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Exactly fifteen years ago, the Journal of Democracy published in its fifth anniversary issue an article by Robert D. Putnam entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital."1 The essay struck a chord with readers who had watched their voting precincts empty out, their favorite bowling alleys or Elks lodges close for lack of patrons and members, and their once-regular card games and dinner parties become sporadic. Marshaling evidence of such trends, the article galvanized widespread concern about the weakening of civic engagement in the United States. But it also roused deep interest in the broader concept of "social capital"-a term that social scientists use as shorthand for social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trust to which those networks give rise. No democracy, and indeed no society, can be healthy without at least a modicum of this resource.
Even though Putnam's article and subsequent book-length study Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community2 focused on the United States, scholars and political leaders around the world were seized by the question of how to foster the growth and improve the quality of social capital.3 This interest was not altogether surprising, as research in a variety of fields was demonstrating that social capital makes citizens happier and healthier, reduces crime, makes government more responsive and honest, and improves economic productivity.4
The trend that "Bowling Alone" spotlighted was alarming: By many measures, since the 1960s or 1970s Americans had been withdrawing from their communities. Attendance at public meetings plunged by nearly half between 1973 and 1994. The family dinner seemed at risk of becoming an endangered species. Trust in strangers took a sharp drop: In the early 1960s, more than half of all Americans said that they trusted others; fewer than a third say the same thing today. In the 1990s, as Americans' social connections withered, they increasingly watched Friends rather than had friends. Sociologists who had once been skeptical of Putnam's findings found to their dismay that over the last two decades the incidence of close friendships had declined.5 As of 2004, a quarter of those polled in the United States reported that they lacked a confidant with whom to discuss important personal matters (the 1983 figure had been less than half that), and...