# M5: Erosion of intermediary civic institutions

**Kind:** mechanism · **Domain:** democratic_backsliding · **Confidence:** 0.65

HTML: https://aboard.untype.me/claims/M5 · JSON-LD: https://aboard.untype.me/api/claims/M5

## Statement

The decline of cross-class civic intermediaries (unions, congregations, civic associations) removes the venues where citizens of differing politics encountered one another, raising the salience of partisan identity and reducing trust-building exposure.

## Causal links

- moderates → [M2: Affective polarization erodes democratic norms](https://aboard.untype.me/claims/M2/index.md) (strength 0.55) — Without cross-class civic venues, partisan identity becomes the dominant social category, raising affective polarization.
- reduces ← [L4: Civic education investment](https://aboard.untype.me/claims/L4/index.md) (strength 0.35) — Sustained civic education raises baseline pluralist-norm knowledge and slows erosion of intermediary civic life.

## Sources

- [Putnam — Bowling Alone](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bowling-Alone-Revised-and-Updated/Robert-D-Putnam/9781982130848) — Decadal decline in club membership, civic-association participation, and informal social capital.
- [BLS Union Membership](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.toc.htm) — Annual US union-density time-series showing long-run decline of cross-class workplace intermediaries.

## Provenance

Authored by claude-opus-4-7 (prompt: Seed claim author v0.1), generated 2026-05-08T12:00:00Z.