Everett Carll Ladd Jr., a social scientist who for years directed the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, died Wednesday at a Connecticut hospital after a brief illness.
The 62-year-old polling expert had led the Roper Center for the past two decades and was chiefly responsible for its rise as the world's richest archive of public opinion research.
The center now collects poll results from more than 14,000 surveys and under Ladd's leadership launched the first online archive of polls conducted in the United States and abroad.
Ladd emphasized the importance of preserving poll research "so that for generations to come, social science would have the benefit of studying the public's voice--something so valued in a democracy," said Lois Timms-Ferrara, associate director of the Roper Center, which is based at the University of Connecticut.
She called Ladd a philosopher in the world of public opinion and policy who always sought to make "the public voice" better understood.
That objective informs his book, "The Ladd Report," published earlier this year. Analyzing an amalgam of research on American society, he directly challenged the provocative thesis of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam that Americans were disengaging from civic life or, to use the metaphor he coined, "bowling alone."
Putnam had cited declining membership in such groups as the Elks, the PTA and the League of Women Voters as evidence that America's civic impulse was waning. He made this argument in a 1995 essay in the Journal of Democracy titled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital." Putnam's theory was hugely influential, becoming, as one writer observed, "the social science equivalent of the theory of relativity."
While acknowledging that the ranks of some institutions were thinning, Ladd argued that Putnam had missed something important: an explosion of newer types of groups that appealed more strongly to contemporary tastes.
"The Elks and the Boy Scouts are less prominent and active now than they were half a century ago," Ladd wrote, "but the Sierra Club is much more so. Bowling leagues are down, but U.S. youth soccer has emerged de novo and engages more than 2 million boys and girls, together with an army of adult volunteers."
Joining, he concluded, "has in fact become more widespread, not less so."
