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AUTHOR: THEDA SKOCPOL

TITLE: ASSOCIATIONS WITHOUT MEMBERS
SOURCE: American Prospect vno45 p66-73 Jl/Ag ’99
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with
permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.
In just a third of a century, Americans have dramatically changed their style of civic
and political association. A civic world once centered in locally rooted and nationally
active membership associations is a relic. Today, Americans volunteer for causes and
projects, but only rarely as ongoing members. They send checks to service and
advocacy groups run by professionals, often funded by foundations or professional
fundraisers. Prime-time airways echo with debates among their spokespersons: the
National Abortion Rights Action League debates the National Right to Life Committee;
the Concord Coalition takes on the American Association of Retired Persons; and the
Environmental Defense Fund counters business groups. Entertained or bemused,
disengaged viewers watch as polarized advocates debate.
The largest membership groups of the 1950s were old-line and well-established,
with founding dates ranging from 1733 for the Masons to 1939 for the Woman’s
Division of Christian Service (a Methodist women’s association fromed from
“missionary” societies with nineteenth-century roots). Like most large membership
associations throughout American history, most 1950s associations recruited members
across class lines. They held regular local meetings and convened periodic assemblies
of elected leaders and delegates at the state, regional, or national levels. Engaged in
multiple rather than narrowly specialized pursuits, many associations combined social
or ritual activities with community service, mutual aid, and involvement in national
affairs. Patriotism was a leitmotif; during and after World War II, a passionate and
victorious national endeavor, these associations sharply expanded their memberships
and renewed the vigor of their local and national activities.
To be sure, very large associations were not the only membership federations that
mattered in postwar America. Also prominent were somewhat smaller, elite-dominated
civic groups—including male service groups like Rotary, Lions, and Kiwanis, and
longstanding female groups like the American Association of University Women and the
League of Women Voters. Dozens of ethnically based fraternal and cultural
associations flourished, as did African-American fraternal groups like the Prince Hall
Masons and the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World.
For many membership federations, this was a golden era of national as well as
community impact. Popularly rooted membership federations rivaled professional and
business associations for influence in policy debates. The AFL-CIO was in the thick of
struggles about economic and social policies; the American Legion and the Veterans
of Foreign Wars advanced veterans’ programs; the American Farm Bureau Federation
(AFBF) joined other farmers’ associations to influence national and state agricultural
policies; and the National Congress of Parents and Teachers (PTA) and the General
Federation of Women’s Clubs were influential on educational, health, and family issues.
The results could be decisive, as exemplified by the pivotal role of the American
Legion in drafting and lobbying for the GI Bill of 1944.
Then, suddenly, old-line membership federations seemed passé. Upheavals shook
America during “the long 1960s,” stretching from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s.
The southern Civil Rights movement challenged white racial domination and spurred
legislation to enforce legal equality and voting rights for African Americans. Inspired by
Civil Rights achievements, additional “rights” movements exploded, promoting equality
for women, dignity for homosexuals, the unionization of farm workers, and the
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mobilization of other nonwhite ethnic minorities. Movements arose to oppose U.S.

involvement in the war in Vietnam, champion a new environmentalism, and further
other public causes. At the forefront of these groundswells were younger Americans,
especially from the growing ranks of college students and university graduates.
The great social movements of the long 1960s were propelled by combinations of
grassroots protest, activist radicalism, and professionally led efforts to lobby
government and educate the public. Some older membership associations ended up
participating and expanding their bases of support, yet the groups that sparked
movements were more agile and flexibly structured than pre-existing membership
federations.
The upheavals of the 1960s could have left behind a reconfigured civic world, in
which some old-line membership associations had declined but others had reoriented
and reenergized themselves. Within each great social movement, memberships could
have consolidated and groups coalesced into new omnibus federations able to link the
grass roots to state, regional, and national leaderships, allowing longstanding American
civic traditions to continue in new ways.
But this is not what happened. Instead, the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s brought
extraordinary organizational proliferation and professionalization. At the national level
alone, the Encyclopedia of Associations listed approximately 6,500 associations in
1958. This total grew by 1990 to almost 23,000. Within the expanding group universe,
moreover, new kinds of associations came to the fore: relatively centralized and
professionally led organizations focused on policy lobbying and public education.
Another wave of the advocacy explosion involved “public interest” or “citizens’”
groups seeking to shape public opinion and influence legislation. Citizens’ advocacy
groups espouse “causes” ranging from environmental protection (for example, the
Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund), to the well-being of poor children
(the Children’s Defense Fund), to reforming politics (Common Cause) and cutting public
entitlements (the Concord Coalition).
THE FORTUNES OF MEMBERSHIP ASSOCIATIONS
As the associational explosions of 1960 to 1990 took off, America’s once large and
confident membership federations were not only bypassed in national politics; they also
dwindled as locally rooted participant groups. To be sure, some membership
associations have been founded or expanded in recent decades. By far the largest is
the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), which now boasts more than 33
million adherents, about one-half of all Americans aged 50 or older. But AARP is not
a democratically controlled organization. Launched in 1958 with backing from a
teachers’ retirement group and an insurance company, the AARP grew rapidly in the
1970s and 1980s by offering commercial discounts to members and establishing a
Washington headquarters to monitor and lobby about federal legislation affecting
seniors. The AARP has a legislative and policy staff of 165 people, 28 registered
lobbyists, and more than 1,200 staff members in the field. After recent efforts to
expand its regional and local infrastructure, the AARP involves about 5 to 10 percent
of its members in (undemocratic) membership chapters. But for the most part, the
AARP national office—covering an entire city block with its own zip code—deals with
masses of individual adherents through the mail.
Four additional recently expanded membership associations use modern mass
recruitment methods, yet are also rooted in local and state units. Interestingly, these
groups are heavily involved in partisan electoral politics. Two recently launched groups
are the National Right to Life Committee (founded in 1973) and the Christian Coalition
(founded in 1989). They bridge from church congregations, through which they recruit
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members and activists, to the conservative wing of the Republican Party, through
which they exercise political influence. Two old-line membership federations—the
National Education Association (founded in 1857) and the National Rifle Association
(founded in 1871)—experienced explosive growth after reorienting themselves to take
part in partisan politics. The NRA expanded in the 1970s, when right-wing activists
opposed to gun control changed what had traditionally been a network of marksmen’s
clubs into a conservative, Republican-leaning advocacy group fiercely opposed to gun
control legislation. During the same period, the NEA burgeoned from a relatively elitist
association of public educators into a quasi-union for public school teachers and a
stalwart in local, state, and national Democratic Party politics.
Although they fall short of enrolling 1 percent of the adult population, some
additional chapter-based membership associations were fueled by the social
movements of the 1960s and 1970s. From 1960 to 1990, the Sierra Club (originally
created in 1892) ballooned from some 15,000 members to 565,000 members meeting
in 378 “local groups.” And the National Audubon Society (founded in 1905) went from
30,000 members and 330 chapters in 1958 to about 600,000 members and more than
500 chapters in the 1990s. The National Organization for Women (NOW) reached
1,122 members and 14 chapters within a year of its founding in 1966, and spread
across all 50 states with some 125,000 members meeting in 700 chapters by 1978.
But notice that these “1960s” movement associations do not match the organizational
scope of old-line membership federations. At its post-World War II high point in 1955,
for example, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs boasted more than 826,000
members meeting in 15,168 local clubs, themselves divided into representative
networks within each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. By contrast, at its
high point in 1993, NOW reported some 280,000 members and 800 chapters, with no
intermediate tier of representative governance between the national center and local
chapters. These membership associations certainly matter, but mainly as
counterexamples to dominant associational trends—of organizations without members.
After nearly a century of civic life rooted in nation-spanning membership federations,
why was America’s associational universe so transformed? A variety of factors have
contributed, including racial and gender change; shifts in the political opportunity
structure; new techniques and models for building organizations; and recent
transformations in U.S. class relations. Taken together, I suggest, these account for
civic America’s abrupt and momentous transition from membership to advocacy.
SOCIETY DECOMPARTMENTALIZED
Until recent times, most American membership associations enrolled business and
professional people together with white-collar folks, farmers, and craft or industrial
workers. There was a degree of fellowship across class lines—yet at the price of other
kinds of exclusions. With only a few exceptions, old-line associations enrolled either
men or women, not both together (although male-only fraternal and veterans’ groups
often had ties to ladies’ auxiliaries). Racial separation was also the rule. Although
African Americans did manage to create and greatly expand fraternal associations of
their own, they unquestionably resented exclusion by the parallel white fraternals.
Given the pervasiveness of gender and racial separation in classic civic America,
established voluntary associations were bound to be shaken after the 1950s. Moreover,
changing gender roles and identities blended with other changing values to undercut
not just membership appeals but long-standing routes to associational leadership. For
example, values of patriotism, brotherhood, and sacrifice had been celebrated by all
fraternal groups. During and after each war, the Masons, Knights of Pythias, Elks,
Knights of Columbus, Moose, Eagles, and scores of other fraternal groups celebrated
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and memorialized the contributions of their soldier-members. So did women’s

auxiliaries, not to mention men’s service clubs and trade union “brotherhoods.” But
“manly” ideals of military service faded after the early 1960s as America’s bitter
experiences during the war in Vietnam disrupted the intergenerational continuity of
male identification with martial brotherliness.
In the past third of a century, female civic leadership has changed as much or more
than male leadership. Historically, U.S. women’s associations—ranging from female
auxiliaries of male groups to independent groups like the General Federation of
Women’s Clubs, the PTA, and church-connected associations—benefited from the
activism of educated wives and mothers. Although a tiny fraction of all U.S. females,
higher-educated women were a surprisingly substantial and widespread
presence—because the United States was a pioneer in the schooling of girls and the
higher education of women. By 1880, some 40,000 American women constituted a
third of all students in U.S. institutions of higher learning; women’s share rose to nearly
half at the early twentieth-century peak in 1920, when some 283,000 women were
enrolled in institutions of higher learning. Many higher-educated women of the late
1800s and early 1900s married immediately and stayed out of the paid labor force.
Others taught for a time in primary and secondary schools, then got married and
stopped teaching (either voluntarily or because school systems would not employ
married women). Former teachers accumulated in every community. With skills to make
connections within and across communities—and some time on their hands as their
children grew older—former teachers and other educated women became mainstays of
classic U.S. voluntary life.
Of course, more American women than ever before are now college-educated. But
contemporary educated women face new opportunities and constraints. Paid work and
family responsibilities are no longer separate spheres, and the occupational structure
is less sex-segregated at all levels. Today, even married women with children are very
likely to be employed, at least part-time. Despite new time pressures, educated and
employed women have certainly not dropped out of civic life. Women employed
part-time are more likely to be members of groups or volunteers than housewives; and
fully employed women are often drawn into associations or civic projects through work.
Yet styles of civic involvement have changed—much to the disadvantage of
broad-gauged associations trying to hold regular meetings.
THE LURE OF WASHINGTON, D.C.
The centralization of political change in Washington, D.C. also affected the
associational universe. Consider the odyssey of civil rights lawyer Marian Wright
Edelman. Fresh from grassroots struggles in Mississippi, she arrived in Washington,
D.C. in the late 1960s to lobby for Mississippi’s Head Start program. She soon realized
that arguing on behalf of children might be the best way to influence legislation and
sway public sympathy in favor of the poor, including African Americans. So between
1968 and 1973 Edelman obtained funding from major foundations and developed a
new advocacy and policy research association, the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF).
With a skillful staff, a small national network of individual supporters, ties to social
service agencies and foundations, and excellent relationships with the national media,
the CDF has been a determined proponent of federal antipoverty programs ever since.
The CDF has also worked with Democrats and other liberal advocacy groups to
expand such efforts; and during periods of conservative Republican ascendancy, the
CDF has been a fierce (if not always successful) defender of federal social programs.
Activists, in short, have gone where the action is. In this same period, congressional
committees and their staffs subdivided and multiplied. During the later 1970s and
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1980s, the process of group formation became self-reinforcing—not only because

groups arose to counter other groups, but also because groups begot more groups.
Because businesses and citizens use advocacy groups to influence government outside
of parties and between elections, it is not surprising that the contemporary group
explosion coincides with waning voter loyalty to the two major political parties. As late
as the 1950s, U.S. political parties were networks of local and state organizations
through which party officials often brokered nominations, cooperated with locally rooted
membership associations, and sometimes directly mobilized voters. The party structure
and the associational structure were mutually reinforcing.
Then, demographic shifts, reapportionment struggles, and the social upheavals of
the 1960s disrupted old party organizations; and changes in party rules led to
nomination elections that favored activists and candidate-centered efforts over
backroom brokering by party insiders. Such “reforms” were meant to enhance
grassroots participation, but in practice have furthered oligarchical ways of running
elections. No longer the preserve of party organizations, U.S. campaigns are now
managed by coteries of media consultants, pollsters, direct mail specialists,
and—above all—fundraisers. In this revamped electoral arena, advocacy groups have
much to offer, hoping to get access to elected officials in return for helping candidates.
In low-turnout battles to win party nominations, even groups with modest mail
memberships may be able to field enough (paid or unpaid) activists to make a
difference. At all stages of the electoral process, advocacy groups with or without
members can provide endorsements that may be useful in media or direct mail efforts.
And PACs pushing business interests or public interest causes can help candidates
raise the huge amounts of money they need to compete.
A NEW MODEL OF ASSOCIATION-BUILDING
Classic American association-builders took it for granted that the best way to gain
national influence, moral or political, was to knit together national, state, and local
groups that met regularly and engaged in a degree of representative governance.
Leaders who desired to speak on behalf of masses of Americans found it natural to
proceed by recruiting self-renewing mass memberships and spreading a network of
interactive groups. After the start-up phase, associational budgets usually depended
heavily on membership dues and on sales of newsletters or supplies to members and
local groups. Supporters had to be continuously recruited through social networks and
person-to-person contacts. And if leverage over government was desired, an
association had to be able influence legislators, citizens, and newspapers across many
districts. For all of these reasons, classic civic entrepreneurs with national ambitions
moved quickly to recruit activists and members in every state and across as many
towns and cities as possible within each state.
Today, nationally ambitious civic entrepreneurs proceed in quite different ways.
When Marian Wright Edelman launched a new advocacy and research group to lobby
for the needs of children and the poor, she turned to private foundations for funding
and then recruited an expert staff of researchers and lobbyists. In the early 1970s,
when John Gardner launched Common Cause as a “national citizens lobby” demanding
governmental reforms, he arranged for start-up contributions from several wealthy
friends, contacted reporters in the national media, and purchased mailing lists to solicit
masses of members giving modest monetary contributions. Patron grants, direct mail
techniques, and the capacity to convey images and messages through the mass media
have changed the realities of organization building and maintenance.
The very model of civic effectiveness has been upended since the 1960s. No longer
do civic entrepreneurs think of constructing vast federations and recruiting interactive
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citizen-members. When a new cause (or tactic) arises, activists envisage opening a
national office and managing association-building as well as national projects from the
center. Even a group aiming to speak for large numbers of Americans does not
absolutely need members. And if mass adherents are recruited through the mail, why
hold meetings? From a managerial point of view, interactions with groups of members
may be downright inefficient. In the old-time membership federations, annual elections
of leaders and a modicum of representative governance went hand in hand with
membership dues and interactive meetings. But for the professional executivesof
today’s advocacy organizations, direct mail members can be more appealing because,
as Kenneth Godwin and Robert Cameron Mitchell explain, “they contribute without
‘meddling’” and “do not take part in leadership selection or policy discussions.” This
does not mean the new advocacy groups are malevolent; they are just responding
rationally to the environment in which they find themselves.
ASSOCIATIONAL CHANGE AND DEMOCRACY
This brings us, finally, to what may be the most civically consequential change in
late-twentieth-century America: the rise of a very large, highly educated upper middle
class in which “expert” professionals are prominent along with businesspeople and
managers. When U.S. professionals were a tiny, geographically dispersed stratum, they
understood themselves as “trustees of community,” in the terminology of Stephen Brint.
Working closely with and for nonprofessional fellow citizens in thousands of towns and
cities, lawyers, doctors, ministers, and teachers once found it quite natural to join—and
eventually help to lead—locally rooted, cross-class voluntary associations. But today’s
professionals are more likely to see themselves as expert individuals who can best
contribute to national well-being by working with other specialists to tackle complex
technical or social problems.
Cause-oriented advocacy groups offer busy, privileged Americans a rich menu of
opportunities to, in effect, hire other professionals and managers to represent their
values and interests in public life. Why should highly trained and economically well-off
elites spend years working their way up the leadership ladders of traditional
membership federations when they can take leading staff roles at the top, or express
their preferences by writing a check?
If America has experienced a great civic transformation from membership to
advocacy—so what? Most traditional associations were racially exclusive and gender
segregated; and their policy efforts were not always broad-minded. More than a few
observers suggest that recent civic reorganizations may be for the best. American
public life has been rejuvenated, say the optimists, by social movements and advocacy
groups fighting for social rights and an enlarged understanding of the public good.
Local community organizations, neighborhood groups, and grassroots protest
movements nowadays tap popular energies and involve people otherwise left out of
organized politics. And social interchanges live on in small support groups and
occasional volunteering. According to the research of Robert Wuthnow, about 75 million
men and women, a remarkable 40 percent of the adult population, report taking part
in “a small group that meets regularly and provides caring and support for those who
participate in it.” Wuthnow estimates that there may be some 3 million such groups,
including Bible study groups, 12-step self-help groups, book discussion clubs, singles
groups, hobby groups, and disease support groups. Individuals find community, spiritual
connection, introspection, and personal gratification in small support groups. Meanwhile,
people reach out through volunteering. As many as half of all Americans give time to
the community this way, their efforts often coordinated by paid social service
professionals. Contemporary volunteering can be intermittent and flexibly structured, an
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intense one-shot effort or spending “an evening a week on an activity for a few months
as time permits, rather than having to make a long-term commitment to an
organization.”
In the optimistic view, the good civic things Americans once did are still being
done—in new ways and in new settings. But if we look at U.S. democracy in its
entirety and bring issues of power and social leverage to the fore, then optimists are
surely overlooking the downsides of our recently reorganized civic life. Too many
valuable aspects of the old civic America are not being reproduced or reinvented in the
new public world of memberless organizations.
Despite the multiplicity of voices raised within it, American’s new civic universe is
remarkably oligarchical. Because today’s advocacy groups are staff-heavy and focused
on lobbying, research, and media projects, they are managed from the top with few
opportunities for member leverage from below. Even when they have hundreds of
thousands of adherents, contemporary associations are heavily tilted toward
upper-middle-class constituencies. Whether we are talking about memberless advocacy
groups, advocacy groups with some chapters, mailing-list associations, or nonprofit
institutions, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the wealthiest and best-educated
Americans are much more privileged in the new civic world than their (less numerous)
counterparts were in the pre-1960s civic world of cross-class membership federations.
Mostly, they involve people in “doing for” others—feeding the needy at a church
soup kitchen; tutoring children at an after-school clinic; or guiding visitors at a museum
exhibit—rather than in “doing with” fellow citizens. Important as such volunteering may
be, it cannot substitute for the central citizenship functions that membership federations
performed.
A top-heavy civic world not only encourages “doing for” rather than “doing with.” It
also distorts national politics and public policymaking. Imagine for a moment what
might have happened if the GI Bill of 1944 had been debated and legislated in a civic
world configured more like the one that prevailed during the 1993-1994 debates over
the national health insurance proposal put forward by the first administration of
President Bill Clinton. This is not an entirely fanciful comparison, because goals
supported by the vast majority of Americans were at issue in both periods: in the
1940s, care and opportunity for millions of military veterans returning from World War
II; in the 1990s, access for all Americans to a modicum of health insurance coverage.
Back in the 1940s, moreover, there were elite actors—university presidents, liberal
intellectuals, and conservative congressmen—who could have condemned the GI Bill
to the same fate as the 1990s health security plan. University presidents and liberal
New Dealers initially favored versions of the GI Bill that would have been
bureaucratically complicated, niggardly with public expenditures, and extraordinarily
limited in veterans’ access to subsidized higher education.
But in the actual civic circumstances of the 1940s, elites did not retain control of
public debates or legislative initiatives. Instead, a vast voluntary membership federation,
the American Legion, stepped in and drafted a bill to guarantee every one of the
returning veterans up to four years of post-high school education, along with family and
employment benefits, business loans, and home mortgages. Not only did the Legion
draft one of the most generous pieces of social legislation in American history,
thousands of local Legion posts and dozens of state organizations mounted a massive
public education and lobbying campaign to ensure that even conservative
congressional representatives would vote for the new legislation.
Half a century later, the 1990s health security episode played out in a transformed
civic universe dominated by advocacy groups, pollsters, and bigmoney media
campaigns. Top-heavy advocacy groups did not mobilize mass support for a sensible
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reform plan. Hundreds of business and professional groups influenced the Clinton
administration’s complex policy schemes, and then used a combination of
congressional lobbying and media campaigns to block new legislation. Both the artificial
polarization and the elitism of today’s organized civic universe may help to explain why
increasing numbers of Americans are turned off by and pulling back from public life.
Large majorities say that wealthy “special interests” dominate the federal government,
and many Americans express cynicism about the chances for regular people to make
a difference. People may be entertained by advocacy clashes on television, but they
are also ignoring many public debates and withdrawing into privatism. Voting less and
less, American citizens increasingly act—and claim to feel—like mere spectators in a
policy where all the significant action seems to go on above their heads, with their
views ignored by pundits and clashing partisans.
From the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, American democracy
flourished within a unique matrix of state and society. Not only was America the
world’s first manhood democracy and the first nation in the world to establish mass
public education. It also had a uniquely balanced civic life, in which markets expanded
but could not subsume civil society, in which governments at multiple levels
deliberately and indirectly encouraged federated voluntary associations. National elites
had to pay attention to the values and interests of millions of ordinary Americans.
Over the past third of a century, the old civic America has been bypassed and
shoved to the side by a gaggle of professionally dominated advocacy groups and
nonprofit institutions rarely attached to memberships worthy of the name. Ideals of
shared citizenship and possibilities for democratic leverage have been compromised in
the process. Since the 1960s, many good things have happened in America. New
voices are now heard, and there have been invaluable gains in equality and liberty. But
vital links in the nation’s associational life have frayed, and we may need to find
creative ways to repair those links if America is to avoid becoming a country of
detached spectators. There is no going back to the civic world we have lost. But we
Americans can and should look for ways to recreate the best of our civic past in new
forms suited to a renewed democratic future.
ADDED MATERIAL
DAVE CUTLER