Civic Engagement and Elite-MassPolicy Agenda Agreement in American Communities.

In a series of influential books and articles Robert Putnam has argued for the importance of social capital in the workings of democratic political systems. A prominent aspect of his argument is that one source of social capital, civic engagement, or participation in various kinds of associations and organizations, is instrumental for successful democratic governance. In Bowling Alone, for example, Putnam argues that higher levels of civic engagement allow the mass public to communicate with their political leaders with a more unified and successful voice. More specifically, he observes that higher civic engagement allow[s] individuals to express their interests and demands on government and to protect themselves from abuses of power by their political leaders. In Making Democracy Work, Putnam also argues that higher civic engagement leads to greater government success in dealing with public problems and, therefore, to higher citizen satisfaction with government. These ideas about the collective effects of civic engagement on governance and democratic policy making are consonant with work by various other scholars on the importance of active associational life. They imply, as well, that higher civic engagement in a community will be associated with greater mass influence over public policy. Much research has explored Putnam’s ideas about civic engagement, but to our knowledge no prior scholarship has directly tested the consequences of civic engagement for mass influence on public policy. In this study we examine the effects of levels of civic engagement in American communities on mass-elite agreement on community public policy priorities. (We also explain how such agreement is central to the entire policy making process.) In our analyses we consider the effects of both membership and active and involved membership in both bridging and bonding social capital organizations -- in response to Putnam’s distinctions about the likely relative importance of these two kinds of civic engagement generally and with these two different types of organizations. And we take account of various rival explanations for mass-elite policy agreement that are identified in prior research on American community politics and empirical democratic theory. Our tests are for the set of communities -- and samples of their citizens and leaders -- that were examined by Sidney Verba and Norman Nie in Participation in America. The parts of this data set that are critical to the present analysis - the data on mass-elite policy concurrence and on various community attributes - were not archived by Verba and Nie and were effectively lost. But we have reconstructed those data with help from various participants in the original research project. This data set is perhaps uniquely valuable for studying the relationships of concern here, too. Putnam’s conceptions of the role of social capital and civic engagement are especially relevant to local community settings. Further, his empirical description of trends in civic engagement in the United States indicate that the Verba and Nie data were collected near the peak level of such engagement, when its effects on the democratic process should have been especially evident. Finally, the richness of the full data set collected by Verba and Nie allows us to carry out empirical tests that fit Putnam’s conceptions particularly well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]