Theda Skocpol has a number of ambitious goals in this engaging book. She wants to correct the myth of localism—the idea that the nineteenth-century American civic life lauded by Tocqueville and idealized by numerous people since was centered exclusively, or even primarily, around autonomously organized groups in individual communities. She wants to make the case that classic American civic organizations were cross-class organizations, and to explain “what we have lost” by moving away from that situation. She aims to convince readers of Robert Putnam's work that “social capital” is an overly simplistic concept that does not provide nearly enough theoretical leverage for an understanding of the dramatic recent changes in the American civic landscape. And she wants to offer a plausible explanation of these changes, to convince the reader that our polity is the worse for them, and to make some suggestions for reinvigorating civic life. In my judgment, she succeeds reasonably well in most of these areas, though her suggestions for change seem a bit tired and fragmented.

Skocpol takes on the “myth of localism” both empirically and normatively. In her second chapter, “How the United States Became a Civic Nation,” she provides a concise description of the waves of association-formation that resulted in fraternal organizations like the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and so forth. Skocpol's Civic Engagement Project at Harvard has collected data on a number of large mass-membership organizations, and these data allow her to generalize about membership trends, organizational structure, and the life spans of these groups. But beyond this, Diminished Democracy pulls together a huge range of secondary sources and—unusually, she acknowledges—a large but unsystematic collection of archival materials, such as ceremonial ribbon badges, membership lists, programs, organization manuals, and convention minutes. With these multiple sources of evidence, she makes a strong case that most of the important organizations in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America were national in both structure and focus. She argues that larger organizations lasted longer than small ones and that connecting through district, state, and national meetings was very important to local groups. She traces the history of a number of organizations to show how national organizers “encouraged the creation of local units in each state and then handed the job of membership organizing to native state leaderships elected by the earliest few local chapters” (p. 92).

Not only does Skocpol want the reader to understand the translocal nature of American mass-membership organizations, but she also wants to make a normative case for these kinds of organizations: “Inside the clubs or lodges or posts of America's vast voluntary federations, millions of people learned about group operations and collective debate and decision-making” (p. 99). Organizational mimicry of U.S. federal structures and representational practices, as well as the constant reinforcing of patriotic values, helped prepare members for the responsibilities of citizenship. The conventions and intrachapter communications helped to give members a sense of a larger, collective purpose; and she points out that of the 58 large associations (enrolling over 1% of the relevant populations) her project studied, 34 “mobilized their members to work for explicitly political causes” (p. 122).

The translocal nature of the organizations, Skocpol argues, also contributed to their cross-class nature. I have always been somewhat skeptical about this particular argument of Skocpol's: Having studied women's organizations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I was left with a strong impression that most local groups were pretty homogeneous in terms of class. In this book, Skocpol presents some evidence for the diversity of some chapters of fraternal and other organizations, but more importantly, she argues that the federal structure, with its attendant opportunities for leadership, travel, and connections among local chapters that might represent very different constituencies, meant that in significant ways, “there were many participatory venues open to average Americans, where men or women of various backgrounds could learn skills of expression and organization relevant to civic and political life more generally” (p. 104). As she demonstrates in her last few chapters, these opportunities for leadership and involvement have largely been lost.

Skocpol carefully describes the ways that Americans' civic organizations—whether the Elks and Moose of the nineteenth century or the Sierra Club and National Organization for Women in the current era—have been “thoroughly inter-twined” with the state: “Leading membership federations gained by being associated with bold national efforts that concretely helped millions of citizens. And of course the U.S. Congress and state legislatures responded when widespread voluntary associations mobilized members” (p. 71). Today, “new institutional levers” are available for advocates—“additional niches” through which to attempt influence (p. 201). Government grants and the practice of subcontracting government services to nonprofit organizations have also helped to fundamentally reshape the landscape of civic organizations.

The larger point that Skocpol wants to make here—and I think she does it well—is that “social capital” is too blunt a concept to allow us to understand the pathways to citizen involvement in the polity. Social capital is often thought of as the extent to which people regularly get together with friends and neighbors, the extent to which people feel they can count on and trust each other. But this condition is neither sufficient—nor, perhaps, necessary—for vigorous democracy to exist. In a footnote, she says that her argument about civic life is “analogous” to Rosenstone and Hansen's argument about electoral politics (Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America, 1993). I think the development of this argument is her most important contribution in Diminished Democracy. That is, she demonstrates the myriad ways that political structures and institutions and public policy shape the opportunities people have for participating in civic life, the ways they can be involved, and the impacts that their involvement is likely to have on public policy. Leaders, for example, will organize large numbers of people at the grassroots level only if there are structural incentives for them to do so. If, as at the present time, they can establish influence over public policy by deploying small staffs, expertise, and foundation grants, then why organize? Skocpol's comparison of the strategies of Frances Willard (leader of the Women's/Christian Temperance Union in the 1870s and 1880s) and Marian Wright Edelman (founder of the Children's Defense Fund a hundred years later) is very instructive in this regard.

Two of many implications of this argument are the following: Understanding changes in the incentive structures of political institutions can help us understand why working-class people have been effectively closed out of American civic life. And Robert Putnam is looking in the wrong places when he wants to explain the decline of civic life in terms of individual choices like job/career balancing or television watching.