Bowling for Bertie

Fianna Fáil invited Robert Putnam to tell them about using social capital to improve the quality of life for the people of Ireland. Colin Murphy profiles Bertie's guru

'For Ireland", Bertie Ahern told his parliamentary party in Cavan, "community is the thread that holds together the fabric of our society and our future". Community is at the heart of "the brave society" we aspire to – one which "completes the great unfinished business of the social agenda".

"Our policies must and will promote a deeper involvement of people everywhere in Ireland in every aspect of community life and voluntary activity."

Bertie Ahern's speech showed just how enthusiastically he has absorbed the ideas of in-vogue American academic Robert Putnam. The emphasis on community, and its connection to an ethos of volunteerism, has been Robert Putnam's rallying cry for over 20 years.

Initially begun as a study of what makes democratic government work well, Putnam spent the 1970s and 1980s watching a unique experiment in local government in Italy. In prosperous northern Italy where there were dense networks of social engagement and participation, he found, local governments had thrived. In the barren south, where society was suspicious and inward-looking, government was mired in corruption and clientelism. The key factor in "making democracy work" (as he called the ensuing book) was something called "social capital" – the bonds between people formed in communities and through joining organisations and group activities – the "glue" that holds society together.

Putnam was by then a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Boston's Harvard University – a leading centre for the study of government and politics. He had had the opportunity to test his ideas for good politics in person in 1989, when made dean of the college. But after two tumultuous years, Putnam quit. "He demonstrated little interest in raising money, serving as faculty interlocutor, glad-handing politicians or any of the other myriad acts of ingratiation and discipline that a successful deanship requires", judged David Warsh in the Boston Globe. Ironically, perhaps, for a man so intent on promoting connectedness, he was reported to be weak in fostering connections between the school's academic community and the non-academic policy types who came in from jobs in government. Putnam returned to his research – and soon saw his career as academic and author take off.

Up to this point, Putnam has said, he was "just an ordinary academic", whose first 11 books "were really good but had a total readership of about six people".

Applying his work in Italy to the United States, he found indicators of a worrying loss in community identity and habits there. He called the problem "bowling alone" – Americans who used to bowl in leagues still bowled, but now did so with just a few friends, in isolated units rather than within a grand social organisation. Across the US, in places where communities still behaved as communities, or had found new ways to network and form social bonds, the quality of life was higher. People voted more, had dinner parties and joined parent-teacher associations. Where these had dropped off, there was more crime, lower educational standards, and people died earlier.

Bowling Alone shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and Putnam became an academic celebrity, invited to give seminars at the White House and Downing Street. Bertie Ahern read Bowling Alone and, meeting Putnam in Dublin, asked him to keep in touch. Putnam asked with whom in particular would he correspond – "with me, with me, talk to me" said Ahern (Putnam told British journalist John Lloyd).

Putnam says he was lucky to write about something that stuck a chord with people, but he has also described himself as a "missionary" for civic engagement.

From a small town in the American mid west, Putnam converted from Methodism to Judaism in the 1960s, after meeting his wife, Rosemary, and has praised the "unique and intense" sense of community among Jews.

After Bowling Alone, he went on to set up the Saguaro Seminar at Harvard, to both study and foster social capital in the US, culminating in the report and book, Better Together.

Putnam will have given the party's TDs much to think about in terms of fostering their own constituency organisations. Putnam's practical analysis of social capital reads like a self-help manual for parish pump politics. Neighbours and communities should know each other and, when they do, crime falls, schools are better run, people are happier and healthier.

It is a classic formula for government-party electioneering: full of vague common-sense rhetoric about improving quality of life and pulling together as communities, with a practical, local appeal, and little focus on central government (and its mistakes). "Social capital" dresses up the key quality-of-life issues in society as issues for resolution at a local-organisations level, beyond the reach of government.

It can be deeply socially and economically conservative, ultimately leading to welfare-service provision that is effectively privatised, sub-contracted to non-governmental organisations, or from which the state has simply retreated. One social capital researcher who spoke to Village linked this issue to the failures in the emergency response in New Orleans: "When you have a major disaster the state cannot respond because it has rowed back so far it doesn't have the capacity to intervene any more."

This isn't the necessary culmination of the social capital route. Though Putnam's work is closely linked to that of neocon scholar Francis Fukuyama's work on the concept of "trust" and its economic utility, Putnam himself is no neoliberal, and nor is he a straightforward social conservative – while he was dean, the Kennedy School liberalised its recruitment policy to welcome openly homosexual students and staff, in order to promote diversity on campus. But social capital's conservative economic aspect helps explain its attractiveness to George Bush, who champions private philanthropy over public aid, and the World Bank, which promotes privatisation of social services in poor countries.

At the core of his thinking is the idea of subsidiarity, that decision-making should be devolved to the lowest levels possible, so that decisions are taken as close as possible to the people (or by the people). It's an idea close to the heart of traditional American conservatism, with its lurking suspicion of the federal government. But it also reflects Catholic social teaching, as in Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical on subsidiarity, and the idea of "sustainable development" that dominates thinking on Third World development.

Putnam's most recent book, Better Together, addresses a lot of his critics by conceding that social capital is no panacea – it can be used for ill as well as for good, such as when communities band together in intolerance – and that there is no set recipe for generating it. (Though he has said that World War II helped build a "great generation" of socially concerned people in the US, and suggested that 9/11 could have had a similar impact.)

But only in passing does he note the most fundamental politics of the concept. The book is a collection of stories of social capital at work, from a public library scheme in Chicago, to a 45,000-strong evangelical church in California. Putnam notes in his conclusion that there are key "enabling" structural factors that underly social capital, such as the tax code, highway building and educational investment. ("Education", he says in a revealing aside, "is often the most powerful predictor of high levels of social capital".) But, bar this brief mention, taxes, infrastructure and state investment in education are absent from his work.

This is politics-lite, perfect for the doorsteps of the constituency (particularly those where Sinn Féin activists have long been networking intensely and making the kinds of connections between local groups that Putnam prescribes). It diverts attention from the excesses, inefficiencies, and overspends of government planning – e-voting, the roads, decentralisation – to the folksy premise that government should help people "connect".

Part of the Putnam aura is simply his ability as a speaker and writer. He combines George Bush's folksy charm with Bill Clinton's number crunching ability, and dazzles audiences with bravura performances at the podium, despite a tendency to run overtime. He dispenses his wisdom with good doses of anecdotes and humour. An example: "What I'm talking about is long-term reciprocity – doing something for someone else without expecting an immediate return. Our legendary American hero, Yogi Berra (a baseball player), put it really well: 'If you don't go to someone's funeral, they won't go to yours.'" His turn of phrase is pithy and accessible, though his catchphrases are well worn: Americans don't even watch television in company any more, he says, they own their own individual televisions and so "they watch Friends rather than having friends".

And he is not slow to praise his benefactors. Putnam told his Fianna Fáil audience: "there is no political leader anywhere in the world who has had the sustained interest in the issue of social capital as the Taoiseach". Two years ago, he told a British newspaper, "the British government has been more consistently focussed and creative about this problem than any other major government that I'm aware of in the west".

The arch social capitalist changed his travel plans to attend the Fianna Fáil jamboree, en route from Australia to the UK. With a position on the faculty still at the Kennedy School in Harvard, and constant globetrotting – advising government in Canada, France, Germany as well as at his pit-stops on this trip – he is clearly adept at making global connections. (He's been a regular visitor to this island, and has spoken at Dublin's City Development Board, the Ceifin Conference, the National Economic and Social Forum and UCD, amongst others, in the last couple of years.) But for a man who champions the local, what has he to say about the social capital of his home town of Lexington, Massachusetts?

"It's true that I'm not as connected as I would like to be. When my kids were young I was more involved. I'm a sinner in this. It's do as I say, not as I do."

But then Lexington, with an 86 per cent white population of 30,000 and a median income of $96,000, is not the type of place that typically lacks social capital – or any other kind.p

?More: www.bettertogether.org