Editors’ Note: Jae Yeon Kim introduces the research he has conducted, along with other colleagues at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, on the uneven associational landscape of civic opportunity in the United States.

I was born and raised in South Korea and came to the United States about a decade ago to pursue my doctoral studies in political science. Although I had previously lived in several foreign countries, the culture shock I experienced in America was the most unforgettable. The country is powerful and wealthy, but it is also highly unequal. In America, it is common to come across places where the social landscape changes abruptly within a short walking distance. You’ll find an affluent neighborhood on one side of a highway, while the other side is impoverished. There isn’t just one America but a thousand Americas, each fragmented and isolated. I came from a working-class family and have experienced inequality firsthand in South Korea. I was still taken aback by the degree of residential and other forms of spatial segregation that exist in America.

I recently co-authored a paper with Milan de Vries and Hahrie Han, my colleagues at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, which was published in Nature Human Behaviour. The paper highlights how fragmented America is regarding civic opportunity. We define civic opportunity as the opportunities that people have to acquire the necessary skills to participate in collective life in pluralistic societies. Democracy is not a spectator’s sport. Unfortunately, it is not always easy for individuals to work together. They must learn civic skills, often referred to as social capital. However, as Robert Putnam argued most famously in Bowling Alone, this hidden fabric of American democracy is fraying. So, to reverse the trend, it is essential to distinguish the demand- and supply-side of social capital. Civic muscles or social capital do not develop naturally. Without the civic gyms, so to speak, training and working those muscles, it is easy for people to be disconnected from each other and become disaffected from democracy. An infrastructure of associations or organizations is required to cultivate social capital, ranging from community centers, churches, and unions to bowling clubs. These organizations, according to French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835), are the ‘schools of democracy’ because they help people learn how to get involved in their communities. Furthermore, it is critical not just to count the number of these organizations but to identify the kinds of civic opportunities they offer because not all organizations function as schools of democracy to the same degree.

In short, civic opportunities matter because they enable or constrain civic engagement. It is much easier to be civically skilled if you live where local associations hold public events, offer memberships and volunteering opportunities, and provide access to civic and political actions. In contrast, if you live in civic deserts lacking such opportunities, it isn’t easy to grow civic skills even if you have similar interests and motivations to get involved in civic life.

Thanks to big data and machine learning, we were able to map the distribution of civic opportunity across the United States at an unprecedented level, using the tax returns nonprofits filed with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). We then linked these 1.8 million tax documents to the websites of these organizations, as well as to other demographic data. The results demonstrate that the distribution of civic opportunities in the United States is highly unequal. Counties with high levels of education and less poverty, and that are predominantly white, are more likely to have access to civic opportunities. In a democracy, every person has one vote, but that doesn’t mean everyone has the same opportunity to develop civic skills. This opportunity largely depends on where you live—that is, your neighborhood.

In the remainder of the paper, we show that civic opportunity is not just an abstract concept but also has significant and concrete policy implications. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, some groups came together and provided food and other essential supplies to people in their community. Local and national media outlets praised these groups as the silver lining of the pandemic. For example, Bed-Stuy Strong (BSS), a Brooklyn-based mutual aid network, supported 28,000 people in Central Brooklyn via one week’s supply of home-delivered groceries. They also successfully raised and redistributed $1.2 million from crowdsourced donations.

The activity of these groups was not, however, a miracle or random event. Our study revealed that areas with high civic opportunity are more likely to see mutual-aid groups form than those with low civic opportunity. The emergence of these mutual-aid groups has highlighted the unequal distribution of civic opportunity that forms the social foundation of American democracy. Organizing a mutual-aid group requires specific skills, such as recruiting, motivating, and coordinating people. Places that offer such civic opportunities are more resilient and can respond better to a crisis like the pandemic. Additionally, our research shows that greater civic opportunity predicted lower vaccine hesitancy and higher vaccine uptake during the coronavirus pandemic.

Although civic-opportunity organizations play a crucial role, they often receive little attention from the media. This lack of attention makes it challenging for them to recruit new members and raise funds. According to our data, there are over 560,000 civic-opportunity organizations in the United States. The most common types of civic-opportunity organizations are social-fraternal organizations (such as Rotary Clubs, fraternities, sororities, ethnic clubs, etc.) and religious organizations (churches, temples, mosques, etc.). These types of organizations comprise 37% of all civic opportunity organizations and provide civic opportunities in 85% of American counties. However, their contributions often go unnoticed, particularly in today’s increasingly nationalized American political environment, where all politics is presidential and local politics receive scant attention.

Investing in these grassroots organizations is crucial for promoting democratic revival and a flourishing America. As Hahrie Han and I argued in our article published in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2022), civil society is like the invisible seams that make American democracy strong by linking institutions to people, and people to each other. For many decades, these seams have been fraying partly because the traditional source of civic opportunities, such as large, federated membership organizations like the Elks, Masons, and Rotary Clubs, have become less common. As scholars such as Theda Skocpol, Marshall Ganz and Ziad Munson have shown, these organizations used to provide civic opportunities and linked civic action to political power. Our data affirms the contention of these scholars that federated membership organizations are becoming increasingly rare. Our findings show that 70% of such organizations were established before the 1980s, while only 15% were founded between 2000 and the present day. This trend has emerged despite the fact that 61% of the organizations in our dataset were established in the past two decades (in these calculations we assumed an organization’s IRS incorporation year can serve as a proxy for its foundation year).

This paper is part of a larger project called “Mapping the Modern Agora,” which is being developed at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The goal is to create new scholarship focusing on America’s failing civic infrastructure. I am working with my colleagues on two follow-up projects to explore further the intersection between civic engagement and democracy.

In one project with Milan de Vries and Hahrie Han, we investigate the relationship between redlining, an infamous example of structural racism, and civic inequality in urban America. To conduct this research, we have analyzed records on redlining and the distribution of civic opportunity across more than 13,000 census tracts in urban America.

In collaboration with Elizabeth McKenna at Harvard Kennedy School, we are working on another project that explores how non-profit organizations manage the competing demands of their funders and constituencies. As government funding has diminished, philanthropies have begun to wield greater influence in civil society than ever before. Given that influence, the question arises as to whether civic associations can balance the needs of funders and constituents whom they claim to serve. To conduct this project, we have gathered over 250,000 email contacts from the websites of civic organizations that offer civic opportunities, and we intend to utilize them as a base for conducting a large-scale survey. These projects are made possible by the data collected by the Mapping the Modern Agora team. We have spent the past few years building one of the largest and most comprehensive datasets on nonprofits in the United States. We hope that these projects will encourage new research and inquiry into the study of civic engagement, democracy, and the health of civil society.

-Jae Yeon Kim

Jae Yeon Kim is a research fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a senior data scientist at Code for America.