You’ve probably heard of Bowling Alone, the hugely influential 2000 book diagnosing our country’s malaise by Robert Putnam, the Harvard University political scientist. In it, Putnam showed that Americans’ stock of social capital—the fabric of a community’s trust and cooperation—had been plummeting since the 1950s, and that its decline was harming our well-being, personal relationships, health, lifespan, and economic growth. In the quarter-century since the book received widespread attention, social trust, accepted norms, and community cohesion continue to come undone, paving the way for the rise of authoritarian populism and damage to the republic. Indeed, the number of people saying they trust the American people to make judgments under our democratic system stands at just 53 percent, down from 83 percent in April 1974, when Gallup first started asking the question, amid Watergate and the Vietnam War.
This loss of trust, which Putnam documented through nearly half a million interviews, has had all sorts of ill effects. It hurts economic activity because, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow observed, commercial transactions rely on it. (“It can be plausibly argued,” he once said, “that much of the economic backwardness in the world can be explained by the lack of mutual confidence.”) It undermines social mobility, as Harvard’s Raj Chetty and his colleagues have shown. And it creates the social alienation that, in the words of the Brookings Institution’s Isabel Sawhill, can lead to “school shootings, opioid addiction, police brutality, and racial strife.” As Putnam found in his fieldwork in Italy in the 1970s, social capital has a profound effect on the functioning of democratic institutions: When it is present, it can build on itself. When it is absent, it is very difficult to rebuild.
At Nationhood Lab, the project I run at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, we wanted to see if there are regional differences in social capital mirroring those we’ve documented for life expectancy, gun violence, various health problems, social vulnerability, persistent poverty, intergenerational economic mobility, the prevalence of authoritarian personalities, and support for President Donald Trump and Trumpism. Using a county-level Social Capital Index developed by the economists Anil Rupasingha, Stephen J. Goetz, and David Freshwater, we calculated the social capital reserves in each U.S. region, as defined by my American Nations model. That model is based on the settlement geography of the rival societies that colonized North America between the 16th and late 19th centuries and comes out of my 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, which showed how this fractured regional geography has shaped our history, constitutional structure, and our varied social and political environments, past and present. (I have written about its political implications in the Monthly for over 15 years; you can also find a detailed summary here, and an even wonkier description for scientific researchers in this paper.)
The social capital index score is based on the density of 10 types of associational institutions in the county—including bowling leagues, churches, sports clubs, civic organizations, and labor unions—plus turnout in presidential elections, the Census return rate, and the number of non-profit organizations. Using data for 2014 collected by researchers at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, here are the results by county and, at the top of this article, by regional culture (for clarity.)
The regional pattern map—which calculates the score for the entire region by weighting each county’s score by its population—reveals a clear pattern. It largely follows whether a region’s cultural value set is oriented toward individualism (“less taxes, less government, less regulation equals more freedom”) or communitarianism (invest in public goods to maintain an environment where the bottom 90 to 99 percent of the population can live in freedom). Three of our “aggressively communitarian” regions lead the pack. The Midlands—which had its origins in William Penn’s utopian colonies on the shores of Delaware Bay—has the highest reserves of social capital with an overall index score of -0.16, followed by the Left Coast at -0.2 and Yankeedom (the Greater New England cultural space) at -0.26.
The two regions founded by Imperial Spain, El Norte and Spanish Caribbean, had very poor scores, -1.23 and -1.01, respectively, as did (communitarian, but hyper-urbanized) New Netherland (-1.07) and First Nation, a long-oppressed indigenous region, which was at the bottom of the list at -1.47. This is very similar to the spatial pattern we found for persistent poverty, and reflects previous findings that wealthier places tend to have more social capital.
Three southern regions that often have among the worst metrics in whatever phenomenon we’ve analyzed—Greater Appalachia, Deep South, and the New France enclave in southern Louisiana—are in the middle of the pack for social capital, as is the Far West. Tidewater, a region that’s rapidly transformed from the apartheid of Jefferson Davis and Jim Crow to among the wealthiest and most progressive of the “nations” over the past 60 years, had the fourth-best score, just behind Yankeedom at -0.34. Hawaii, despite being aggressively communitarian, fared worse than the southern regions and the Far West, with a score of -0.99, probably because its population is highly urbanized, as urban places get dinged, by dint of density and diversity, in the economists’ social capital index.
To control for urbanity effects, we repeated the exercise using only non-urban counties, and the pattern grew starker, with the “big three” communitarian regions greatly outpacing the rest.
And this is what the results look like if you only look at core, major metro counties, defined as Category 1 in the federal government’s six-tier county classification scheme:
You can see more maps and wonkier explanations over at Nationhood Lab, but the bottom line is this: the distribution of social capital is regionally correlated and likely a product of the divergent attitudes toward public goods across our balkanized federation. The 2014 data is the most recent available that can fully power this particular social capital model. Still, there’s every reason to assume social capital reserves have declined in the ensuing Trump era. Those regions already running on empty are likely to fall into social crisis first. If there’s a return to normalcy in the coming election cycles, it’s these regions that will need help most urgently.
