Money and Politics, A Different Story
posted by Danielle Citron
In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote about the decline in civic participation and civility in the last third of the twentieth century. During that time, we joined and participated in fewer community organizations. We gave less money away to charities. We trusted our politicians less and in turn spent less time working on public issues. In a hopeful note, Putnam highlighted exceptions to this civic disengagement trend, including the rise in youth volunteering, the growth of networked technologies, the vigorous growth of grassroots activity from evangelical conservatives, and the increase in self-help support groups.
The current election season marked a resurgence of political participation perhaps because we brought together some of the factors Putnam identified: youth involvement, the use of information technologies, and increased participation of religious groups. Here comes another factor that may impact civic engagement: the recession. As New York magazine’s Jennifer Senior notes, social psychologists have studied money’s effect on our brains. It makes us self-centered and prone to burrow within ourselves at the expense of our wider communities. Professor Kathleen Vohs (who has studied such consumer behavior) suggests that when people think about money that they’ve lost, they are more sensitive to physical pain and social rejection. She offers that our recession mentality may make us “more cooperative.”
We have indeed seen a rise in volunteerism during the economic downturn. An interesting trend to follow is whether we sustain our engagement in local communities in the way that participation enthusiasts hope and that the technical community has seen in the open source community. Hopefully, we don’t have to keep losing money to remain committed to civic participation and civility.
May 15, 2009 at 1:19 pm
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