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1 Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam “Bowling Alone: Americas Declining Social Capital Journal of Democracy, January 1995, pp. 65-78. Abstract: The US once had an enviable society, but over the last two or three decades this civic society has shrunk, and more people are watching TV. Possible explanations for this trend include more women in the workplace, increased mobility of families and changing demographics. Many students of the new democracies that have emerged over the past decade and a half have emphasized the importance of a strong and active civil society to the consolidation of democracy. Especially with regard to the postcommunist countries, scholars and democratic activists alike have lamented the absence or obliteration of traditions of independent civic engagement and a widespread tendency toward passive reliance on the state. To those concerned with the weakness of civil societies in the developing or postcommunist world, the advanced Western democracies and above all the United States have typically been taken as models to be emulated. There is striking evidence, however, that the vibrancy of American civil society has notably declined over the past several decades. Ever since the publication of Alexis de Tocquevilles Democracy in America, the United States has played a central role in systematic studies of the links between democracy and civil society. Although this is in part because trends in American life are often regarded as harbingers of social modernization, it is also because America has traditionally been considered unusually civic (a reputation that, as we shall later see, has not been entirely unjustified). When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, it was the Americans propensity for civic association that most impressed him as