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Between 1960 and 1990, the total number of US national associations quadrupled. Professional advocacy groups proliferated, lobbying and litigating for social change in Washington, D.C.—at the expense, some say, of broadbased engagement through traditional civic membership organizations. “Our findings tell a different story,” says Edward Walker, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “At the same time that you saw those nonmembership organizations expanding, you also saw major expansions of membership organizations.”
Looking at the public affairs listings in the Encyclopedia of Associations from 1965 to 1997, Walker and colleagues concluded that advocacy organizations without members—think tanks, foundations, and public law groups, for example—have not displaced those with members.
The Children’s Defense Fund, Earthjustice, and the Southern Poverty Law Center launched in the 1970s, but so did member-based advocacy groups such as the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. “The proportion of nonmembership organizations relative to membership organizations has been relatively stable,” Walker says.
Walker says the two kinds of organizations support rather than compete with each other. The more membership organizations there are in a field, the more nonmembership ones are founded. Member-driven and professional advocacy groups serve the complementary functions of demonstrating popular support and providing expert knowledge. Some professional advocacy groups, like the Industrial Areas Foundation, exist to support broad-based organizing.
But even if membership associations are going strong, “membership” is not what it used to be. Groups like Common Cause, Amnesty International, and NARAL don’t necessarily involve their members in broad-based organizational life the way the classic fellowship associations once did. “Traditional American membership associations, such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the American Legion, and the Fraternal Order of Eagles, had local chapters with face-to-face meetings, they collected dues, they checked off whether each person paid their dues monthly,” says Theda Skocpol, professor of government and sociology at Harvard University. “And that’s not the same as sending out a mailing list to several hundred thousand people shrieking that the environment is being endangered and asking you to send in a contribution.”
Civic engagement is more than writing a check. Without the structure of the fellowship associations, “we lose bridges between educated and well-to-do people and their fellow citizens, and we lose all kinds of ways for people to learn to be active citizens—what it means to pay dues, how to keep records, how to run meetings, what it means to send a delegate to a higher level,” says Skocpol. Walker acknowledges that the meaning of membership is changing. “The old federated groups clearly brought together people from lots of different social class backgrounds,” he says. “They aren’t the polarized, single-issue membership groups that are playing such a large role today.”
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.