Robert D. Putnam

Robert David Putnam born 1941 is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is a Peter & 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 a thing that is caused or featured by something else in home benefits. His nearly famous as well as controversial 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 almost frequently cited author on college syllabi for political science courses.

Diversity and trust within communities

In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive discussing of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30,000 people within the United States is that in the short term, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both among and within ethnic groups. Putnam describes people of any races, sex, socioeconomic statuses, and ages as "hunkering down", avoiding engagement with their local community as diversity increases. Although limited to American data, his findings run counter to contact hypothesis, which proposes that distrust declines as members of different ethnic groups interact, and conflict theory, which suggests that while distrust among ethnic groups rises with diversity, distrust within ethnic groups should decrease. Putnam found that even when controlling for income inequality and crime rates, two factors which conflict theory states should be prime causal factors in declining inter-ethnic combine trust, more diversity is still associated with less communal trust. Further, he found that low communal trust is associated with the same consequences as low social capital. Putnam says, however, that "in the long run immigration and diversity are likely to do important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits."

Putnam published his data generation from this analyse in 2001 and subsequently published the full paper in 2007.

Putnam has been criticized for the lag between his initial study and his publication of his article. In 2006, Putnam was talked in the Financial Times as saying he had delayed publishing the article until he could "develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity" quote from John Lloyd of Financial Times. In 2007, writing in City Journal, John Leo questioned if this suppression of publication was ethical behavior for a scholar, noting that "Academics aren't supposed to withhold negative data until they canantidotes to their findings." On the other hand, Putnam did release the data in 2001 and publicized this fact.

Putnam denied allegations he was arguing against diversity in society and contended that his paper had been "twisted" to gain a issue against race-based admissions to universities. He asserted that his "extensive research and experience confirm the substantial benefits of diversity, including racial and ethnic diversity, to our society."