罗伯特·普特南

罗伯特·普特南（英语：Robert David Putnam，1941年1月9日—），美国政治学家，专攻比较政治学，生于纽约州罗切斯特，毕业于斯沃斯莫尔学院和耶鲁大学，哈佛大学肯尼迪政府学院公共政策教授，提出了两层博弈理论，知名著作包括《独自打保龄球》（Bowling Alone）。

Robert David Putnam (born January 9, 1941) is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Putnam developed the influential two-level game theory that assumes international agreements will only be successfully brokered if they also result in domestic benefits. His most famous work, Bowling Alone, argues that the United States has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life (social capital) since the 1960s, with serious negative consequences. In March 2015, he published a book called Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis that looked at issues of inequality of opportunity in the United States. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Putnam is the fourth most frequently cited author on college syllabi for political science courses.

Join or Die, a 2023 documentary film about community connections and club participation that is available on Netflix, features Putnam and is based on Putnam's works.

Early life and career

Robert David Putnam was born on January 9, 1941, in Rochester, New York, and grew up in Port Clinton, Ohio, where he participated in a competitive bowling league as a teenager. Putnam graduated from Swarthmore College in 1963 where he was a member of the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. He won a Fulbright Fellowship to study at Balliol College, Oxford, and went on to earn a master's degree and doctorate from Yale University in 1970.

He taught at the University of Michigan until joining the faculty at Harvard in 1979, where he has held a variety of positions, including Dean of the Kennedy School, and is currently the Malkin Professor of Public Policy. Putnam was raised as a religiously observant Methodist. In 1963, Putnam married his wife Rosemary, a special education teacher and French horn player. Around the time of his marriage, he converted to Judaism, his wife's religion.

Making Democracy Work

His first work in the area of social capital was Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, published in 1993. It is a comparative study of regional governments in Italy that drew great scholarly attention for its argument that the success of democracies depends in large part on the horizontal bonds that make up social capital. Putnam writes that northern Italy's history of community, guilds, clubs, and choral societies led to greater civic involvement and greater economic prosperity. Meanwhile, the agrarian society of Southern Italy is less prosperous economically and democratically because of less social capital. Social capital, which Putnam defines as "networks and norms of civic engagement", allows members of a community to trust one another. When community members trust one another, trade, money-lending, and democracy flourish.

Putnam's finding that social capital has pro-democracy effects has been rebutted by a sizable literature which finds that civic associations have been associated with the rise of anti-democratic movements.

Bowling Alone

In 1995, he published "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" in the Journal of Democracy. The article was widely read and garnered much attention for Putnam, including an invitation to meet with then-President Bill Clinton and a spot in the pages of People.

In 2000, he published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, a book-length expansion of the original argument, adding new evidence and answering many of his critics. Though he measured the decline of social capital with data of many varieties, his most striking point was that many traditional civic, social and fraternal organizations – typified by bowling leagues – had undergone a massive decline in membership while the number of people bowling had increased dramatically.