Introduction to Section I

Where, why, and when does citizen participation have the legitimating impact that Tocqueville posited? The introduction stressed that the Tocqueville/Putnam theory seems more affected by context than has been previously recognized. The next chapters explore how contexts shift participation effects. Kim leads off with an examination of the United States and South Korea, comparing effects of voluntary associational participation in each society. His dramatic findings are that citizens participating more report more civic trust in the United States, but not in Korea (using national samples of citizens surveyed in each country). But why? Americans, he suggests, join associations in a more open manner, based on their beliefs and/or hobbies and are therefore more often exposed to people different from themselves. By contrast in Korea, associational participation is more often restricted to family ties, alumni groups, hometown, and the like. In the Korean context, participation can have no impact on trust or lead in the opposite direction to the Tocqueville/Putnam model, producing individuals who are more segmented in their social relationships and less civic minded. Extending this work, Kim has elsewhere established similar inconsistencies with Tocqueville across some 38 countries.