Individualism revisited: Moral worldviews and civic engagement

Highlights

• Models the effect of distinct moral worldviews on types of civic engagement.

• Three types of worldviews considered: individualistic, civic and religious.

• Religious worldview associated with greater odds of in-group volunteering.

• Civic worldview associated with volunteering that benefits larger community.

• These and other findings related to debates about the nature of culture in action.

Abstract

This paper investigates whether substantively distinct moral worldviews can help explain why certain people engage in different types of civic actions. Based on an analysis of survey data from a nationally representative sample of American adults, we find that, controlling for other important factors, a moral worldview emphasizing civic responsibility is more likely to encourage volunteer efforts that benefit the larger community than is one emphasizing personal fulfillment. Furthermore, we also find that a worldview emphasizing religious duty is less likely to promote involvement in civic activity that helps those in the larger community relative to a worldview emphasizing civic responsibility. But a religious worldview increases the probability of in-group volunteering relative to an individualist worldview. The implications of these findings for the broader scholarship on civic engagement and social capital and the role of culture in action are discussed.

Introduction

Scholars have long been interested in understanding why certain people but not others participate in civic action. Research on this question tends to focus on factors such as organizations, social networks, leadership skills, and biographical availability to distinguish civic activists from non-activists (for example, see Beyerlein and Hipp, 2006b, McAdam, 1986, Passy, 2001, Verba et al., 1995). Although there are some exceptions, culture has generally taken a backseat in research on differential participation. We believe there is much to be gained from bringing culture to bear on the question of individual variation in civic action. In this article, we evaluate the role that distinct cultural worldviews play in explaining involvement in different types of civic engagement.

Several scholars have emphasized the importance of cultural understandings for mobilizing public-spirited action. Perhaps most prominently, Bellah and colleagues (1985) raised concerns that a growing culture of individualism (defined as a focus on the self as the source of moral authority) would weaken commitment to civic engagement in the United States. Yet these ideas have not been explored systematically, as extant work has instead generally focused more on how networks, practices, habits, and skills play a role in making civic participation possible. Though open to the idea that different moral commitments could lead to different styles of civic engagement, contemporary cultural sociologists rarely consider the role culture might play in differentially encouraging people to take civic action (Campbell, 1996, Smith, 2003, Smitch, 2010, Vaisey, 2009). We therefore know little about whether there are such differences.

Although we do not doubt that individualist moral sources can motivate and sustain public commitment, we do question whether individualism is equally capable of motivating and sustaining it. After all, Bellah and colleagues (1985) argued that increased individualism would weaken public commitment, not eliminate it. Although ethnographic research (e.g., Lichterman, 1995, Lichterman, 1996) has shown that traditional civic and religious moral commitments are not necessary conditions for civic engagement, such studies cannot rule out the possibility that different “moral cosmologies” (Davis and Robinson, 2006) differ in their sufficiency as predictors of public-spirited action. The goal of this paper is to reopen the empirical investigation on the link between cultural worldviews—here defined as general orientations toward moral evaluation (Vaisey and Lizardo, 2010, pp. 1595–1596)—and civic engagement. Specifically, we examine whether—after accounting for dispositional, organizational, and relational factors of civic engagement, as well as demographic characteristics—substantively different moral worldviews can help explain why certain people but not others are engaged in more “bridging” or public-spirited volunteerism and more “bonding” or in-group-focused volunteerism. Our results show that individualism, in fact, does generally lower the probability of both types of volunteerism, even when controlling for other important factors.

Important differences are also found between two different types of non-individualist moral worldviews. We find evidence that civic morality encourages volunteering that helps people in the larger community, while religious morality fosters caring for people in one's own religious community. In the conclusion, we consider the implications of our findings for understanding the cultural dimensions of civic engagement. We also discuss the insights that our findings might provide for discussions about general declines of social capital in the United States—especially the substantial drop in efforts focused on helping communities—that Putnam (2000) and others have emphasized given the growing individualism of recent birth cohorts.