American political scientist, Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, and the scholar who more than any other has made social capital — the network of relationships, norms, and trust that make collective life possible — a central category of contemporary American political and social analysis. Putnam is a rare academic figure in the second half of the 20th century: a mainstream political scientist whose books reach general readers, whose arguments move presidents, and whose empirical findings have shaped the self-understanding of the country they describe.
Making Democracy Work (1993), written with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti, is the study on which his later work rests. Taking advantage of the 1970 Italian regional-government reform — which created nominally identical new regional institutions across the Italian peninsula — Putnam and his collaborators tracked their performance over two decades and found dramatic and stable differences between north and south. The explanation, after careful elimination of alternative hypotheses, was the thickness of civic association: regions with denser histories of horizontal, cross-class civic life (choral societies, cooperatives, soccer clubs, neighborhood associations) sustained effective democratic government; regions with more vertical and hierarchical social structures did not. The finding echoed Tocqueville's classic analysis of American democracy and made social capital an analytic commonplace in political science.
Bowling Alone (2000) applied the framework to the United States, gathering five hundred pages of evidence for the thesis that American civic engagement — measured across many indicators of associational life, political participation, informal socializing, religious involvement, trust — has declined substantially since roughly the 1960s, and that the decline has serious consequences for democratic capacity, public health, and subjective well-being. Our Kids (2015) documented the widening opportunity gap between the children of the college-educated and the children of the non-college-educated, with implications for American social mobility and the social compact. The Upswing (2020, with Shaylyn Romney Garrett) set the Bowling Alone story in a longer historical frame, arguing that American civic, political, and economic life followed an "I-we-I" curve across the 20th century — rising communal solidarity from the Progressive Era through mid-century, falling solidarity thereafter — and that the preconditions of another upswing are visible if the country can find the collective will to build on them.