Time and money pressures alone cannot explain civic disengagement.

Evidence

To sum up: The available evidence suggests that busyness, economic distress, and the pressures associated with two-career families are a modest part of the explanation for declining social connectedness. These pressures have targeted the kinds of people (especially highly educated women) who in the past bore a disproportionate share of the responsibility for community involvement, and in that sense this development has no doubt had synergistic effects that spread beyond those people themselves. With fewer educated, dynamic women with enough free time to organize civic activity, plan dinner parties, and the like, the rest of us, too, have gradually disengaged. At the same time, the evidence also suggests that neither time pressures nor financial distress nor the movement of women into the paid labor force is the primary cause of civic disengagement over the last two decades. The central exculpatory fact is that civic engagement and social connectedness have diminished almost equally for both women and men, working or not, married or single, financially stressed or financially comfortable. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 681

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader ‘busyness’ literature and to traditional narratives blaming women’s workforce entry for community decline — Putnam dismantles the common assumption. — connects to: Political scandals alone cannot explain Americans’ civic withdrawal — Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining…, 25; Time and financial pressures explain very little of civic disengagement. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 646; Neither welfare state nor racial backlash explains the civic decline — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization…, 95

Broader Connections

• Neither welfare state nor racial backlash explains the civic decline #corroborates (0.85) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 95