Jennings and Stoker (2004) Social Trust and Civic Engagement across Time and Generations

Background Information: Social capital helps solve collective action problems (macro level) because—the conventional wisdom holds—individuals can’t work together towards a common goal if they don’t trust each other. Social capital creates virtuous circle such that being involved in civic associations and volunteer work not helps develop political skills and fosters trust and confidence in others, and vice versa, thus enabling collective action to address social and political needs. Previous indicators of social capital include: (1) trust in one’s fellow human beings and (2) civic engagement, i.e. involvement in voluntary organizations and the performance of volunteer work

Research Problem: The social capital literature lacks research taking a trans-generational, developmental perspective in order to sharply delineate intergenerational differences in social trust and civic engagement, their origins and long-term development, and their interconnections over time. The literature has not been able to disentangle life-cycle and generational effects. Further, it isn’t clear whether individuals have stable attitudes with regard to trust and engagement. Finally, the literature fails to evaluate the interconnections between social trust and civic engagement at the individual level.

Research Questions: (1) Which generation is more “responsible” for the decline in social capital: the Baby Boomers or the Generation Xers? (2) Are there generational differences in the extent to which trust and engagement are stable attributes of individuals? (3) Does pre-adult involvement in voluntary organizations build predispositions and skills that have long-lasting consequences, encouraging civic engagement later on in life?

Methodology: Jennings and Stoker (2004) focus on social trust, organizational involvement, and voluntary work. They utilize three-wave, longitudinal panel data (originating from 1965 study of high school seniors).

1st Generation includes the high school seniors’ parents, fits nicely into Putnam’s (2000) idealized “civic generation” and Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.”
2nd Generation includes the Baby Boomers; important: the Baby Boomers and the “protest generation” are synonyms.
3rd Generation includes people born after 1968, the Gen Xers.
To measure participation in voluntary organizations, all respondents except G2 in 1965 and G3 in 1997 reacted to a long list of organizations, indicating whether they belonged and their level of activity. Jennings and Stoker focus on the breadth of organizational involvement and sacrifice the depth.
The volunteer work measure utilized an open-ended question. After indicating whether they performed any volunteer work ‘apart from any work you do for pay,’ those saying yes were asked ‘what kind of volunteer work do you do?’

Findings:

Life-Cycle Pattern: Trust drops for those in their early to mid-20s compared with those still in their teens. Trust then starts to rise with age, climbing just as steadily for those in the late 20s and early 30s as it had dropped for those exiting their teens. Put differently, trust rebounds as young adults adapt to their new circumstances and establish new social relationships.

Inter-Generational Differences:

On average, G3 is less trusting than G2 during life-stages. G3, however, is at a particularly distrusting moment in their lives. Put differently, this may be a life-cycle effect.

G2 were involved in more organizations than G1 at a comparable age. That difference rests in part on much greater participation of G2 women in the professions and business. Conversely, G2 also outranks G1 with respect to neighborhood associations and sports groups and visibly trails G1 only with respect to fraternal organizations.

In terms of voluntary organization memberships, G2 holds up its end of the civic engagement stick fully as well as did G1. These findings here accord with age-related findings (e.g., Putnam, 2000, chapter 14) and those based on explicit careful divisions between early and late Baby Boomers, which find the early Boomers to be more civically inclined than the later ones (e.g., Bennett and Rademacher, 1997).

G2 in 1997 tends to be slightly less trusting than G1 in 1965, but substantially more organizationally involved. Overall, the social capital levels favor G2 when Jennings and Stoker hold education, income, marital status, and workforce participation constant.

Read the findings on pages 354 and 355 very carefully. In sum, members of G3 experienced substantially less ‘applied’ civic training in high school than did their parents. Even though gains were registered in some domains (athletic teams, and speech and debate clubs) the overall portrait is of less extracurricular involvement among today’s youth than among those of the boomer era. Although our evidence has concerned pre-adult involvement in social activities and organizations, it is fully consistent with the fears, and findings, of lessened civic involvement among recent cohorts of young adults.

The distinctively low levels of trust and engagement found for G3 can’t be traced to a generational difference in the success of parent–child transmission.

Life-cycle effects: In the aggregate G2 members increased their volunteering a bit as they aged from their mid-30s to around 50 years of age, as also expressed by an increase in the mean number of activities from 0.57 to 0.70. Although G3 trails G2 as of 1997, a breakdown by age shows that late adolescents essentially match their parents: 43% of the 16–20-year olds do volunteer work.

Strong findings for life-cycle effects: the volume and focus of volunteer work are mightily conditioned by life stage as well as by the opportunity structures presented by well-established institutions



There is a clear life-cycle dynamic at work in the link between one’s organizational experiences as a pre-adult and those that surface later on. The results provide near spectacular support for such effects. The seeds planted during the high school years germinate and only gradually bear fruit. As people move into the life situations of middle age that evoke or require civic engagement, they draw on the predispositions and skills set in place at an earlier time. Pre-adult experiences do eventually matter.

For voluntary activity is there a positive, statistically significant result; those with a history of volunteering are more trusting than would be otherwise expected on the basis of their personality and SES.

Trust is a stronger prerequisite for, than an outcome of, civic engagement.

Conclusion:

The Gen Xers are less engaged, less trusting, etc. than their parents and grandparents. Their parents (G2) were more engaged than their grandparents (G1)

While generational differences in social trust and civic engagement are stark, so too are those involving the life cycle.

There’s a decline in each form of civic engagement from late adolescence to early adulthood. Youth in high school have many opportunities to volunteer and join groups, and they have strong incentives to do so. Involvement drops dramatically after HS and only slowly climbs upwards again as middle age sets in.

There’s a parallel life cycle trend in social trust — with trust levels first falling with the transition from adolescence to adulthood, then climbing again in the late 20s and subsequently. There may even be a decline in the later years, but they are unable to use their evidence to distinguish period from life-cycle effects.

The parallel nature of these life-cycle trends encourages the expectation that trust and engagement are dynamically inter-related, but evidence on this point is decidedly mixed. It’s more plausible that SES is lurking behind both patterns.

Those aged 18–25 years today will manifest lower levels of social trust and civic engagement than their elders because they are at an unsettled point in their lives and because they are representatives of the low social capital Generation X (or Y). The two phenomena should not be conflated when interpreting age differences as they have very different implications for how both individuals and society will change as time moves on.

The effects of organizational involvement in high school on involvement later in life are delayed, emerging gradually and increasingly strongly as the individual approaches middle age.
The apparent effect of social trust on civic engagement also increases as individuals move from young adulthood to mid-life.

Hope for the future! It may be possible to reverse the decline in social capital. Involving adolescents in social organizations early on should have consequences for their civic engagement level later in life. But those consequences will not be immediate. They will take time, perhaps even decades, to be felt, as the erstwhile high school students wend their way through life.

There is heterogeneity in the determinants of civic engagement, a heterogeneity structured by age. What inspires civic engagement in early adulthood is not the same as what instigates it in mid-life, nor, perhaps, in the later years. There appears to be age-related variation in the extent to which individuals’ early organizational experiences come to play a role, and in the extent to which their dispositions to trust or distrust others are consequential

Social trust is a disposition that is quite malleable among young adults. It is at best weakly transmitted from parent to child, leaving the young adult quite open to other influences, good or bad. It is also quite unstable across the early years of adulthood. At the same time, the tendency to trust or distrust others appears to crystallize with age. Hence, efforts to nurture trusting dispositions will be fruitful if they are targeted at those, particularly young adults, whose dispositions are more in play.

There are both age-related and generational differences in the stability of organizational involvement. Compared to those from the Long Civic Generation (our G1), the Baby Boomers (our G2) move more frequently into and out of voluntary associations over time.