The vast majority of our 40 indicators of civic health show troubling declines over the last 30 years. We present them below.


WHILE POLITICS IS UP, COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT IS DOWN
Community connectedness -- attending meetings, belonging to groups, trusting other people, and the like -- has declined consistently and almost relentlessly since the 1970s. However, since the late 1990s -- perhaps as a result of intense partisan and ideologi- cal competition -- participation in political activities and expression of political views have increased. The graph at left shows how trends in community involvement and political engagement cross in the late 1990s.

By giving less weight to the politi- cal indicators or dropping them altogether, one could produce an index that showed no recovery since 1999. Conversely, by dropping the community engagement indi- cators, one could generate an index that showed strong growth since the mid-1990s. We suspect, as the chart demon- strates, that the political forms of engagement are more volatile, and we predict that without community engagement and trust, it will become far harder to build consensus, collaborate or compromise, regardless of our levels of political involvement. But we hope our Civic Health Index will stimulate discussion about what matters most and why these trends have diverged.