ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Theda Skocpol recently served as the President of the American Political Science Association, and is the Director of the Center for American Political Studies and the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She received her B.A. in 1969 from Michigan State University (which in 1997 awarded her a doctor of science honoris causa) her M.A. (1972) and PhD (1975) from Harvard. She taught at the University of Chicago between 1981 and 1986 before returning to Harvard as a full professor. Her 1979 book States and Social Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China, won the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the American Sociological Association award for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship. Her 1993 book on the history of American social policy, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, won the American Political Science Association’s highest book award, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. She is the founder and co-editor of the Princeton University Press’ “Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, Comparative, and International Perspectives,” which to date has published thirty titles. She has written or co-written seven other books, the latest of which relates to the topic of the AJPS article reprinted here: Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life.

Jocelyn Crowley is currently Assistant Professor in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Public Policy at Rutgers University, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Women’s Studies. She received her B.A. at Cornell University in 1992, a Masters in Public Policy at Georgetown University in 1993, and her PhD in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999. While in Washington DC she served as a research associate with the HUD Department’s Division of Policy, Research and Development, and then as a Special Research Affiliate at the Center on Budget and Priorities. She recently published The Politics of Child Support in America for Cambridge University Press and articles on child support policy in Publius and Social Science Quarterly. She is currently continuing her work on civic engagement as well as completing a book on the father’s rights movement in the US.

THE AUTHORS SPEAK

Jocelyn Crowley and Theda Skocpol

Interviewed by Lauren Pearson and Wells Robinson

(the responses to most questions are collaborative; individual author responses are indicated where appropriate)

What caused you to settle on this specific area of research? What was the process through which you traveled to arrive at this?

Crowley: Dr. Skocpol had been working in this area for awhile and had formed her own research team at Harvard to collect information on groups that formed in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I was interested in the topic and therefore joined her team.

Skocpol: You could look at a book I co-edited with Morris Fiorina, Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Brookings Institution Press, 1999), to learn more about the background to this article. I have been working for many years on the development of US voluntary associations, and this specific project suggested itself when new data (were) collected on the spread of voluntary federations across the United States.

How old is the field of associational research? How has it developed or evolved?

People have been studying associations in the United States since Alexis de Tocqueville first arrived…of course, it was Robert Putnam’s work in the 1990s that really focused academic attention on this important issue once again.

Which variables did you think would turn out to be the most influential on associational formation before your research?

We really believed that there had been a strong emphasis on modernization explanations in the literature on associational formation, but that these theories were not necessarily borne out by the empirical data. As we began this project, we had a strong sense that alternative explanations had to be tested—including explanations stressing the impact of political institutions, effects flowing from the Union victory in the Civil War, and explanations stressing pre-existing organized networks (such as church networks and voluntary associations).

What role did each of you play in the research and formation of this article? What was your co-author relationship like?

Crowley: This was the first time I had co-authored an article with anyone, and I found it to be a richly rewarding experience. Dr. Skocpol is a world-renowned social scientist, and I learned so much about the research process from her.

Skocpol: I was delighted to have the chance to work with Dr. Crowley because she is very smart and organized, and because she has sophisticated abilities as a statistical analyst. We both worked together on all phases of the project, yet we brought slightly different assets to the collaboration I had previously collected a lot of data on the spread of voluntary associations across the United States, so I could provide a unique way to measure associational development with new, never-before-analyzed data. I also know a lot about theories of civic engagement in the United States and beyond. In turn, Dr. Crowley knew how to use hazard models, and had a lot of experience defining and operationalizing variables for statistical analysis. We also like each other, and so we can work well together. We passed data and findings back and forth to work out interpretations. Then we passed drafts of the article back and forth many times as we wrote and re-wrote the piece. We also made presentations to various audiences to get their feedback and improve our drafts.

What is your definition of the relationship between “institutions” and “context”? Both can be defined as the social environment. The Civil War and the US expansion created this social environment that led to the startup of many organizations. Are the terms “institution” and “context” interchangeable?

The term “institution” (is used) to refer to long-standing patterns of rules or terms of governance. “Context” is a much more fluid idea, and can include institutions, social patterns, economic patterns, culture, and demography. Obviously, in this research we broked down the overarching idea of “context” into specific variables that could be measured across states and across time.

Instead of electoral competitiveness in Table 3, were there any other variables that could be a more direct measurement of party organization?

David Mayhew has developed an organizational measure, but like most other measures political scientists have developed it depends largely on data collected in the twentieth century. We needed to make sure that our measures were specific to the period we were studying. Mayhew and Martin Shefter and others have shown that parties became strongest organizationally when they faced tough electoral competition, and we were also interested in the possible impact of electoral competition on civic associations, which would have the most leverage in a competitive situation.

Were there concepts or variables that you would have liked to include in the model, but did not because of lack of available data?

Part of the difficulty in conducting historical research revolves around data problems. There are always concepts that you want to measure, but you have to make sure that the data are available. We had to do a lot of digging to make sure we covered the theoretical concepts we wanted to address. I believe that in the end, we were successful in finding operationalizations for most plausible explanatory variables. We included many more potential explanatory variables than previous researchers have considered.

Did your peer reviewers (for the AJPS) have anything to do with your exclusion of Confederate states from your data set in Table 3, or was that your idea?

As we were testing our models, we were always acutely aware of the potential criticism that “the South is different,” and we originally handled this issue with a dummy variable. Peer reviewers suggested that we separate out the data in this way. We agreed. We ended up that such a separation provided more confidence in our results.

What has been the response from political scientists, historians, and sociologists to your work?

We have been fortunate in that we have had opportunities to present this work in front of various groups, such as the American Political Science Association, the Harvard Economic History Workshop, and the Harvard Workshop on American Politics. Audience members in each of these groups have been quite responsive, and because of their own methodological backgrounds, (have) generated additional sets of questions for us to consider in future research endeavors. We have also gotten nice comments on our published article from many readers.

Because the time (period of the data) set used in your research, do you believe that your findings 1.) have a timeless quality, or are unique to that period, and 2.) will remain pertinent in the future of associational formation?

The Civil War in the United States was definitely a unique period in our history as a nation. It built the foundations of associational life in a way that is perhaps unmatched. We have, however, thought about extending our research to focus on associational life in the post World War I and World War II periods.

Do you think that 9/11 will cause an associational boom in the US?

Crowley: There was a lot of talk in the post-9/11 period that Americans would change their way of life and become more civic-minded. I think that, to a certain extent, Americans did alter their behavior and become more outward-looking, at least in the short term. However, I am not sure if this behavior has persisted. More research should be done on this important questions.

Skocpol: I published an article on exactly this question in the September 2002 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics. You might want to check it out.

To what degree are your variables applicable to other countries outside of the US?

Many of the modernization variables can have an international component to them, but of course, the institutionalist variables are much more specific to the United States. At the same time, this research suggests that researchers looking at the development of voluntary associations in other countries should pay attention to the institutional structure of government and to major wars as possible variables explaining the form and development of associations.

Do you feel that American Imperialism is reflected in the development of associations outside the US (e.g. the Lions Club)?

Many organizations move from their home in the US to locations around the globe. Whether or not this is the product of imperialism is partly an empirical question, and partly a matter of interpretation. Some of the voluntary federations we studies also spread outside the US. Sometimes that occurred when Americans traveled abroad, and sometimes when they engaged in religious evangelism. Of course, membership groups cannot really grow large in other countries unless people there actually want to join them. This is not just a matter of imperialism. American ideas and ways of organizing associations have often been genuinely appealing to people in other parts of the world, especially in Europe, Canada, and Australia. Those are the places where US membership groups had their most significant international expansion during the period we studied.

Has any new research or variables been brought to your attention after the publishing of the article that may influence your beliefs or results?

No new articles have transformed our thinking in a significant way. A graduate student at Harvard re-analyzed our data with somewhat different statistical methods and largely confirmed our results. That was reassuring.