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Social capital or group style? Rescuing Tocqueville’s insights on civic engagement

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Abstract

Social capital has become the preeminent concept for studying civic relationships, yet it will not help us assess their meanings, institution-like qualities, or potential for social capacity. Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights on these three features of civic relationships continue to be highly influential, and the popular social capital concept claims a strongly Tocquevillian heritage while systematically missing what a Tocquevillian imagination illuminates. Scenes from volunteer group settings in a midwestern US city show how a concept of group style apprehends the varying meanings, routines, and social capacities of civic ties. Group style also illuminates the process by which civic groups create “bridging” ties beyond the group. Without rejecting the social capital concept entirely, I highlight research questions and findings that social capital would ignore or misapprehend. A concluding discussion draws out implications for democratic theory, and sketches an agenda for future research on civic group style that makes good on Tocquevillian insights while moving beyond Tocqueville’s own limits.

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Notes

  1. For Putnam’s early reference to social capital, see Robert Putnam, Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); for a later work that popularized a similar definition of social capital, see Robert Putnam, Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). In the study of religious groups alone – the subject of this paper – Putnam’s social capital concept has spread widely. On the consequences of social capital for churches and religious community groups, see for instance Nancy Ammerman, Congregation and community (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997); John Bartkowski and Helen Regis, Charitable choices: Religion, race and poverty in the post-welfare era (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Penny Edgell Becker and Pawan H. Dhingra, “Religious involvement and volunteering: Implications for civil society,” Sociology of Religion 62 (2001): 315–335; J. Z. Park and Christian Smith, “To whom much has been given...: Religious capital and community voluntarism among churchgoing protestants,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39 (2000):272–286; Mark Chaves, Helen Giesel, and William Tsitsos, “Religious variations in public presence: Evidence from the National Congregations Study,” 108–128, in Robert Wuthnow and John Evans, editors, The quiet hand of God: Faith-based activism and the public role of mainline Protestantism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ram A. Cnaan with Stephanie C. Boddie, Femida Handy, Caynor Yancey, and Richard Schneider, The invisible caring hand: American congregations and the provision of welfare (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Mark R. Warren, Dry bones rattling: Community building to revitalize American democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Corwin Smidt (Ed.), Religion as social capital (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2003); Richard Wood, Faith in action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); “Religious culture and political action,” Sociological Theory 17 (1999): 307–332.

  2. On circular reasoning in the social capital framework, see John Wilson, “Dr. Putnam’s Social Lubricant,” Contemporary Sociology 30 (2001): 225–227; Alejandro Portes, “Social capital: Its origins and applications in modern sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998):1–24. Robert Fishman observed that social capital may be operationalized in diffuse, varied ways yet connotes a conceptual whole. See Robert Fishman, Democracy’s voices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

  3. On the missing moral questions, see Amitai Etzioni, “Is bowling together sociologically lite?” Contemporary Sociology 30 (2001): 223–224. On the political inadequacy of the social capital framework, see Robert Edwards and Michael Foley, “Much ado about social capital,” Contemporary Sociology 30 (2001): 227–230. See Stephen Smith and Jessica Kulynych, “It may be social, but why is it capital? The social construction of social capital and the politics of language,” Politics and Society 30 (2002): 149–186, for the same criticism of social capital that capitalism’s most famous critic made of capitalism: It imposes a falsely universalizing logic on relationships – political ones in this case – and it distorts our understanding of the social world. For the view that social capital is a metaphorical Trojan horse bearing neoliberal assumptions, see Margaret Somers, “Beware trojan horses bearing social capital: How privatization turned solidarity into a bowling team,” 233–274, in George Steinmetz (Ed.), The politics of method in the human sciences (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

  4. For the debate about those figures, see Jean Cohen, “American civil society talk,” 55–85, in Robert Fullinwider (Ed.), Civil society, democracy, and civic renewal (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Bob Edwards and Michael Foley (Eds.), American Behavioral Scientist 40, special issue on “Social capital, civil society and contemporary democracy” (March–April 1997); Robert Wuthnow, Loose connections: Joining together in America’s fragmented communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1998); Robert Fullinwider (Ed.), Civil society, democracy, and civic Renewal (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,1999); Andrew Greeley, “Coleman revisited: Religious structures as a source of social capital,” American Behavioral Scientist 40 (1997): 587–594; Michael Schudson, The good citizen: A history of American civic life (New York: Martin Kessler Books, 1998); Theda Skocpol, “Unraveling from above,” American Prospect 25 (March–April 1996); Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina, (Ed.), Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington D.C. and New York: Brookings Institution and Russsell Sage,1999); Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in American life, updated edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

  5. These works, though, usually do not critique the social capital concept itself. See Michael Young, “Tocqueville’s America: A critical reappraisal of voluntary associations before the civil war,” paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, Anaheim, CA, 2001, for an argument that some of the most important civic associations in the US antebellum period were aggressive cultural warriors, trying to impose their vision of social organization across American civic life. See Hyeong-Ki Kwon, “Associations, civic norms, and democracy: Revisiting the Italian case,” Theory and Society 33 (2004):135–166, for evidence that the Italian fascist movement rose rapidly in those regions of Italy shown as having had a dense associational life in Putnam, Making democracy work. For a critical view of German civic associations of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, see Sheri Berman, “Civil society and the collapse of the Weimar Republic,” World Politics 49 (1997): 401–429. For a study of entrenched social and cultural differences in nineteenth century American social clubs and mutual aid societies, see Jason Kaufman, For the Common good? American civic life and the golden age of fraternity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Kaufman deduces “a stark challenge to the argument that associationalism can [join] disparate populations together in fellowship and solidarity” (p. 8), the argument he ascribed to Robert Putnam.

  6. A review of social capital concepts stretches beyond the bounds of this article. For a good discussion of the different concepts, see Nan Lin, Social capital: A theory of social structure and action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); on the differences between Bourdieu’s concept and Coleman’s, which more obviously influences Putnam, see Smith and Kulynych, “It may be social, but why is it capital?.” For a view of civic engagement that does prefer Coleman’s concept to Putnam’s, see Greeley, “Coleman revisited.” For an extensive inventory of social capital studies, especially outside the field of civic engagement, see Michael Woolcock, “Social capital and economic development: Toward a theoretical synthesis and policy framework,” Theory and Society 27 (1998): 151–208.

  7. Regarding Tocqueville’s own time, see Michael Young, “Tocqueville’s America,” “Confessional Protest: The religious birth of US national social movements,” American Sociological Review 67 (2002): 660–688. Students of contemporary US civic life often affirm the suggestion in Tocqueville’s writings that civic groups cultivate broad social ties, but this claim too is challenged in recent research. See Omar McRoberts, Streets of glory: Church and community in a black urban district (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Robert Wuthnow, “Mobilizing civic engagement: The changing impact of religious involvement,” 331–363, in Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina (Ed.), Civic engagement in American democracy (New York: Russell Sage, 1999), “Bridging the privileged and the marginalized?” 59–102, in Robert Putnam (Ed.), Democracies in flux: The evolution of social capital in contemporary society (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Paul Lichterman, Elusive togetherness: Church groups trying to bridge America’s divisions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

  8. Mark E. Warren, Democracy and association (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

  9. For a representative sample of works on civic engagement that invoke Tocqueville, affirmingly or critically, see Berman, “Civil society and the collapse of the Weimar Republic”; Harry Boyte and Sara M. Evans, Free spaces: The sources of democratic change in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Kaufman, For the common good?; Skocpol and Fiorina, Civic engagement in American democracy; Mark E. Warren, Democracy and association; Mark R. Warren, Dry bones rattling; Wood, Faith in action; Wuthnow, Loose connections; Acts of compassion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Young, “Tocqueville’s America.”

  10. See Lichterman, Elusive togetherness. This and all group names and personal names are pseudonyms.

  11. Wuthnow, Loose connections.

  12. Putnam, Bowling alone, 66, and chapter 4 in general.

  13. Ibid., 128.

  14. For details on the larger study, see Lichterman, Elusive Togetherness.

  15. See, for instance, Woolcock, “Social capital and economic development,” but see also the global critique of the concept in Somers, “Beware Trojan horses bearing social capital.”

  16. A review of these different readings of Tocqueville goes beyond my purposes here. Radical democratic thinkers who affirm some aspects of Tocqueville’s legacy include Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, “Secondary associations and democratic governance,” Politics and Society 20 (1992): 393–472; Archon Fung and Erik O. Wright, “Thinking about empowered participatory governance,” 3–44, in Archon Fung and Erik O. Wright (Eds.), Deepening democracy: Institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance (London: Verso, 2003); Eliasoph, Avoiding politics. For communitarians who cite Tocqueville approvingly, see Amitai Etzioni, The new golden rule: Community and morality in a democratic society (New York: Basic, 1996); Francis Fukuyama, The great disruption: Human nature and the reconstitution of social order (New York: Free, 1999). For liberal political theorists who name Tocqueville among their reference points, see John A. Hall (Ed.), Civil society: Theory, history, comparison (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); Amy Gutmann, Freedom of association (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Pragmatist thinker John Dewey referred to Tocqueville in The Public and its problems (Denver: Allan Swallow, 1927).

  17. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969[1835]), 515.

  18. Emile Durkheim wrote that a healthy society hosts a congeries of "secondary groups” that drag individuals “into the general torrent of social life.” See The division of labor in society (New York: Free, 1933[1902]), 28. Civic and professional associations would generate in their members a sense of the greater social good and prepare their representatives to deliberate in large assemblies; see Professional ethics and civic morals (Glencoe, IL: Free, 1957). In a quite different tradition, social philosopher John Dewey wrote that a national, “great community” could come into being when local civic groups helped citizens discover their place in the bigger picture. Dewey put his democratic faith in civic groups as a counterweight to the corporate power that already loomed menacingly in his picture of America’s still inchoate national community. See Dewey, The public and its problems. Putnam affirms a Deweyan sensibility behind his attention to voluntary associations and refers to Dewey’s democratic distinction between “doing with” and “doing for.” See Bowling alone, 337, 116. Still Putnam associates his inquiry into American civic engagement most strongly with Tocqueville.

  19. Putnam, Bowling Alone.

  20. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 513.

  21. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 508.

  22. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 506.

  23. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 512.

  24. This is thanks in large part to the Tocqueville-inspired study by Bellah et al., Habits of the heart.

  25. I use social capacity in the spirit of social capital critics Smith and Kulynych’s usage in “It may be social, but why is it capital?,” though I derive it from Tocqueville’s own arguments rather than from writings on social capital. My notion of social capacity also is informed by the “social control” tradition in twentieth-century US sociology; see Robert Sampson, “What ‘community’ supplies,” 241–292, in R. Fegruson and W. Dickens Eds., Urban problems and community development (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1999). As Morris Janowitz pointed out, earlier US sociologists used the perhaps unfortunate term “social control” to mean voluntary, problem-solving communication between groups dedicated to collective ends. Social control denotes society’s capacity to control and organize itself, in contrast with both coercive control and the idea that individual interests could accumulate into a collective order without planning at all – the invisible hand notion of classical economics. See Morris Janowitz, “Sociological theory and social control,” American Journal of Sociology 81 (1975): 82–108, see especially 86–87, 93. Groups that cultivate social capacity can “control” their relations with other groups and institutionalize those relations through intentional communication.

  26. For an influential map of the distinctions between old and new institutionalisms in sociology, see Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, “Introduction,” 1–38, in Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio (Eds.), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); for other accounts, see W. Richard Scott, Institutions and organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995); Arthur Stinchcombe, “On the virtues of the old institutionalism,” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 1–18.

  27. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 515.

  28. For Tocqueville’s view that civil associations might operate in concert with governmental authorities to provide for social welfare, see Chad Goldberg, “Social citizenship and a reconstructed Tocqueville,” American Sociological Review 66 (2001): 289–315. For a more common, neoconservative reading of Tocqueville’s view on civic groups and the state, see Peter Berger and Richard J. Neuhaus, To empower people: From state to civil society (Washington, D.C.: AEI, 1977).

  29. Putnam, Making democracy work, 88–91.

  30. Putnam, Bowling alone, 48, 65, 337–338.

  31. Robert Putnam, “Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital,” Journal of Democracy 6 (1995): 65–78.

  32. Putnam, Bowling alone, 288, 343.

  33. Ibid., 51, 116–117.

  34. Putnam, Making democracy work.

  35. Putnam, Bowling alone, 341.

  36. Ibid., 343–344.

  37. Putnam, Making democracy work, 96, 149.

  38. Putnam, Bowling alone, 291.

  39. Ibid., 117.

  40. See, for instance, Putnam, Bowling alone; Robert Putnam and Kristin Goss, “Introduction,” 3–20, in Democracies in flux; see also Ross Gittell and Avis Vidal, Community organizing: Building social capital as a development strategy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998). Proponents of the framework are distinguishing more types of social capital beyond the “bonding” and “bridging” variants: There is formal and informal social capital, thick and thin social capital, inward-looking and outward looking social capital. See Putnam and Goss, “Introduction.” Some social capital researchers realize “bridging” itself is very vague, and have suggested four different types of bridging social capital that unify people in successively broad circles of togetherness, from neighborhood to nation; on this point, see Mark R. Warren, J. Phillip Thompson, and Susan Saegert, “The role of social capital in combating poverty,” 1–28, in Susan Saegert, J. Phillip Thompson, and Mark R. Warren (Eds.), Social capital and poor communities (New York: Russell Sage, 2001).

  41. Putnam, Bowling alone, 23.

  42. Robert Fishman, Democracy’s voices.

  43. For general statements of the approach, see Powell and DiMaggio, The new institutionalism in organizational analysis; W. Richard Scott, John W. Meyer, and John Boli, Institutional environments and organizations: structural complexity and individualism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994). For reviews and examples of varying neoinstitutionalisms in sociology and political science, see Elizabeth Clemens and James Cook, “Politics and institutionalism: Explaining durability and change,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 441–466; Mary Brinton and Victor Nee (Eds.), The new institutionalism in sociology (New York: Russell Sage, 1998).

  44. For the source of this definition, see Ronald Jepperson, “Institutions, institutional effects, and institutionalism” in Powell and DiMaggio, The new institutionalism in organizational analysis; Clemens and Cook, “Politics and institutionalism.”

  45. Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman, “Culture in interaction,” American Journal of Sociology 108 (2003): 735–794.

  46. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, “Introduction,” 14.

  47. See Powell and DiMaggio, The new institutionalism in organizational analysis; Elisabeth Clemens, The people’s lobby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Penny Edgell Becker, Congregations in conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Armstrong, Forging gay identities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  48. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, “The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organization fields,” 63–82, in Powell and DiMaggio, The new institutionalism in organizational analysis.

  49. For longer discussions of this viewpoint, see Wuthnow, Loose connections; Lichterman, Elusive togetherness.

  50. See Lichterman, Elusive togetherness, for examples of styles maintained despite their ineffectiveness. For more discussion of conceptual slippage and inconsistencies in neoinstitutionalist writings, see C. Brady Potts, “Culture in organizations: Mediating rules and practice in everyday life,” paper presented at the annual meetings of the Pacific Sociological Association, North Hollywood, CA, 2006.

  51. Eliasoph and Lichterman, Culture in interaction, 740.

  52. Group styles may be identified with help of sensitizing questions and by playing close attention to interactions that make style suddenly explicit; these include interactional mistakes, awkwardness, and unexpected changes in the interactional routine. See Eliasoph and Lichterman, Culture in interaction, 746, 784–787.

  53. Wuthnow, Loose connections; Paul Schervish, Virginia Hodgkinson, Margaret Gates, and Associates, Care and community in modern society (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995); Eliasoph, Avoiding politics; Susan Ostrander, Women of the upper class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).

  54. See John Wilson and Marc Musick, “Toward an integrated theory of volunteering,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 694–713.

  55. The meaning of compassionate action itself has changed greatly in western societies; see Wuthnow, Acts of compassion. Subcultures within the United States continue to imbue community service relationships with different, more collectivist meanings than the customary ones I just described. See for instance Susan Eckstein, “Community as gift-giving: Collectivistic roots of volunteerism,” American Sociological Review 66 (2001): 829–851; Barbara Myerhoff, Number our days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978).

  56. See for instance Wuthnow, Acts of compassion; Eliasoph, Avoiding politics; Janet Poppendieck, Sweet charity? Emergency food and the end of entitlement (New York: Penguin, 1998).

  57. For instance, Putnam, Bowling alone; Greeley, “Coleman revisited”; Becker and Dhingra, “Religious inolvement and volunteering”; Robert Wuthnow, Saving America? Faith-based services and the future of civil society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Loose connections.

  58. For classic descriptions and analysis of group idiocultures, see Gary A. Fine, With the boys (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

  59. In some social movement groups and other civic organizations, being “serious” or “deeply committed” means eschewing formal positions. These groups encourage intensive participation by all members and rotate leadership positions frequently. See for instance Barbara Epstein, Political protest and cultural revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Paul Lichterman, The search for political community: American activists reinventing commitment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Wini Breines, Community and organization in the new left (South Hadley, MA: J.F. Bergin, 1982).

  60. See Clemens and Cook, “Politics and institutionalism.”

  61. Victor Turner, Dramas, fields and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). See Myerhoff’s use of the concept in Number our days.

  62. See Putnam, Bowling alone, especially 288–290; Fukuyama, The great disruption. This logic would be harder to apply to groups strong in bonding social capital. The bonding/bridging distinction is not fully integrated into the larger Tocquevillian sensibility informing the framework, though Putnam holds that most civic groups have a combination of bonding and bridging capital, so that most groups have at least some potential for the Tocquevillian spiral outward. In the present case, Park Cluster members all wanted to “bridge” outward beyond the group, so it is appropriate at the outset to investigate the consequences of regular connections. For a discussion of competing explanations of the Cluster’s evolution, see Lichterman, Elusive togetherness.

  63. See Robert Wuthnow, “Trust as an aspect of social structure,” 145–167, in Jeffrey Alexander, Gary Marx, and Christine Williams (Eds.), Self, social structure, and beliefs: Explorations in sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Vivianna Zelizer, “Circuits of commerce,” 122–144, in Alexander, Marx, and Williams, Self, social structure, and beliefs.

  64. As Mark E. Warren put it, “[I]n contrast to markets and bureaucracies, association is the form of social organization that thrives on talk.” See Warren, Democracy and association, 39.

  65. See Wilson, “Dr. Putnam’s social lubricant”; Portes, “Social capital.”

  66. On movement-building, see for instance Richard Wood, Faith in action; Mark R. Warren, Dry bones rattling; Saegert, Thompson, and Warren, Social capital in low-income communities. On volunteer recruitment, see Becker and Dhingra, “Religious involvement and volunteering”; John Wilson, “Volunteering,” Annual review of sociology 26 (2000): 215–240.

  67. See for instance, Ricca Edmondson, “Studying civic culture ethnographically and what it tells us about social capital: Communities in the west of Ireland,” 59–72, in Paul Dekker and Eric Uslaner (Eds.), Social capital and participation in everyday life (London: Routledge, 2001).

  68. For examples of other customs likely to be common across US civic life, see Lichterman, Elusive togetherness; The search for political community; Becker, Congregations in conflict; Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics.

  69. See Somers, “Beware Trojan horses bearing social capital.”

  70. For an argument that volunteer service has evolved to fit the structure of social service bureaucracies, see Wuthnow, Loose connections.

  71. Wood, Faith in action; Warren; Dry bones rattling.

  72. In theory, community organizing in the Saul Alinsky tradition cultivates active citizenship as an end in itself and not only a means to local political victories. See Stephen Hart, The cultural dilemmas of progressive politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Harry Boyte, CommonWealth: A return to citizen politics (New York: Free, 1989).

  73. See Fung and Wright, “Thinking about empowered participatory governance.”

  74. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, “Participation, activism, and politics: The Porto Alegre experiment,” 45–76, in Fung and Wright (Eds.), Deepening democracy; “Emergent public spheres: Talking politics in participatory governance,” American Sociological Review 68 (2003): 52–74; Archon Fung, “Deliberative democracy, Chicago style: Grass-roots governance in policing and public education,” 111–143, in Fung and Wright (Eds.), Deepening democracy.

  75. Michael P. Brown, Replacing citizenship (New York: Guilford, 1997); Nina Eliasoph, Scrambled moral worlds: The case of U.S. youth civic engagement groups (book manuscript, Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, 2006); Nicole Marwell, “Privatizing the welfare state: Nonprofit community-based organizations as political actors,” American Sociological Review 69 (2004): 265–291.

  76. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Militants and citizens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

  77. See Margaret Somers, “Citizenship and the place of the public sphere: Law, community, and political culture in the transition to democracy,” American Sociological Review 58: 587–620; Baiocchi, Militants and citizens.

  78. See for instance Harry Boyte, CommonWealth.

  79. See Lichterman, Elusive togetherness; John Dewey, The public and its problems; Jane Addams, Democracy and social ethics, with an introduction by Charlene H. Seigfried (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002 [1902]).

Acknowledgments

Many thanks for attentive and helpful comments from Michael Schudson, David Smilde, Juliet Musso, Chris Weare, and Theory and Society reviewers. I learned, too, from responses to the earlier, partial versions of this article presented at the Georgia Workshop on Culture and Institutions, the American Sociological Association, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Sociology Department, and the Civic Engagement Initiative workshop at the University of Southern California.

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Lichterman, P. Social capital or group style? Rescuing Tocqueville’s insights on civic engagement. Theor Soc 35, 529–563 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-006-9017-6

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