Volunteering, social participation and democracy – the heart of matter

As Putnam has argued, within vertical networks, ‘[d]efection, distrust, shirking, exploitation, isolation, disorder, and stagnation intensify one another in a suffocating miasma of vicious circles’. In contrast, the social alliances with the greatest potential for democratising public institutions have a democratic or horizontal internal structure characterised by open friendly relations between citizens who see themselves as equals.

Sociability

At the heart of horizontal networks is something we can call sociability. As distinct from the emphasis on the outward features of social networks, sociability stresses the internal properties of social relations - our subjective experience of relating.

Sociability is modelled on friendship relations. A core element of sociability is the recognition of a need for the company of others and the pleasure derived from association.

Good friends try to spend time together because that is an end in itself. Relations between friends are voluntary and also based on a sense of equality and on what we might call ‘affective mutuality’ .

This sense of sociability and an optimistic orientation towards others underpins democratic forms of voluntary association. But in order to see the relevance this has for democracy, we need to explain the link between sociability and the formation of a civic identity – the awareness that we are acting in concert with fellow citizens who are strangers and not people we have ever met.

Reciprocity

That link can be found in the notion of reciprocity. According to Putnam, the touchstone of social capital is a principle of generalised reciprocity that, he argues, is a close cousin of civility. This in turn may be understood to refer to a sense of fair play towards a ‘generalized other’.

These ideas of civility and generalised reciprocity are crucial to the argument. They direct attention to the fact that we are talking about our treatment of people with whom we have no personal relationship. They are ideas that explain an attitude of trust towards people we do not actually know, and a willingness to do things for them.

Reciprocity also explains why individuals might subjugate their own self-interest. In Putnam’s words:

"I’ll do this for you now, without expecting anything immediately in return and perhaps without even knowing you, confident that down the road you or someone else will return the favour."

Reciprocity, then, is an essentially sociable impulse rather than an individualistic one, since it is built on feelings of optimism and confidence about the giving of fair treatment to other members of society and receiving the same from them.

Sociability refers to the general features of relationships that enable us to build trust and make connections with others. When we extend this conduct towards people we don’t know, we transform sociability into a capacity for democratic organisation – which is precisely what social capital means.

Putnam’s thesis of civic disengagement

Putnam’s claims about a current decline in civic engagement have found a ready audience among those committed to the instrumental interest in social capital. If there are significant benefits in increasing the stock of social capital, then there must be significant costs associated with dwindling social capital.