicity and legislative results, he sees them as far less effective, relative to the proportion of citizens who may hold a given position, than movements that can build on already organized, network-rich institutions and associations.⁸⁰

More telling is the impact of recent civic reorganizations on America's capacity to use government for socioeconomically redistributive purposes. The decline of blue-collar trade unions is surely a case in point. Unions mobilize popular constituencies electorally as well as in workplaces to demand an active government role in social redistribution. A recent study investigating variations among nations and across the U.S. states argues that union decline helps to explain shrinking electorates. “Rates of unionization are important determinants of the size of the electorate,” explain Benjamin Radcliff and Patricia Davis, “and, thus, the extent to which the full citizenry is engaged in collective decisions…Declines in labor organization…mean that the electorate will increasingly over-represent higher-status individuals. The result, presuming that elected officials are more responsive to those who vote than those who do not, will be public policies less consistent with the interests of the working class.” Furthermore, “given that unions also contribute to the maintenance of left party ideology, a declining labor movement implies that left parties may move toward the center. Shrinking union memberships… thus contribute to a further narrowing of the ideological space.”⁸¹

The dwindling of once-huge cross-class membership federations has also affected representation and public discussions. Ideologically, traditional voluntary federations downplayed partisan causes and trumpeted values of fellowship and community service, so their decline clears the way for alternative modes of public discourse less likely to facilitate social inclusion or transpartisan compromises. Modern advocacy associations often use “rights talk” and champion highly specialized identities, issues, and causes. Stressing differences among groups and the activation of strong sentiments shared by relatively homogeneous followings, advocacy group tactics may promote further artificial polarization and excessive fragmentation in American public life.⁸²

In the eloquent phrasing of Karen Paget, the proliferation of advocacy groups can add up to “many movements” but “no majority.”⁸³

Historically, popular and cross-class voluntary membership federations championed inclusive public social provision—but contemporary advocacy groups plus business and professional associations are much less likely to do so. Consider contrasts in the associational politics surrounding the enactment of the G.I. Bill of 1944 and the defeat of the Clinton proposal for universal health insurance coverage in 1993–1994. Benefits for World War II veterans and universal health coverage were both popular causes, if we judge only by mass public opinion. But when it came to translating popular will into legislation, the latter cause lost steam—in part because the organized civic universe of the 1940s was so different from that of the 1990s.

Back in the 1940s, a large national fellowship federation, the (otherwise conservative) American Legion, drafted, lobbied for, and helped to implement a G.I. Bill that was one of the most generous and inclusive federal social programs everenacted.⁸⁴

The Legion had a nationwide network of chapters that could persuade conservative and liberal congressional representatives to vote for extensive veterans' benefits—and it was motivated to take this course by the hope of attracting millions of new dues-paying and actively participating members from the ranks of the 16 million Americans who served in the military during World War II.

By contrast, in the early 1990s when the Clinton administration tried to devise a proposal for universal health insurance coverage, highly specialized professional and advocacy associations influenced the drafting of legislation in ways that defied broad public preferences. As a result, the proposed legislation was far too complex and regulatory for ordinary citizens to understand, and mass associations were not much involved in the ensuing political struggles. Instead, hundreds of lobbying business and professional groups mobilized to defeat any possibilities for extended health coverage.⁸⁵

Perhaps the most intriguing evidence on the distributive effects of recent civic changes appears in Jeffrey Berry's book The New Liberalism. As Berry's longitudinal research shows, professionally run public interest groups have increasingly made quality-of-life causes such as environmentalism more visible; and they have often prevailed after going head-to-head with business interests in legislative battles. But Berry also offers some more discouraging data. Recent gains by citizens' associations have crowded out advocacy by unions and other groups speaking for the interests and values of blue-collar Americans. Furthermore, Berry shows that liberal-leaning citizen advocacy groups have become less likely over time to ally with traditional liberal groups on behalf of redistributive social programs. “Liberal citizen groups,” he says, “have concentrated on issues that appeal to their middle-class supporters…. [A]s the new left grew and grew, the old left was…increasingly isolated.”⁸⁶

Berry's findings are echoed in new research that Kristin Goss and I are currently doing on the changing universe of female-led voluntary associations. If we look at public opinion, American women in the present as well as the past care to an unusual degree about public policies providing support for families, children, and communities. Prior to the mid-1960s, classic women's fellowship associations regularly championed such causes. But most of the new women's associations founded and active since the 1960s tend to focus on reproductive rights, women's health, or other issues of special concern to middle-class employed career women.⁸⁷

These newly featured concerns certainly enrich public discussion. Yet women's associations are no longer speaking so avidly on behalf of broad social supports for families, children, and communities. And with women's organized voices muted, such causes—of vital interest across class lines—no longer have the saliency they once did in U.S. democracy.