Inaccurate, Exceptional, One-Sided or Irrelevant? The Debate about the Alleged Decline of Social Capital and Civic Engagement in Western Societies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his 1790 address to the Académie Française in Paris, Condorcet noted that every new generation has a tendency to accuse itself of being less civic-minded than previous cohorts. Two centuries later, this argument has once again regained front-page status. The debate is currently focused on the question of whether or not social capital and civic engagement are declining in Western societies. In his academic best-seller Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argues that younger age cohorts, socialized in the prosperous economic conditions of the 1960s and onwards, are less inclined to engage in community life and in politics, and also less likely to trust their fellow citizens. By contrast, the ‘long civic generation’, born roughly between 1910 and 1940, is portrayed as much more motivated in these respects. They readily volunteer in community projects, read newspapers and take on more social responsibilities. In this view, a process of generational replacement is responsible for a steady decline of social capital and civic engagement in American society. As the long civic generation is replaced by younger age cohorts, the social capital stock of American communities slowly diminishes. The indicators used to substantiate this claim are numerous and diverse: measures for voter turnout, attendance of club meetings, generalized trust, the number of common family dinners, the number of card games played together, and even respect for traffic rules. All of these attitudes and behaviours, it is argued, depict a significant downward trend. Although Putnam is by far the most vocal of all scholars in the ‘decline of social capital’ choir, he certainly is not the only author describing an erosion of traditional societal relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.075 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.062 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".