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First published in 1976, Political Behaviour provides a systematic introduction to the methods and findings of the behav

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Political Behaviour [1 ed.]
 9781040358429, 9781041027331, 9781003620792, 9781041027355

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Part 1: Concepts and Theories
1 Political Behaviour: Definitions and Methods
2 Schools of Behavioural Analysis
Part 2: Political Culture
3 The Idea of Political Culture
4 The Good Citizen
5 Aspects of Toleration
6 The Hierarchy of Politics
7 Political Socialization: Games Politicians Play
8 Judicial Behaviour
Part 3: Local Politics
9 The Study of Local Politics
10 Local Politics: Electors and Governors
11 Local Politicians: Ambitions and Motivation
12 Social Structure and Community Power
13 Decision-Making in Local Politics
Part 4: Voting Behaviour
14 The Study of Political Generations
15 Class and Politics
16 The Influence of Social Groups
17 Ideology, Issues and the Voter
18 Political Communication
19 The Floating Voter
Conclusion
Suggested Further Reading
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Routledge Revivals

Political Behaviour

First published in 1976, Political Behaviour provides a systematic introduction to the methods and findings of the behavioural approach to the study of politics. Howard Elcock describes the subject matter of political sociology and the methodological problems to which it gives rise. He examines the behaviouralist’s claim to scientific status as an observer of society using precise techniques of measurement and research. Throughout, the discussion of theory is accompanied by the empirical data that will allow the student to evaluate issues and arguments for himself. The author considers general concepts such as political culture, socialization, participation, power and authority as well as the areas of politics to which sociological students of the subject have contributed most- the stability of political regimes, the process of political socialization, power and influence in local authorities and electoral behaviour. This book will be immensely helpful for the students of political science and political sociology.

Political Behaviour

Howard Elcock

First published in 1976 by Methuen & Co Ltd. This edition first published in 2025 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1976 Howard Elcock All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under ISBN: 0416817904 ISBN: 978-1-041-02733-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-62079-2 (ebk) ISBN: 978-1-041-02735-5 (pbk) Book DOI 10.4324/9781003620792

Political Behaviour

Howard Elcock

Methuen & Co Ltd

First published in 1976 by Methuen & Co Ltd 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE ©1976 Howard Elcock Photoset by Red Lion Setters, London, and Printed in Great Britain by offset lithography by Billing & Sons Ltd, Guildford, London and Worcester ISBN (hardbound) ISBN (paperback)

0 416 81790 4 0 416 81800 5

This title is available in both hardbound and paperback editions. The paperback edition is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents Acknowledgements Preface

vi

vii

Part 1: Concepts and theories 1

1 Political behaviour: definitions and methods 2 Schools of behavioural analysis 25

Part 2: Political culture 39

3 The idea of political culture 41

4 The good citizen 58

5 Aspects of toleration 74

6 The hierarchy of politics 91

7 Political socialization: games politicians play 8 Judicial behaviour 125

3

109

Part 3: Local politics 137

9 The study of local politics 139

10 Local politics: electors and governors 157

11 Local politicians: ambitions and motivation 171

12 Social structure and community power 183

13 Decision-making in local politics 200

Part 4: Voting behaviour 215

14 The study of political generations 217

15 Class and politics 231

16 The influence of social groups 248

17 Ideology, issues and the voter 263

18 Political communication 276

19 The floating voter 291

Conclusion

305

Suggested further reading Notes

317

Index

334

310

A cknowledgements The Author and Publishers are indebted to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: the Cambridge University Press, Messrs. Barrie and Jenkins, Ltd., William Heinemann, Ltd., Macmillan and Co., Ltd. (London), the Macmillan Publishing Co. (New York), the Princeton University Press, Messrs. John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., and Dr Robert Baxter.

Preface

A textbook is primarily a teaching aid, and in writing this one I have sought to achieve three objects. First, the book should give the reader an impression of the extent of the subject he is studying; all relevant schools of thought should at least receive a mention and the major factual material covered by scholars should be considered. Secondly, the main themes and most important research projects should be described, and finally the book should seek to stimulate discussion and debate among those who use it. I have not, theiefore, hesitated to allow my own judgements and opinions to influence what follows and while, for example, some may feel that I have treated systems analysis and management science in a cavalier fashion (since in my view their practitioners have contributed little to our empirical understanding of political activity), those who practise these arts or are enthusiastic for them have their chance, in using this book, to challenge my view. I make no apologies, therefore, for the controversial judgements con­ tained in what follows. A textbook must inevitably be mainly an account and an assessment of other people's ideas and researches and there are many authors to whom I owe large debts; these are acknowledged in the footnotes. But at times there are opportunities to present one's own ideas and unpublished research, or that of colleagues, especially when published material does not answer fully the questions raised by a particular political event or phenomenon. Such opportunities arise all the more frequently when a particular approach to politics is still in its youth, and at several points I have taken advantage of them to discuss ideas or information of my own. In the course of such an enterprise as this one acquires many debts of gratitude, but I would like particularly to acknowledge

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the debt I owe to Dr David Butler, who in his seminars at Nuffield College, Oxford, not only increased my knowledge of and interest in British politics and government but also conveyed to me his enthusiasm for the behavioural approach to the study of politics. My tutor at The Queen's College, Geoffrey Marshall, encouraged me to preserve a sceptical attitude to such new approaches, which I trust I have to some extent retained. My old friend Robert Baxter has been the source of much encouragement and many ideas, and Part III in particular owes much to him. My colleagues in the Department of Politics at the University of Hull have contributed much, listening to my ideas and offering constructive criticisms. Above all I am indebted to successive groups of students to whom I have taught Political Behaviour; they have helped me over the years to mature and develop the ideas and material contained in this book. For the mistakes and blemishes which inevitably remain, I am alone responsible. Hull, 1974-75

HOWARD ELCOCK

Note I have suggested further reading for each chapter at the end of the book (p.310), the items being listed in the order which seems to me from their importance and subject matter to be the most logical, rather than alphabetically. H.E.

part 1

Concepts and theories

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-1

Chapter I Political behaviour: definitions and methods Under the influence of the linguistic philosophers, it has become almost a requirement that writers on politics should devote a good deal of their time and space to defining their terms before coming to the substance of their arguments; indeed, some writers seem to spend most of their time defining their terms. It is not our intention here to engage in a lengthy philosophical debate on the meaning of the words 'politics' and 'behaviour', or to consider at great length problems such as the nature of reality or the meaning of statements of causation, even though we shall touch on these matters, but rather to develop a working definition of our terms; to see what writers on politics have meant by the words 'politics' and 'behaviour' and to produce definitions which will be useful in the discussion of studies in particular fields and aspects of politics that follow, and to look at the implications of the methods employed by behavioural students of politics. What is proposed here is a character sketch of politics and behaviouralism,[l] rather than a detailed portrait showing every wrinkle, as it were, and proof against all philosophical objection. We shall then consider some of the problems which arise from the activity of the behaviouralists in the field of political science. Politics The nature of political activity has been the subject of interminable debate, which has never resulted in a universally acceptable definition of the term but has elucidated certain of its characteristics; these have assumed considerable importance for behavioural and other students of politics. It is the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-2

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characteristics most relevant to the behaviouralists' work that we shall consider here. Such a discussion will also give the present author a chance to nail his colours to the mast, as it were; to state his own position in order that later statements of opinion shall not be confused with statements of fact. It will become apparent that such an action is both within the behavioural tradition and essential to a full understanding of it. Men have to develop some method by which they can resolve disputes among themselves and agree upon goals which they wish to pursue by co-operative action. The existence of a common procedure for resolving disputes and reaching common decisions is an important requirement for every community; indeed, J.R. Lucas has argued that the existence of such a decision procedure is the proper basis for the definition of a community. Thus two people journeying together who agree on a common destination or route constitute a community, as does a married couple, because they must have some way of settling disputes — e.g. that in the last resort the husband shall decide, as laid down in the 1662 Prayer Book, or that in the last resort the wife shall decide, as in America — so that they may stick together and not drift apart or break up like couples engaged in some passing love affair.[2] Such agreements can be reached in several ways: by surrender­ ing the right to decide to one person — the tallest, the strongest, the best orator, and so forth — or by fighting to determine whose will shall prevail. The former might be called the dictatorial decision procedure. An alternative is to have an open debate among the citizens, at the end of which a decision shall be reached either by arriving at an agreed view, a consensus, or by accepting the decision that commands majority support. In different situations involving different sorts of issues one may wish to insist on a unanimous vote or approval by more than a simple majority; very often, for example, the rules of a club can only be changed by a two-thirds or three-quarters majority, whereas a decision to demolish and rebuild the clubhouse can be taken by simple majority. A variation upon this decision procedure is for the

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general populace, the people of a country or the members of a club, to elect representatives — a parliament or a committee, who take decisions for them, and hold them periodically accountable for their decisions by requiring the committee or parliament to submit to re-election at more or less regular intervals. Decision procedures of this broad type might be called political decision procedures and contrasted with judicial procedures where the parties to a dispute place their arguments and their evidence before a disinterested third party or group of such third parties, asking him or them to decide an issue on the basis of the arguments and evidence set before them. Of course, these last two decision procedures, the political and the judicial, may, and indeed usually do, co-exist, and may overlap, as when the American Supreme Court declares an Act of Congress to be unconstitutional; here the judges overrule the result of the political decision procedure. Essentially, however, they are separate procedures with different methods of resolving the disputes brought to them and arriving at the decisions asked of them. A political decision procedure, then, is a procedure involving discussion and debate followed by a decision which is broadly acceptable to all the parties, or is at least not so unacceptable to any party that its members decide to oppose it to the point of disrupting the system. J.D.B. Miller has said that 'politics, to be distinguished as a recognizable activity, demands some initial disagreement between parties or persons, and the presence of government as a means of resolving the disagreement in some direction*. [3] Bernard Crick has gone further: Politics ... can be simply defined as the activity by which differing interests within a given unit of rule are conciliated by giving them a share in power in proportion to their importance to the welfare and the survival of the whole community. And, to complete the formal definition, a political system is that type of government where politics proves successful in ensuring reasonable stability and order. [4] Crick's definition has been criticized because it appears to restrict the use of the word 'politics' artificially to liberal

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democratic societies, but unless some such restriction is placed on its use the word becomes meaningless. Without presuming to offer a firm and immutable definition of politics, we will find it useful for our purpose to take a political system to be one in which the members of society give expression to their interests and receive satisfaction in a way which ensures that, in the long term, no one interest gains satisfaction to the exclusion of any other; all must get something sometimes if the system is to survive and prosper. Such a society can exist only in certain circumstances: most of the population must accept that their fellows' existence and desires are legitimate and deserving of satisfaction, to some extent at least, and no one fraction of the population must be in a position permanently to expropriate the values and goods which the society has to distribute. Thus a system like the Stormont regime in Northern Ireland, under which the Unionist Party, represent­ ing the Protestant majority, was able to hold a monopoly of governmental power to the exclusion of the Roman Catholic minority, was not politics but its negation, a collective dictatorship in which a large part of the population could have no say in the affairs of the community [5]. The result has been periodic outbreaks of violence between the dominant interest, the Protestants, and the excluded interest, the Catholics. Second, it must be possible to give free expression to whatever opinions members of the society may hold, and to put forward whatever arguments they choose in an attempt to win the majority over to their point of view. With the circumstances in which these and other conditions for successful politics can exist the behaviouralists have been greatly concerned. Another aspect of political activity which has come to have very considerable relevance for the behaviouralist is the view that a country's decision procedures are evolved over centuries and become that community's traditional methods for resolving disputes and arriving at common decisions. Such a view has been advanced chiefly by conservative political thinkers, such as Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century[6] and Michael Oakeshott in modern times, [7] and it is arguable that this is their most important contribution to our understanding of what politics is. For these thinkers the

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overriding political goal is to ensure peace and survival; to use politics in an attempt to achieve an ideal way of living is to use it improperly and such an attempt may end up by disrupting the whole society, as Burke argued had happened in France after 1789. Oakeshott has summed up this view of politics in an often quoted metaphor: In political activity ... men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for refuge nor floor for anchor­ age, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion. [8] Societies have developed the means of survival in the past, and can only continue to survive by using the means handed down by those who governed them successfully in the past. If improvements or alterations are to be made, these must be compatible with the tradition and must be made gradually, by partial modifications of the decision procedure. Each community develops its own ways of distributing the available goods, services and values among its members, of resolving disputes among them and making common decisions; this is its political tradition from which it cannot escape without bringing about its own destruction. Politics 'springs neither from instant desires, nor from general principles, but from existing traditions of behaviour themselves*, Oakeshott writes; 'and the form it takes, because it can take no other, is the amendment of existing arrangements by exploring and pursuing what is intimated in them1. [9] Radical and all-embracing political change is thus impossible; indeed, it is a recipe for disaster. From this view of politics as a tradition arises a problem which is of central importance and of great interest to the behaviouralists: that of how people learn to operate their politics, how they find their place in the political system; in short, how men learn to 'do polities'. The answer provided by the conservative thinkers is again of great significance: politics can be learnt only by apprenticeship; by standing by one's elders and learning by example and practice. One cannot

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learn politics from a book, says Oakeshott, any more than one can learn cookery in this way; a cookery book assumes a knowledge of how to cook: 'The book ... may help to set a man to dressing a dinner, but if it were his sole guide he could never, in fact, begin; the book speaks only to those who know the kind of thing to expect from it, and consequently how to interpret it.'[10] Similarly in politics, 'long before we are of an age to take interest in a book about politics we are acquiring that complex and intimate knowledge of our political tradition without which we could not make sense of a book when we come to open it. And the projects we entertain are the creatures of our traditional 1] Hence those who would become involved in political activity must be trained virtually from birth in the traditional ways of doing things in politics. At an early stage we learn of the political cosmos and discover our place in it; we learn how to perform our roles by watching our elders. This process is of great interest to the behaviouralists, who call it political socialization, and they have devoted much time and energy to its study. Hence our working definition of politics contains two elements. First, it is a means of resolving disputes and making decisions which is based on free debate followed by an act of granting consent, by majority vote or other means, to the action proposed as a result of the debate. It is only one among several possible decision procedures, though one may feel that it is the decision procedure allowing the greatest scope for individuals to realize their desires and ambitions, and it can only survive and flourish given certain conditions. Second, a community's politics are the product of its history; it is a tradition which must be learnt by all who are entitled to participate in it, and in a political society that must mean every inhabitant except infants and the incurably insane. The social tradition will also restrict the behavioural student of politics in terms of the forms of political activity he is allowed to investigate. Since regimes other than liberal democracies are unlikely to allow him to operate within their boundaries lest his activities or his conclusions prove to be subversive,[12] the behaviouralist is largely restricted to observing liberal democratic polities. We may add that this reduces the danger which might otherwise arise from our

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adoption of the working definition of politics we proposed earlier, that it might unduly restrict the subject matter of our study. Since behaviouralist students of politics have of necessity been largely concerned with liberal democracies, little harm can come of restricting our study of the behaviouralists largely to the liberal democratic context so long as we are conscious of having done so. Our definition is intended simply as a tool fashioned for the task currently in hand, and no more. The behavioural study of politics We shall begin the second part of our task of defining our terms by considering the reasons why behaviouralism has developed in political science. One reason, of course, has been the growth of other social sciences, notably sociology and psychology, from both of which the behaviouralists have borrowed concepts and techniques, but the chief reason has been a reaction against the traditional approaches to the study of politics: the legalistic study of formal political institutions, on the one hand, and normative and speculative political theory on the other. Taking political institutions first, these were traditionally studied by examining the content of a country's constitution, its statute book and common law, and interpreting them, rather than by a consideration of how political actors conduct themselves in the context of the law and the Constitution. The student of politics was also concerned with the powers of the Cabinet, the electoral system, the formal structure of political parties and so forth; if the conduct of individuals was mentioned it would be in a descriptive, historical manner, giving accounts of how particular prime ministers conducted their cabinets, for example, with little or no attempt systematically to relate the instances one to another. By contrast, the behaviouralists, among others, argue that the student of politics should concern himself with what actually happens and how people carry on their political activities; thus it is pointless to examine the constitutional convention of ministerial responsibility without looking at the effect it has on ministers and civil servants — who makes decisions, what the relationship is between a minister and his civil service advisers,

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and what actually happens when a minister or his department is found to be at fault — rather than looking at what the law or the conventions of the Constitution say these relationships should be or what should happen. In doing this, individual cases should be systematically aggregated in order that generaliza­ tions may be made about the behaviour of the people concerned. A frequent conclusion drawn by the behaviouralists is that appearance does not necessarily bear much relationship to reality; that what matters are individual attitudes and informal relationships rather than the formal structure of powers and duties. In this, the findings of behavioural political scientists are akin to those of the 'human relations' school of management studies whose practitioners found that the most important influences upon workers were their interpersonal relationships both among themselves and with their superiors, not the formal structure of authority in the factory.[13] It is necessary, both in the study of industrial management and in the study of politics, to probe beyond the formal institutions to the informal network of human attitudes and relationships existing within the context of the institution. Hence the growth of the behavioural study of politics was in part a reaction against the domination of political science by teachers and writers whose training and methods were predominantly legal and historical. It was also a reaction against traditional political theory. The great writers of the past were concerned to set ideals and goals towards which men should strive in politics, on the basis of speculation about human nature and relationships. The social contract theorists, for example, derived prescriptions about the government of men from an imaginary occasion in the distant past when men came together and agreed to submit themselves to government for their mutual protection; from this anthropological myth, that governmental authority is based upon a contractual relationships between government and subject agreed to at a specific point in time, these theorists, such as Hobbes and Locke, derived statements about how governments should behave, for example that they should not invade the privacy or property of citizens except in certain exceptional circumstances. Rousseau argued that since men

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were naturally free, the ideal state was one in which all court play a part in making decisions; the General Will of the people would emerge only if all took part, as individuals, in the debates in the Assembly. The Utilitarians grounded their prescriptions on their assumption that what influenced men was the increase of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. On a grander scale, Hegel and Marx based their theories on an interpretation of historical progress and pointed to the ideal state to which that progress would ultimately lead humanity. These classics of political theory have two features in common: they seek to present goals or ideals, and their arguments are not based upon factual premises except, in some cases, to a very limited extent. All this is not to say that such theories are not important and valuable, but rather that they are not related in any systematic way to reality; typically they have been the work of men ensconced in a study, or the Reading Room of the British Museum, or living apart on an island in a Swiss lake. The behaviouralists, by contrast, wanted to discover how people carry on their political activity, whatever the formal rules of the Constitution and the law might say, and they sought to do so by looking for objective and indisputable facts which could be analysed systematically. For a behaviouralist, facts are objective and verifiable by anyone who wishes to check them; there is no question of reality being determined by the observer's viewpoint or ideology, as there would be for a Marxist or an Idealist. The philosophical tradition with which the behaviouralists identify themselves is the empirical school whose originator was David Hume, and whose modern exponents are the logical positivists. Thus a prominent American behaviouralist, Robert Presthus, has written that One of behaviouralism's basic characteristics is the accep­ tance of logical positivism as an epistemological system. Facts, publicly verifiable and sensually perceived, are regarded as the only valid basis of truth or reality. Values are seen differently as normative preferences whose validity is not subject to scientific proof. Behaviouralism is properly identified with empiricism, by which I mean a temperamen­ tal and methodological affinity for aggregate factual data and field research. [14]

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There is a difference between facts and values not only in the sense that there is an external, observable world perception which is unaffected by the observer's ideological, normative or social viewpoint, but also in that statements of fact and statements of value must be assessed in entirely different ways. Statements about reality must be based on observation, as Sir Alfred Ayer has argued: ... it is only by the occurrence of some sense-content, and consequently by the truth of some observation, that any statement about a material thing is actually verified; and from this it follows that every significant statement about a material thing can be represented as entailing a disjunction of observation statements.[15] The only other kind of statement whose truth can be assessed is an analytic proposition which is assessed in terms of the rules of logic. Analytical statements are meaningful or senseless; synthetic propositions are verified or falsified by observation. Statements of value, by contrast, are simply expressions of the personal preferences of the speaker, since they can be assessed neither by appeal to logic nor by observation; in a later essay Ayer comments upon the status of moral judgements as follows: Why should I value human happiness? Why should I be swayed by my pastors and masters? Why should I attach such great importance just to these experiences? In the end there must come a point where one gets no further answer, but only a repetition of the injunction: Value this because it is valuable.[16] Ayer's chief concern in Language, Truth and Logic was to dispel metaphysics; reality and human behaviour are observable and external, and morals and norms are merely subjective preferences bearing no relation to the world of fact. Such a view of meaning and observation is axiomatic for the behavioural student of politics, as it is for his distant cousin, the behaviourist psychologist. When Pavlov conducted his famous experiment of ringing a bell whenever he fed his dogs, and showed that after a time the dogs' mouths watered when the bell was rung even when no food was in evidence, he demonstrated, among other things, that one could understand

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the learning process of the mind by means of a study of external, observable behaviour. Similarly, the behavioural political scientist will seek the explanation of a political phenomenon, such as the tendency of many voters to support the same party at every election in which they take part, by seeking observable links with other characteristics, such as attitudes, social status, occupation or religion. This he does by obtaining the relevant information on a systematic basis and then determining which characteristics are meaningfully correlated, often with the aid of a computer. The work of behavioural students of politics tends to be ahistorical. They are concerned with political activity which is currently available for observation and are interested in the past only if there is precise data available about it for the purpose of comparison; otherwise conclusions about the past are not verifiable in a way which will satisfy the behaviouralist, who is concerned with examining systematically a real and observable world which others — his colleagues, his readers and his critics — can examine for themselves in order to confirm or refute his conclusions. The difference between behavioural and other students of politics in terms of their outlook and methods can be summed up by an apocryphal story of a meeting between the late C. Wright Mills and an eminent behavioural student of, among other things, the voting habits of Americans, Paul Lazarfeld. Mills is supposed to have opened the conversation by quoting the first sentence of his book, The Sociological Imagination: 'Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps.* Lazarfeld replied: 'How many men, which men, how long have they felt this way, which aspects of their private lives bother them, when do they feel free rather than trapped, what kind of traps do they experience, etc., etc.?* Behaviouralists are concerned with questions the answers to which are quantitative and precise; the study of politics must be reduced to questions: 'how many?*, 'which?*, 'how much?*. Before we consider in more detail the methods by which the behaviouralists obtain their information, it should be said that although behaviouralism in political science developed as a reaction against older ways of studying politics, it can and often does coexist with them; indeed, other methods may help

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the student to make sense of the findings of a series of inter­ views or a sample survey, the characteristically behavioural methods. Thus when David Butler and Donald Stokes discovered that Conservative voting among the working class was heavily concentrated in the older generations in their sample, they referred to history for an explanation; the Labour Party's rise is a comparatively recent phenomenon, too recent, in fact, for these people to have been able to recognize it as a major party when their opinions were being formed. [17] Again, Robert Dahl sets his study of the decision-making process in New Haven, Connecticut, in the context of an account of the town's history since the American War of Independence. [18] Such work is not itself behavioural, but it is valuable in helping the student to elucidate and explain behavioural findings. Methods In order further to understand the nature of the behavioural approach to politics, let us examine some of the methods employed in this approach. A simple method, where the number of individuals is comparatively small, is to relate various attributes of a group of political actors to one another in order to determine the nature of their relationships. In studying the members of political elites, for example, we may determine to what extent they are recruited from various sources; the smaller the number of sources, the more closed the elite. Thomas Lupton and Shirly Wilson used the report of an inquiry into a supposed bank rate leak in 1957 to identify the 'top decision-makers' in British financial and economic affairs; they included Cabinet Ministers, senior civil servants and the directors of banks and City insurance firms. They found, for example, that one-third of the Cabinet ministers and almost half the insurance directors were educated at one school, Eton, and that many of these 'top decision-makers' were related to one another by family or marriage.[19] This was an exercise in tabulating and relating facts, such as family and educational background, about a small group of important figures, the facts being of a kind easily discoverable by the use of such publications as Who's Who and Debrett's Peerage. The

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conclusion the authors* came to was that the British political elite was to a large extent closed, consisting mainly of people with a common social and educational background. There are several features of the method used in this study that are significant in terms of the philosophical foundations of behaviouralism. First, the facts are accessible to any individual; they can be looked up in standard reference publications. Secondly, such a study can be done with any small group of leaders for whom basic information about origins, education and career is available; indeed it is the only kind of systematic study that Western observers can make of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or of that of the People's Republic of China, whereas in Western societies one may be able to supplement one's information, for example, by making inquiries of one's subjects. The conclusion that Cabinet ministers and insurance directors tend to be Old Etonians is one of a probability rather than certainty; not every Cabinet minister or insurance director goes to Eton, but in 1957 a large proportion did and most of the rest went to other public schools. However, both groups may have contained the odd individual who had received only a grammar school education. Lastly, the method produces a study whose findings relate to a specific point in time; at a different time the composition of the elite may be different. For example, the findings about members of the Cabinet relate to a period when a Conservative government was in office; a Labour Cabinet would contain fewer Etonians, though probably more Wykehamists. When a researcher wishes to examine more personal attributes of political actors, he will need to interview his subjects, for instance to determine their attitudes to various politics, issues and events. To do this he will prepare a questionnaire designed to ensure that the* frequency of particular responses can be tabulated and correlated. This at once gives rise to a problem. The subjects may be led* to give certain replies if the range of responses is limited by the questioner; for example, if a group of people were asked who was responsible for a particular decision, and were handed a list of possible candidates, this might inhibit or prevent them from offering names not on the list. On the other hand, if the

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interview is not structured to some extent the answers may prove impossible to compare, especially if they are obtained by a team of interviewers rather than by a single researcher, as will be the case in studies involving more than a small number of subjects. There may be other difficulties as well. If one asks the members of a local Council the question; 'Who runs this town?' one may invite a simple dogmatic answer — 'The mayor', T h e leader of the Labour Group' — where a more qualified and complex answer relating, say, to the specialized fields of the Council's activity may be more accurate. To ask a question which seems to require a simple factual answer raises problems in political science as it does in theology, where the question: 'Who is god's vice-regent on earth?' similarly invites a dogmatic reply: 'The Pope*, 'The Archbishop of Canterbury',­ and so forth.[20] However, a researcher will normally publish his questionnaire as part of his finished work, so that his readers can examine it for possible pitfalls. Not only the facts but also the methods used by behaviouralists are expected to be open to scrutiny. Where a study is to be made of a problem involving large numbers of people, say, the electorate of a country, where millions of people are concerned, it is impossible to interview them all. Hence the best-known weapon in the behaviouralist armoury, the sample survey, has been developed. [21] The survey method involves selecting a number of individuals whose replies to the researcher's questions can be regarded as likely to resemble the replies which the entire relevant group, or population, would give if it were possible to interview them all. In some cases where numbers are small it may indeed be possible to interview all relevant individuals, as in a study of the members of the Cabinet currently holding office, for example, where, the numbers involved would be not more than a couple of dozen at most. Such an exercise, interviewing all relevant individuals, is known as a census; thus the census carried out by the Registrar General every ten years is intended to include every individual resident in Great Britain on a particular day. At the other extreme we could interview one single person, in which case all we could have claimed to discover would be information relating to that individual. The sample survey is a compromise; we cannot interview everyone

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— a census of a country's entire population is an exercise which no academic researcher has either time or resources to contemplate; even the British government essays such an operation only once every decade, and then it uses the sanctions of the criminal law to ensure that everybody answers the census questions. The sample is therefore drawn from the population in such a way that it is statistically overwhelmingly probable that its members' answers will be an accurate representation of the answers the whole population would give if it were possible to ask them. Having obtained this informa­ tion we can examine the most meaningful relationships between particular findings: to put this in statistical language our task is to ascertain the values of the variables and assess the significance of the correlations between them. Once again, the philosophical assumptions underlying the method are empirical. The objective reality to be observed is the sample and hence the responses obtained to the questionnaires. The information is tabulated and the method followed is set out for others to examine. Others can check both methods and calculations, and of course the whole exercise can be repeated. Survey evidence is cumulative, and at the universi­ ties of Michigan, in the United States, and Essex in England, among others, data banks of survey material have been built up which can be drawn upon by researchers for comparable material. In this way, each conductor of a survey may stand on the shoulders, as it were, of his predecessors. When the work is published the data will be presented systematically in the form which establishes the author's arguments and conclusions. The precision of their procedures has led the behavioural students of politics to claim that they are in truth scientists; that their observations and conclusions are as valid and as immutable as those of the scientist experimenting in his laboratory. TKeir impact upon the political scene itself is often regarded as disturbing, for their revelations of the way in which politics 'really' works may discredit the political process itself. It has been argued, for example, that the discovery that very few voters make a rational choice based upon the personalities and policies of the parties or the quality of their election campaigns has discredited the notion of electoral choice essential to representative democracy. These are

18

Political behaviour

important issues which we must consider. Before doing so, however, there is one more point that must be made about the findings of behavioural research. Many of these findings are correlations, statistical relationships between variables; for example, that women are more likely to support right-wing parties than men, that in Britain members of trades unions are considerably more likely to vote Labour than non-unionists, or, to take an example from another discipline, that people who smoke cigarettes are more likely to get cancer of the lung than those who do not. All these correlations have been established by sample survey methods, and such statements must not be confused with statements of cause and effect;the statement that when A happens, B usually happens, is not the same as the statement that A causes B. Membership of trades unions and Labour voting may both be products of other factors, such as being brought up in a slum, going to a particular kind of pub, and working in a large and impersonal factory; in short, our phenomena may both be products of a broader working-class syndrome. Equally, the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer may be the result of other physiological or psychological factors; anxious people may both smoke cigarettes and get lung cancer. This also reveals perhaps the greatest weakness of the behavioural techniques, that they tend to tell us very little, if anything, about the causes of the behaviour they reveal. We can only speculate about causes or turn to other methods, such as those of history or psychology, to find them, though there may be occasions when one can establish that some attitudes are dependent upon others. Nonetheless, the information that the behavioural political scientist can give us about causes as opposed to correlations is very limited, partly because one can only establish a cause after one has discovered a correlation and it is impossible to do this without returning to the subjects, but also because, as we have just seen, the attributes which are correlated may all be effects of a cause our study has not detected at all. This is one reason why it is often dangerous not to combine behavioural techniques with others which will enable us to set our findings in a broader context which will help us to explain them. (See pp. 13-14 above).

Political behaviour

19

A science of politics? Behaviouralists must study politics dispassionately, without regard for the feelings or values of their subjects, or for that matter for their own feelings and values, and their activities are sometimes resented by those involved in political or other activity. One of the behavioural students of the decisions of the American Supreme Court, Glendon A. Schubert, was accused at a conference of reducing respect for the law by sugges­ ting that Supreme Court justices were influenced by their personal attitudes and opinions rather than by statute and precedent. He was accused of making Chief Justice Hughes, who presided over the Court during its abrupt volte face over President Roosevelt's New Deal policies, appear to be an unscrupulous seeker after power rather than a dispassionate and detached interpreter of the law. [22] He and other students of the judiciary in various countries have shown that attitudes towards legal principles such as adherence to precedents may be dependent upon the judges' social and political attitudes and opinions,[23] not a finding calculated to reassure those bringing politically controversial matters to the courts for decision. Robert Presthus argues that such accusations are inevitable and to be expected if the behaviouralist is to stick to his last; to seek the true state of affairs regardless of the official view and to probe beneath formal institutions for the informal relationships that make them work. He says that: Behaviouralism often asks: How do individuals or groups act, as contrasted with institutionalized expectations and conventional assumptions about their behaviour? ... All organizations exhibit a rough dichotomy between their public and their private faces. In sociological terms they have both 'manifest* and 'latent' functions. Manifest or public functions are the official, conventional modes of behaviour and mission which partially motivate an organi­ zation and legitimate its existence. Yet along with these honorific values come latent private values, including the drive for power, security and survival. Behavioural research and theory is often concerned with the latent facet of analysis.

20

Political behaviour

In this sense behaviouralism is revolutionary. It often challenges the Establishment and the ceremonial parapher­ nalia that sustain it. In showing the 'functional' role of official myths it tends to weaken them somewhat.[24] Thus fact and value may come into conflict. The behaviouralist may be criticized for undermining values held by society or its leaders to be important, and it may be regarded as no excuse to point to the facts and say that one could do no other than tell the truth, except among one's behaviouralist colleagues. It is also the case that behavioural research is only undertaken by citizens of countries with tolerant regimes. Despite behaviouralism's attempt at factual objectivity, values always enter in and there are few nowadays who accept Max Weber's belief that ultimately a value-free social science will develop, a belief grounded in too close an assimilation of social with physical science, but one which had considerable currency and influence around the turn of the century. Unacknowledged assumptions can slip in at too many points; in the drafting of a questionnaire or in the selection of personalities to study or interview, apart from the obvious points at which values enter in — the initial decision to undertake a particular study and its design at the beginning, and the interpretation of the data at the end. Once one gets beyond the simplest facts, values are bound to be involved as one seeks a framework for analysis. One is also reluctant to put one's own values on the altar for possible sacrifice. Charles Taylor has therefore concluded that ... the non-neutrality of the theoretical findings of political science need not surprise us. In setting out a given frame­ work, a theorist is also setting out the gamut of possible polities and policies. But a political framework cannot fail to contain some, even implicit, conception of human needs, wants and purposes. The context of this conception will determine the value-slope of the gamut unless we can intro­ duce countervailing considerations ... For instance, we still will believe that having a peaceful polity is a good, even if it results in bad art. But if the countervailing factor is signifi­ cant for political behaviour, then it will lead us to revise

Political behaviour

21

our framework and hence our views about the possible gamut of polities and policies. [25] The findings of behavioural, or other, political studies are bound both to influence and be affected by the values held by the researcher and his subjects. In politics the fact that one is dealing with values is inescapable. In many cases one can go further and say that the purpose of a study is avowedly teleological; that it is intended to further a particular policy or value. American political scientists, for example, have tended to regard themselves as being under an obligation to promote the maintenance and spread of liberal democratic politics by determining the conditions under which such politics can be successfully created, can survive and prosper — a modern American equivalent of the British attempt to export her parliamentary traditions and system to her Imperial possessions. They assume that liberal democracy is, if not the ideal political system, then at least the best available to us and therefore regard it as desirable to assist in its propagation and maintenance. S.M. Lipset, reflecting on the purpose of his book, Political Man, declares that A basic premise of this book is that democracy is not only or even primarily a means through which different groups can attain their ends or seek the good society; it is the good society itself in operation. Only the give-and-take of a free society's internal struggles offers some guarantee that the products of the society will not accumulate in the hands of a few powerholders, and that men may develop and bring up their children without fear of persecution.[26] He goes on to express his concern that the conflict within the liberal democracies may be declining to a point at which the liberal democratic system will no longer adequately or convincingly reflect the differences between its members. Similarly, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba begin their cross-national study of political culture, the attitudes and beliefs of citizens in relation to the political systems under which they live, with a certain missionary zeal. They declare that their purpose is to clarify the reasons for the survival and stability of democratic regimes where they exist, and they presume that the maintenance of these regimes and the

22

Political behaviour

creation of new democracies is a desirable end which their work may help to further. Here is their opening paragraph: This is a study of the political culture of democracy and of the social structures and processes that sustain it. The faith of the Enlightenment in the inevitable triumph of human reason and liberty has been twice shaken in recent decades. The development of Fascism and Communism after World War I raised serious doubts about the inevitability of demo­ cracy in the West; and we still cannot be certain that the continental European nations will discover a stable form of democratic process suitable for their particular cultures and social institutions; nor can we more than hope that together they will discover a European democracy. [27] These fears and uncertainties apply with much greater force to the countries of the Third World. Their concern is to do their part to ensure that democracy prevails. It can therefore be said that even if a value-free social science were a possibility, many of behaviouralism's current practitioners would not be interested in it. It may be, however, that the work of the behaviouralists will itself affect politics or even destroy it altogether. Bernard Crick warned that ... politics is, to many social scientists, a kind of disease; society is a patient ridden with tensions and political events are the unreal, neurotic fixations by which it tries to rationa­ lize these contradictions. This is what Professor Lasswell has called 'the preventive politics of the future' which will exist in a worldwide 'techno-scientific culture*. 'The ideal of a politics of prevention is to obviate conflict by the definite reduction of the tension level by effective methods, of which discussion will be but one/ If the causes of these tensions are exposed and are put to the patient, therapy will result ... But such a 'politics of prevention' is not politics at all, it is the elimination of politics; and it is not science either — it is ideology. [28] Politics may be eliminated through well-intentioned attempts to reduce the amount of social conflict, or it may be eliminated by people eager to seize or retain power. Thus, at a less

Political behaviour

23

apocalyptic level than Lasswell's 'politics of prevention', it might be argued that the conduct of opinion polls in Britain could enable a prime minister to request a dissolution of Parliament at a time when victory for his party would be almost certain; the Opposition's chances of displacing the government would decline almost to vanishing point. It was, perhaps, such a possibility that alarmed the late Aneurin Bevan when he accused the pollsters of 'taking the poetry out of polities'; they were reducing the level of uncertainty and thus the interest of the political conflict. Fortunately, the humiliation suffered by the pollsters when they wrote off Harry S. Truman in the 1948 American presidential election, and Edward Heath in the British General Election of 1970, shows that such an eventuality is still far off and that any leader who attempts to use the polls to secure his own continuance in office is taking a considerable risk. The development of the behavioural techniques may affect politics in other ways. During the nineteen-sixties a number of people, including H J. Eysenck,[29] suggested that when voters were told by the polls that one party was in the lead, they might switch their votes to that party because they wished to be on the winning side; the so-called 'Bandwagon effect1. The West German government went so far as to prohibit the publication of polls during the run-up to an election. It may be argued just as plausibly that voters who are wavering or apathetic may rally to their party when they are told that it is losing; again, David Butler and Anthony King suggested that Labour's majority in the 1966 General Election was reduced because their victory, according to the polls, seemed so certain that some Labour voters probably did not bother to vote.[30] In any case, there is little evidence; the National Opinion Poll asked a sample during the 1966 campaign whether they followed a poll and if they did, which party was currently in the lead in the poll they followed. A large majority did not follow the polls at all, and many of those who claimed to do so answered the question on the leading party wrongly. Hence fears about the effect of opinion polling on politics are ill-founded for the present and for the foreseeable future. These, then, are some of the issues raised by the growth of behavioural studies of politics: the effect they may have on

24

Political behaviour

political activity itself; the extent to which their methods may properly be described as scientific; and the problem of the intrusion of values into a method of study concerned, supposedly, with an indisputable and objective reality, as opposed to the subjective world postulated by Idealist and Marxist philosophers. Behaviouralism raises issues of central importance to both students of political institutions and events and to political philosophers. It also enables us to answer traditional questions, such as the nature of consent, the operation of representative government, and the extent to which oligarchy is inevitable in political life, in new ways and on the basis of new sources of information. In what follows we shall examine the behaviouralists' efforts to answer these and other questions by examining political systems, or parts of political systems, with the aid of their statistical and other techniques. The behavioural study of politics is still at an early stage of development, with the result that in many fields the literature is inadequate, variable in quality, and omits many items of importance; nonetheless, it is now sufficiently advanced for it to be worthwhile to survey and assess the results it has so far produced.

Chapter 2 Schools of Behavioural Analysis Systems analysis and cybernetics Towards the end of the last chapter we suggested that the behavioural students of politics claim an affinity with students of the natural sciences. In both disciplines their methods are precise and their information and their procedures can be scrutinized for correctness and accuracy; the scientific procedure of checking a hypothesis by experiment and observation is followed, and knowledge is cumulative: each piece of survey or other work tells us more about the subject-matter in hand. The data can be used by subsequent researchers to supplement their own findings and questions not answered by one piece of work can provide a future researcher with a hypothesis for testing in a new study. Some of the more ambitious attempts to analyse politics are claimed to be scientific in another sense, that they borrow concepts from the physical sciences and especially the applied sciences such as engineering and electronics. This is true in particular of David Easton's systems analysis[31] and Karl W. Deutsch's cybernetic approach to politics.[32] These two theorists in particular use scientific concepts and discoveries by analogy to construct complex models of the working of the political system. A common starting-point for these studies is structuralfunctionalism, the conception of a political system as consisting of a number of functions which the institutions, or structures of the system, perform more or less well. If the structures fulfil the functions properly they are functional, if they fail to do so they are dysfunctional. The model is thus basically dichotomous; it is necessary first to determine what the functions of the political system are, either in general or in a particular context, and then to assess how well the machinery of government meets the demands of the functions.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-3

26

Political behaviour

Functions are of three kinds: first, inputs, which are the messages, demands and information that are fed into the system. The result of a General Election, the decisions of a party conference, the requests or demands of pressure groups and Notes from foreign governments are all examples of input messages. On the basis of these inputs decisions are taken within the system which result in our second category of functions, outputs. Here laws, regulations, Notes to foreign governments, or conversations with foreign ambassadors, and concessions to pressure groups would be typical output messages, which in turn generate the third type of function, feedback. The outputs produce reactions and responses from those responsible for input functions and so generate new inputs. The basic model can be represented diagrammatically as in Table 2.1. It should be said that the lists of input, output and feedback messages are not intended to be definitive or exhaustive; they are included for illustrative purposes. Already our view of the political process is characteristically mechanistic; the system is a self-guiding Table 2.1 Inputs

-^

Domestic Election results Pressure group demands Party policies Parliamentary debates and questions

Decision-making ­ process

Cabinet, ministers, Civil Service, public corporations, local government, etc.

Foreign Notes from foreign governments Reports from embassies International events and crises Debates at the United Nations

^Outputs

Domestic Laws Regulations Policies Concessions to group demands. Government statements in Parliament Foreign Notes to other governments Consultations with ambassadors Speeches by United Nations representatives

Feedback loop ­

27

Schools of behavioural analysts

mechanism whose actions provide an important part of the stimulus to further action. In order to use the model to assess actual political systems it is obviously necessary to define the functions they are required to perform in abstract terms which are not limited in their application to one system or one type of system; this ideal may, of course, be impossible to achieve. Having done this, we can use them to assess the structures of the system we wish to study. Gabriel Almond, for example, identified four input functions and three output functions: Input functions 1. Political socialization and recruitment 2. Interest articulation 3. Interest aggregation 4. Political communication

Qutput functions: 1. Rule-making 2. Rule-application 3. Rule adjudication[33]

This list has been accepted by many subsequent structuralfunctionalists as providing a fairly complete account of the functions a political system is usually expected to perform. It might equally be argued, though, that they reflect an assumption that Western liberal democracy is the best system of government, for only such a system is likely to fulfil all these functions, or be more or less completely functional. A Soviet Communist might well wish to include political education as an output function, for instance, since this is one of the most important tasks of a party operating on Leninist principles. The structures of a particular system or series of systems may now be examined to discover how well they perform each of our seven functions. A particular structure may, of course, perform more than one function, although one is likely to be more important than the others. A political party in a Western democracy, for example, is at once a mechanism for interest articulation and aggregation as it prepares and presents its policies, a means of explaining and criticizing the actions of the government, and a body which can produce feedback by proposing new policies on the basis of the public reaction to existing policies and government actions. A political party is thus involved in input and feedback, and even in output when it is presenting government policies, but it is primarily an input structure. It may be assessed as functional or dysfunctional in

28

Political behaviour

respect of all three dimensions of the model. One other feature of the structural-functional model of politics that we should note at this stage is that the political system is not a closed circuit, as it were; its activity is generated by the environment in which it operates, by both the pressures and demands of its own society and those from other systems. David Easton's systems analysis and Karl Deutsch's cybernetic approach are basically attempts to refine the structuralfunctional model with a view to strengthening its usefulness for comparing one system with another, and the concepts used are very definitely borrowed from the applied sciences. Let us consider Deutsche analysis as an example. His starting-point is to dismiss the idea that comparison of one political system, or one historical event, with another is impossible because each system or event is unique. Political events are uncertain, it is true, but probabilities can be measured and in any case one event or institution must have something in common with others or we would be unable to discuss them or communicate meaningfully about them. The Napoleonic Wars must have something in common with the Peloponnesian War for both to be denoted by the word 'war'. If political events and institutions can be compared and contrasted, then the social and physical sciences can be discussed and studied on the same plane, Deutsch argues, and the differences between them are reduced to matters of degree. Writing of historical events, Deutsch says that the idea that they are unique and ineffable ... rests on unexamined assumptions regarding the nature of knowledge. As we have seen, no knowable object can be completely unique: if it were radically unique it could be neither observed nor recorded, nor could it be known. Any object or event that can interact with others sufficiently to make a relevant difference to their outcome must have suffi­ cient structural similarities to permit such interaction. Any­ thing that can interact with events important for us must have some structural similarities with them, and to a lesser extent with us; and once it has structure, there seems to be no a priori reason why it could not be matched by suitable symbols. Of course, our current models of many particular events may be too crude to permit the effective mapping of

Schools of behavioural analysis

29

the probabilities involved, or the effective prediction of any probable results that could be important for us. But to conclude from this that these events cannot be effectively parallelled for such purposes by any symbol system requires either metaphysical convictions or a sweeping prediction of the future course of social science. [34] Events and phenomena can be symbolized, and the same symbol can be employed with at least partial accuracy to represent several separate events or phenomena, which can therefore be meaningfully compared and aggregated under one or more headings. This point having been established, Deutsch goes on to argue that cybernetics, 'the science of communication and control',[35] can be applied to political systems, after shwoing that other models, including the structural-functional model, have defects which limit their explanatory power. Cybernetics is largely concerned with self-guiding mechanisms which operate on the basis of input, output, and feedback functions to steer themselves towards a predetermined destination. Thus Deutsch discusses radar tracking devices, quoting from one of his earlier writings: A modern radar tracking and computing device can 'sense' an object in the air, interacting with its beam; it can 'inter­ pret* it as an airplane (and may be subject to error in this 'perception'); it can apply records of past experience which are stored within its network, and with the aid of these data from 'memory' it can predict the probable location of the plane several seconds ahead in the future (being again subject to error in its 'recollections' as well as in its 'guess* and to 'disappointment' if its calculation of probability was correct, but if the airplane should take a less probable course); it can turn a battery of anti-aircraft guns on the calculated spot and shoot down the airplane; and it can then 'perceive1, predict, spot and shoot down the next. If it should spot more than one airplane at the same time, it must become 'infirm of purpose*, or else decide ('make up its mind') which one to shoot down first.[36] This machine therefore performs many of the functions of the human brain, and equally many of the same functions appear

30

Political behaviour

in a political system. Messages are received from outside, are interpreted in the light of records about past messages and action, the irrelevant material is filtered out and a decision made and action taken. If the action proves to be wrong or misdirected, this is fed back into the system which takes further, corrective action. Another mechanical analogy is the guidance system of a missile, which finds itself veering away from the target, applies corrective rudder and oversteers, then applies opposite rudder in order to bring itself back on to course, and so on, proceeding towards the target in a series of waves of decreasing amplitude. Such systems of communication and control are fed the relevant data in the form of electric currents or radio waves; the equivalent in the political system, Deutsch says, is information. Information arrives in the political system, that which the system regards as irrelevant is filtered out and some of it may be stored in the system's memory — Civil Service files, computer data banks, and so forth. The remainder goes forward for decision, and the results of the decision are themselves recorded and remembered, the system thus learning how to cope with various situations and devising standard procedures for them. Decisions are made and the achievements of the system's objectives monitored. From this, Deutsch is able to define political power as the control of information. The ability, for example, to withhold information can affect the working of another part of the system; the limit upon a particular actor's power is the amount of information to which he is allowed access. That information is power will come as no surprise to politicians and journalists, but Deutsch's analysis does allow him to refine this political truism. It also allows him to define the circumstances in which a political system can survive or will perish. Once again he draws an analogy with the human brain: A society or community that is to steer itself must continue to receive a full flow of three kinds of information: first informa­ tion about the world outside; second information from the past, with a wide range of recall and recombination; and third, information about itself and its own parts. Let any one of these three streams be long interrupted, such as by oppression or secrecy, and the society becomes an automaton, a walking corpse. It loses control over its own

Schools of behavioural analysis

31

behaviour, not only for some of its parts, but also, eventually, at its very top. Or let the monitoring of internal data be unimpaired, let consciousness exist, but inhibit its feedback into the behaviour of the system — create a consciousness at once informed and powerless — and you have the pattern of a man who feels 'possessed', who watches his own behaviour in helpless surprise, unable to change it. On the level of a society this is the experience of Cassandra watching her city rush to its doom.[37] Thus a system can cease to work either through isolation from outside stimuli or through a breakdown in its internal guidance system — the feedback loop. A social instance of the first kind would be a priesthood which, shut up in its monasteries or palaces, fails to adjust its teaching and ministry to the changing society in which it operates, or a bureaucracy which fails to keep its political leaders informed or to listen to public opinion and thus comes to make decisions so unacceptable that it provokes a revolution in which its members are hanged from the nearest lamp-posts. In the second case the bureaucracy responds to initial pressures but ignores the response its decisions evoke, or, alternatively, the nation's parliament becomes so powerless and supine that it fails to articulate dissent against the bureaucrats1 decisions. The analogy with electronic and other guidance systems which stands at the centre of the cybernetic approach to politics certainly increases the power and subtlety of the structuralfunctional model and permits the construction of an elaborate representation of the decision-making process, such as, that of foreign policy-making prepared by Deutsch and reproduced as Figure 2.2. The screening and selection of information produces data which can be used to take decisions at various points within the system. These decisions in their turn are the input data for the next stage in the process. Unfortunately, ingenious and subtle though such models are, they have so far produced little in the way of empirical research, since their designers are kept too busy attacking the models of others and protecting their own brain-children from the assaults of colleagues. American political .science reflects American

A

Confrontation and simultaneous B __ inspection of abridged secondary ""*" symbols {'consciousness")

1 |

• » - • Main stream of information — Secondary streams of information Tertiary streams of

information

"Will" or internal control signals, setting screens Screens, i.e. filtering or selective functions / \

TS Tentative

Foreign input

[receptors)

Screen of selective! attention

Domestic input Mreceptors

T^^^^^Wecision!

electivel nemocvj

^

>creenof­ icceptabk

tand i " feasible

policies

to

to

Areas of decision processes Foreign output effectors)

maP ^decisions Domestic

output teffectorsJ



^,jle_'I rZITf.^l"!!?- l^.^g.^^ ^eii11-^'^^^^^,^ ^i^i

8" s.

(Source: Deusch, op. cit, p. 258.)

o

5

Schools of behavioural analysts

33

political and social culture in the belief current among its practitioners that from the conflict of warring cliques the truth will emerge; but the truth is seldom tested by application to reality. The struggle is so interesting and victory comes to be seen as so important that the combatants become completely absorbed in it, and comparatively little time and effort is devoted to empirical research. Some of their models are also so remote from political reality that it is difficult to apply them to any actual political process or system. The models are conceived with the assistance of concepts borrowed from other fields unconnected with politics, especially the applied sciences, and these concepts cannot easily be adapted in such a way that they can be applied to political phenomena. One other feature common to systems analysis and cybernetics is the conservative assumption which underlies them: that the objective of the political system is to survive. The notion of a political system or a government which aims at the achievement of programmatic objectives or plans ahead is totally absent and, indeed, cannot be accommodated within the models, since a government determined to achieve a particular objective or series of objectives must, for a time at least, impose its policies regardless of public and pressure group reactions. That is, it must cease, if only temporarily, to use feedback information as the guide to future actions, although of course if the government becomes too unpopular or its policies prove disastrous it may have to change its mind, take note of the feedback, and change course. However, party programmes or plans cannot be accounted for entirely in terms of the cybernetic model. The major defect to date has been the failure of these approaches to yield important empirical work — a defect which may be the fault of the methods' practitioners as much as of the methods themselves — and this defect means that their validity has not been established by the empirical means required by behaviouralism. Their interest with regard to our present theme is thus limited. Organization theory If systems analysts and cyberneticians have been excessively

34

Political behaviour

preoccupied with theoretical and conceptual problems, with the result that the practical application of their work has been neglected, the defect of our next school of students of political and social behaviour, the organization theorists, is that their theories stem too much from empirical work done in a particular context, that of private industry. Organization theory as we now know it is generally regarded as having begun with a series of observations carried out by a research team at Chicago into the relationships between workers and managers at an electronics factory. This work is usually referred to as the Hawthorne Researches. [38] The basic conclusion of the studies was that what matters in understanding industrial relations is not the formal structure of the organization — who is superior to whom, who is given an office which entitles him to give orders to others, and so forth — but the interpersonal relationships not only between superiors and subordinates, but also among peer-groups of workers or managers at a given level in the works hierarchy. Such relationships will produce evidence of work habits, patterns of authority and disputes, which a study of the formal rules of the organization will not enable us to anticipate. [39] From this work sprang the 'human relations' school of business management, whose central tenet is that relations must be modified and improved in order to increase the efficiency and profitability of a factory or office. As we saw earlier, the distinction between formal rules and institutions on the one hand and the way people carry on their activities in practice on the other — between manifest and latent functions, to use Robert Presthus's terminology[40] — is central to the study of political behaviour and can be found, for example, in the writings of one of sociology's founding fathers, Max Weber. When Weber talked of the role of the Prussian bureaucracy in the late nineteenth century, he said that although in theory the Beamten were accountable to the Reichstag, in practice this was not the way the system developed: Wherever the dynasties retained actual power in their hands — as was especially the case in Germany — the interests of the prince were joined with those of officialdom against Parliament and its claims for power. The officials were also interested in having leading positions, that is, ministerial

Schools of behavioural analysis

35

positions, occupied by their own ranks, thus making these positions an object of the official career. The monarch, on his part, was interested in being able to appoint ministers from the ranks of devoted officials according to his own discretion. Both parties, however, were interested in seeing the political leadership confront Parliament in a unified and solidary fashion.[41] Thus, what the Constitution said and what the Kaiser and the bureaucrats did were not merely different, they were contradictory. Many of the same themes emerge in the work of organization theorists in industry. When attempts are made to apply organization theory and management science to politics and government, however, they run into difficulties owing to the complexity and uncertainty of the objectives to be achieved in the political system, as compared with the simple and clear objective of profitability in industrial management. Ministers and civil servants are faced with a welter of demands, pressures, policy proposals and crises which continually change, and when the government changes hands, through a General Election or a military coup d'etat, for example, the administrative machine has to adapt to meet the requirements and policy demands of its new masters. To reduce costs, avoid industrial disputes, and get a specific production, administrative or managerial task done effectively with the use of the minimum amount of resources; these are simple objectives compared with those of governments, and methods evolved to meet them may prove quite inadequate when applied to politics and government. A very good example was the Fulton Committee's examination of the British Civil Service, [42] which relied heavily on management science and organization theory techniques. Although the Committee opened its report with an attack on the 'generalist' nature of the Civil Service[43] and attempted to introduce a limited form of expertise, the so-called 'preference for relevance' when recruiting was carried out at graduate level,[44] their main concerns were a more flexible career pattern, more support for civil servants from computers, secretarial staffs, and material resources such as filing systems and better office accommodation, and no attempt was made by the Committee to change the ethos of the Service. The British administrative civil servant has always believed that his task is

36

Political Behaviour

primarily to keep his minister out of trouble, to maintain smooth relationships both with his colleagues in his own and other departments and with outside groups, and not to plan ahead or propose new policy initiatives. This view remained untouched by the Fulton Committee and its management consultants, to the dismay of many observers. Indeed, the Committee yielded to the traditional Civil Service concept of its role without a fight. When talking about the characteristics the administrators of the future would need, they said that: 'They will be men and women experienced in running the government machine',[45] the task with which the administrative civil servant was already almost entirely preoccupied and which he sees as his central task. [46] As a result of the Fulton Committee's work the Civil Service is rather more efficient and flexible, but it is no different in its essential preoccupation with keeping the ship of state afloat, and it is no more likely to carry out forward planning or produce new ideas than it was before the Committee reported. One might have presumed that a Labour government intended a different result; organization theory played a part in ensuring that it did not get it. Until organization theory can cope with an organization with varied and changing objectives, its usefulness in the study of politics will remain limited. Classifications of political systems Some scholars have concentrated on the classification of political systems, often on the basis of structural-functional analysis and with a purpose in mind, such as discovering in what circumstances liberal-democratic political institutions can operate. Others have been concerned with establishing the conditions which produce military governments. Studies of political culture are basically teleological works of classifica­ tion, their purpose being to establish the chances of stable democracy or a military coup, for instance. We shall consider a number of such studies in the next chapter. Another important exercise in classification was that developed by Edward A. Shils, using the concept of modernization. [47 ] Former colonial dependencies, granted independence more or less recently by their former Western masters, wish to imitate those former

Schools of behavioural analysts

37

masters by seeking industrial development and by copying their political and bureaucratic systems. In doing this, tensions arise between these desires and traditional customs and elites and Shils classifies countries according to how far they have progressed towards the ideals derived from Western nations: the growth of industrial development, the degree of urbaniza­ tion, and the extent to which political and bureaucratic structures have adapted themselves to Western patterns. Studies of the working of political systems Our final group of students of political activity do not go in for comparison, classification, or the application of any particular theory, but simply seek to understand the working of a political system or the operation of a particular political function; this group are the most purely empirical of political scientists. Such studies may involve an entire local or national system or a particular activity, such as voting. The most important of such studies have been concerned with the nature of political power, especially in the context of local politics and have led their authors to produce theoretical definitions of the concept of power. Robert Dahl, for example, studied power in New Haven, Connecticut,[48] and on the basis of this and other work has prepared a model of political power. Dahl sees power as analogous to the price mechanism in economics, and the 'expenditure' of power leads to control by the power-holder of other political actors. He defines four types of control: 1. Spontaneous field control: One actor has an unintended influence on others, as when the expression of a Mafia Don's face causes the other members of the Family to tremble for their safety even though he has no intention of harming them. 2. Manipulated field control: The power-holder discovers how to influence others to fall in with his desires. 3. Commands backed by threats. 4. Reciprocity: People are able to command each other by the use of manipulated field control or commands backed by threats, but no one power-holder can

38

Political behaviour dominate the rest, so they trade influence with each other.

Dahl also distinguishes four types of power system within which these methods of control can be used. These are a price system, where there is no central control at all and each political actor bids for compliance with his requests or demands with no certainty of success. This could be seen as the political equivalent of the economists' concept of perfect competition. Or there can be a hierarchy, in which a leader or group of leaders control other members of society through their control of goods, such as money, favours, houses, or jobs. Again, the system may be a polyarchy, in which a number of sub-leaders or sections of the community have considerable influence over government decisions. Finally, there can be reciprocity, with leaders maintaining their partial areas of control by offering their influence to assist other leaders in need and expecting similar assistance in their turn, while not attempting to gain a position of domination over the other leaders. [48] We shall see an application of these concepts when we consider Dahl's work on New Haven, but at this point we should note that he is concerned with the nature of power relationships within a single political unit, whether it be a club, a trade union, a town, or a country. In this discussion of theories of political behaviour and of some of the conceptual frameworks established to guide behavioural and other studies of political activity, it has been implied that the least ambitious models have been the most fruitful in terms of producing empirical research and in yielding meaningful applications to political systems and events. In what follows, where we are to examine both models and empirical findings, we shall, therefore, be concerned in the main with exercises in the classification of political systems or with observations of particular fields of political activity. The less ambitious structural-functional models will also have a place, and in any case structural-functional assumptions underlie many of the classifications, especially in the field of political culture, to which we shall now turn. With the more grandiose and least productive designs we shall concern ourselves no more.

part 2

Political culture

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-4

One of the central questions with which philosophers have been concerned has been the relationship between citizens and government. If the citizens have in any sense consented to the establishment of a government, they can presumably withdraw that consent if the government behaves in a way they find unpleasant or unacceptable. Behaviouralists have approached the question of the relationship between government and citizens either by examining the conditions under which regimes become established and remain stable, concerning themselves especially with liberal democratic or military regimes, or by inquiring why citizens are prepared to accept subordinate positions in a hierarchical state structure. In seeking answers to these questions, the behaviouralists have been able to increase our understanding of a phenomenon which was a central concern for Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau in particular: how communities develop and maintain systems of government acceptable to them.

Chapter 3 The idea of political culture One of the oldest problems with which both students of politics and political actors have been concerned is the circumstances under which particular systems of government can become established and survive. Rousseau believed that the nature of a country's politics was related to the fertility of its soil, since the amount of leisure time available to the citizens to take part in political activity would depend on how much of a surplus they could produce over the minimum sustenance required for the maintenance of life. The colder the climate, too, the larger is the minimum requirement likely to be. Democracy, according to Rousseau, is best suited to a country which can produce a modest surplus for its people, large enough to give them some leisure, but not so great that the people are tempted to a life of idleness and luxury. [50] Again, the Western imperial powers, notably Britain and France, have attempted (with little success) to bring about the replication of their own systems of government when granting independence to their colonies. Increasingly, the question of how and why political systems survive and remain stable has been discussed in terms of the relationship between the system on the one hand and the personalities and attitudes of the citizens on the other. One can approach the problem either from the vantage point of the system of government and see how people's attitudes and beliefs relate to it — the systemic dimension — or from that of the citizen, to see what his reactions are to the way his country is governed — the psychological dimension. [51] In what follows we shall examine each dimension in turn, but essentially they are united in the idea of a political culture. David Hume declared two centuries ago that 'since force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have no support but opinion*. In these days, when minority groups command the means to destroy thousands or even millions of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-5

42

Political behaviour

people, one may have to qualify this statement, but it is still broadly true to say that the people of a country can render it ungovernable. When in 1920 the German army attempted to overthrow the Weimar Republic and establish a right-wing dictatorship under a civil servant — the so-called 'Kapp Putsch* — the trades unions called a general strike which immobilized industry, transport, and supplies. Within a few days the military coup collapsed and the government returned to Berlin, after its chaotic retreat some days before. If, then, all government depends upon the support of the people, stable government can be assured only if the system of government is able to retain that support. This was the problem examined by S.E. Finer when he set out to determine when and why civilian government gives way to military rule. [52] He begins by stating a paradox; in a sense it is surprising that in modern times any army allows civilians to rule over it, decide what it shall do and what resources shall be made available to it, since the army is the sole custodian of the country's means of coercion, with the exception of a small portion given to the police, and modern technology has vastly increased the power of the weapons in the national armoury. No-one could resist if the army decided to take over control of the country by force. The question, therefore, is how civilian governments manage to survive. To resolve this problem, Finer considers the conditions under which armies are able to take over the reins of government. In difficult circumstances, the civilian govern­ ment may take unpopular decisions, make mistakes, or be forced into positions where it imposes hardship and restrictions upon the people. As the government becomes more unpopular and unrest grows, it has to rely increasingly upon the army to maintain order and enforce its demands: the government, therefore, becomes more and more dependent upon the army, which for its part can overthrow the government by turning against it or simply by refusing to continue to protect it from popular unrest and violence. The important factor is the level of the population's attachment to civilian rule, which is in its turn determined by the presence among the people of three attributes, which we must now consider. First, there must be a wide public approval of the procedure for transferring power and a corresponding belief that no

The idea of political culture

43

exercise of power in breach of these procedures is legitimate. When a government comes to an end — the emperor dies or the budget is defeated in parliament, say — there must be a general recognition of the proper way of choosing a successor. Many thrones are handed down from father to eldest son with universal consent, and problems only arise when an old king has left no heir or when the succession is uncertain for some other reason. Again, when a British government is defeated in the House of Commons on a major policy issue, it is generally accepted nowadays that its successor would not be chosen by the sovereign until after a General Election has been held. In America, when a president, a Congress, and other elected officers of the state come to the end of their terms of office, elections are held to return them to power or to choose successors. All these procedures for the transfer of power are, or have been, generally accepted by the populace as the proper way to choose new governments; only when uncertainty exists after the procedure has been operated, as when the king leaves no heir or a General Election fails to produce an overall majority for any party in the House of Commons, is there any problem. If, however, the procedure for handing over power is unclear or not generally accepted by the people, difficulties are likely to arise more frequently and be more fundamental. Finer's second condition for a high level of attachment to civilian rule is that there must be a wide public recognition of who or what constitutes the sovereign authority, and a corresponding belief that no other persons or centre of power are duty-worthy. Most people must be able to identify the government and accept the orders of its members as binding upon them, recognizing no other supreme authority. Uncertainty can lead to civil war, as in the Wars of the Roses where it was unclear who had inherited the right to rule. These first two conditions Finer calls the Political Formula; they constitute the definition of how governmental power is exercised and transferred from one-power-holder to another. His third condition, which is not, however, part of the political formula itself, is that the public must, in the main, be conscious of politics and well mobilized in private associations. They will thus be able to make their wishes clearly known to the government and can be called upon to support the

44

Political behaviour

government or resist a usurper, through the medium of political parties, trades unions and other organizations. The successful resistance to the 'Kapp Putsch', for example, was organized by the German trade union movement. [53] Where all three conditions are broadly fulfilled, the country has a high level of political culture and military intervention is impossible; it 'would be regarded as a wholly unwarrantable intrusion.'[54] Where the succession is uncertain the military may get their chance at a moment of national crisis but will probably be unable to retain power for long; in a country where all three conditions are in doubt or the population is apathetic or weakly organized, and so political culture is not well developed, military intervention in government becomes more probable and situations in which the army can assume control more frequent. Finer defines four levels of political culture. Where all his three conditions are met the culture is mature and a military takeover is almost inconceivable. Where the legitimacy of the government is widely recognized and the population well organized but the succession is in doubt — a situation which Finer calls a developed political culture — the military may attempt to intervene but strong resistance is likely to develop. Where all three components of political culture are in dispute, its level is low and a military takeover would not be strongly resisted, while in a country with a minimal level of political culture politics and government are simply not part of the average person's life or consciousness. Such a country will consist largely of peasant or tribal villages and both the loyalties and concerns of the people will be almost entirely local and personal. In this situation, Finer says that 'questions of legitimacy and consensus are irrelevant'[55] and a coup is unlikely to be resisted except by the elite group it displaces: 'in these countries the military is the sole political force; and as such it is entirely at large'.[56] On this framework we can construct a basis for the classification of societies containing an estimate of the levels at which the army will be able to operate politically; to present its demands and obtain their satisfaction; and to intervene itself in the affairs of government. This classification is shown in Table 3.1. Finer illustrates the usefulness of this classification with a wealth of examples.

45

The idea of political culture Table 3.1 Level of political culture

Situation regarding governmental legitimacy

Characteristic maximum level of military intervention

1. Mature

Unobtainable by army

Influence through normal constitutional channels. Possibly blackmail at times of crisis.

2. Developed

Attempts by army to gain legitimacy resisted by population

Influence and blackmail of civilian authorities.

3. Low

Fluid situation

Displacement of civilian authorities by a refusal to protect them from public violence.

4. Minimal

Legitimacy unimportant to population

Supplantment of civilian authorities by violence against them.

The conditions under which military coups d'etat become possible and can succeed have been assessed in somewhat similar terms by Edward Luttwak in a book aimed, rather entertainingly, at 'democratizing the coup d'etat' by instructing everyone in how to carry one out.[57] He begins by warning his readers that ... in order to carry out a successful coup certain precon­ ditions must be present, just as in cooking bouillabaisse one needs the right sorts of fish to start off with. Secondly, readers should be aware that the penalty of failure is far greater than having to eat out of a tin. (The rewards, too, are greater. )[58] The 'right ingredients* are three conditions, which are to some extent reminiscent of Finer's, although they embrace a

46

Political behaviour

broader political and sociological field of vision. His first condition is that 'the social and economic conditions of the country must be such as to confine political participation to a small fraction of the population*.[59] Finer's third condition is thus explained and expanded. If the bulk of the population is poverty-stricken and illiterate and is not exposed to national communications media, what happens in the capital city will be of no concern to them and in any case news will filter through to them only slowly. If, on the other hand, the populace is aware of and concerned about what is going on, resistance to the no doubt well-meant efforts to overthrow the government will quickly develop. In 1961 four senior French generals, aided by right-wing civilians, staged a coup in Algiers in an effort to reverse President de Gaulle's developing policy of granting independence to Algeria. In January, de Gaulle had gained an overwhelming majority in a referendum, conducted both in Algeria and metropolitan France, on a proposal to create an Algerian republic; in April, the generals and their civilian associates decided to resist the implementa­ tion of the referendum decision by force. They took over the government buildings and the radio station in Algiers, but de Gaulle was able to broadcast from Paris to the troops who could listen to him on their transistor radios: 'I forbid every Frenchman, and above all every soldier, to carry out any of their orders/ The army refused to support its generals and within days they were under arrest or in exile. [60] Speedy mass communications were an important element in bringing about their defeat. Luttwak's second condition is that the target country must be substantially independent; if a Great Power intervenes to prevent a coup, the new rulers' chances of resistance will be virtually nil. [61] Finally he prescribes that there must be no rival centres of power from which resistance or a counter-attack can be organized; he refers, for example, to the Congo. There the central government in Leopoldville was resisted for years by the province of Katanga, whose separatist government was supported by funds from the Belgian Union Miniere, the copper mining company, and by Belgian and other mercenary groups.[62] For a coup to succeed, then, the population must be apathetic and ill-informed and there must

The idea of political culture

47

be a single centre of government, the capture of which means freedom from effective internal resistance or external intervention. We can summarize the conclusions reached by Finer and Luttwak in four conditions, stating the factors controlling the likelihood of military intervention and rule. These are: 1. The extent to which the government is regarded by the governed as legitimate and the extent to which the people feel it should be obeyed. 2. The extent to which the rules of the political game, especially in relation to the transfer of power, are generally understood and accepted as valid and immutable. 3. The level of popular organization within the country and the ease with which it is possible to communicate with the people. 4. Independence from external interference. The first three conditions determine the nature and content of the country's political culture and are dependent upon social attitudes, the level and nature of education, and the degree of economic development the country has attained. This definition of political culture has been adequate for those concerned with assessing the circumstances in which armies come to power, but when the chances of survival of other types of regime are to be assessed, it must be qualified and expanded. The second group of writers who have contributed to the development of the idea of political culture have been concerned with the circumstances in which a democratic political system can exist. The first of these was S.M. Lipset, whose book Political Man[63] is explicitly concerned with furthering the cause of liberal democracy. [64] For Lipset, the key to successful democratic government is the right balance between dispute and toleration. He explores this theme along a number of paths and in the context of different countries. A certain level of economic development is necessary, together with tolerant attitudes, but lively debate and dispute are essential and these he fears are lacking in the Western democracies at the present time. He believes that

48

Political behaviour

politics is no longer the prime focus of interest it once was, and sees political controversy in the Western democracies declining almost to vanishing point. He recalls a conference of European intellectuals he attended at Milan in 1955 on 'The Future of Freedom', and says that ... the socialists no longer advocated socialism; they were as concerned as the conservatives with the danger of an allpowerful state. The ideological issues dividing left and right had been reduced to a little more or a little less government ownership and economic planning. No-one seemed to believe that it really made much difference which political party controlled the domestic policies of individual nations. [65] Later he refers to British left-wing intellectuals who were 'troubled by the fact that the Labour party is no longer ideologically radical, but simply the interest organization of the workers and the trades unions'. [66] He overstates jhis case, alleging that the decline in class and political conflict is the result of increasing affluence, bringing about a reduction in class tensions — a thesis very fashionable in the late nineteen-fifties — and fears that the peoples of the Western nations might become too complacent and too conformist to preserve meaningful democratic politics. Consensus is necessary to the survival of democracy, and so is toleration, but cleavage and dispute are equally necessary. We shall return to the problem of toleration in a later chapter. By far the most comprehensive study of political culture carried out so far is that by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, published under the title The Civil Culture,[67] which is based on sample surveys carried out in the United States, Great Britain, West Germany, Italy, and Mexico. A questionnaire designed to produce information which could be compared cross-nationally was administered to samples of about a thousand people in each of the five countries. The problems involved in such an enterprise were considerable and a weakness of the study is the low response rate of the samples. Only about two-thirds of the people selected in each country gave interviews, and one cannot assume that the other third who refused or could not be contacted were a random selection

The idea of political culture

49

of the total samples, especially when the findings concern, among other things, the levels of political alienation, disgruntlement, and cynicism in the five countries. The findings of the survey must therefore be treated with some reserve but as it is the most comprehensive yet attempted it must be examined in some detail. Almond and Verba's concept of political culture is defined in terms of four variables, all of which are derived from a structural-functional model of the political process (see pp. 25-8 above). These are the ways in which the citizen can assess how well the political system of his country is serving him, and can be tested by sample survey methods. First, Almond and Verba sought to determine how the political system generally is regarded — how strong people's patriotic feelings are, how they evaluate their nation: strong or weak, large or small, and so forth. Second, they look at the citizen's assessment of the system's input functions and seek to determine how effective citizens feel they can be in influencing the decisions of national and local government, what value they place on their votes, and what their views are on the agents of political mobilization — parties, pressure groups and the media. They then turn to the other side of the coin and consider the citizen's response to the system's outputs. Here Almond and Verba seek to discover whether the citizenry regard government decisions as broadly acceptable to them, in the best interests of the nation, and arrived at properly without corrupt or dangerous influences being applied. To assess the more immediate impact of state upon citizen they made inquiries as to whether their respondents felt that they were treated fairly and reasonably by members of the local and national bureaucracies with whom they came into contact, and by the police. Lastly, the authors sought to determine how the individual felt about his place in the system: whether he felt he mattered and could influence decisions, how far he felt a sense of obligation to vote, pay his taxes, and obey the law. Using these four variables, Almond and Verba defined three ideal types of political culture in terms of whether the citizens of a given country made a positive response to the system on each of the four variables shown in Table 3.2:

50

Political behaviour

Table 3.2

Culture type

Parochial Subject Participant

System as general object 0 1 1

Variables Input Output objects objects 0 0 1

1 = positive response to object 0 = no response to object (Source: Almond and Verba, op. cit., Table 1

0 1 1

Self as active participant 0 0 1

2, p. 16.)

In a parochial political culture, where peasants live in villages and till subsistence farms, there is no consciousness of politics at all. Anything outside the village is irrelevant. Almond and Verba say that 'the remote tribesman in Nigeria or Ghana may be aware in a dim sort of way of the existence of an external political regime. But his feelings towards it are uncertain or negative and he has not internalized any norms to regulate his relations to it'.[68] Members of a subject political culture are, in contrast, very much aware of the existence of the system of government but do not feel that they have any role to play in it, or that they can or should be able to influence its decisions. A simple example is the deferential British working-class person described by Robert McKenzie and Alan Silver, who believes that some are born to rule and should rule and that he is not such a person. Asked if he would prefer as prime minister a member of Parliament's son who was educated at Eton and Oxford and had served in the Guards, or a lorry driver's son who went to grammar school and a redbrick university, the typical response of a deferential worker was: The M.P.'s son. Breeding counts every time. I like to be set an example and have someone to look up to. I know the other man has got a long way on his own merits and I do admire that, but breeding counts and is most important in that position. [69] Not all British workers would react in the same way, however.

The idea of political culture

51

At a more all-embracing level, it is often argued that the Germans are essentially a subject people who yield easily to authoritarian regimes. Albert Speer recalled his school education as one of the factors which later led to his succumbing readily to the force of Adolf Hitler's personality: We were being educated in terms of a conservative bourgeois view of the world. In spite of the Revolution which had brought in the Weimar Republic, it was still impressed upon us that the distribution of power in society and the traditional authorities were part of the God- given order of things ... In school, there could be no criticism of course or subject matter, let alone of the ruling powers of the state. Unconditional faith in the authority of the school was required. It never even occurred to us to doubt the order of things, for as students we were subjected to the dictates of a virtually absolutist system. Moreover, there were no subjects such as sociology which might have sharpened our political judgements. [70] Speer was writing about a period when Germany had her first democratic government, based upon a constitution designed to ensure the fullest representation of all views and groups within Germany and to guarantee freedom of speech and expression. The governments of the Weimar Republic, while operating democratic political institutions, left the social and education systems almost completely as they had been under the Kaisers, with the result that even highly educated people lacked that tendency to dispute the decisions of authority which is essential to active democratic politics, or Almond and Verba's participant political culture. There was no feeling that, though government should be respected and obeyed, it should also be open to influence by the citizens and that it should be responsive to their needs, wants, and purposes. If participation is carried too far, though, it can be just as dangerous as excessive deference to the stability of the regime. Apathy may be a sign of satisfaction and Lipset pointed out that the highest turnout of voters in Germany and Austria between the wars came at the point at which their democratic system were on the point of collapse.[71] The highest polls, indeed, often come when the continuation of the political system is at stake. To

52

Political behaviour

quote Lipset again, 'When a nation faces a crisis — major changes in its social, economic or political system or in its international position — the electorate as a whole takes a greater interest in politics.'[72] We can cite another example in the French Third Republic, during which the highest polls in elections were obtained when the issue was the Republic versus a restoration of the monarchy. Almond and Verba make the point that their three cultures are not mutually exclusive, both in the sense that a country may contain people with different cultural positions — a predominantly subject culture may contain groups of parochials, probably in the more remote and isolated parts of the country, for example — and in the sense that a particular person's political culture may consist of a mixture of all three types. Our deferential worker may take pride in voting and feel that writing to his member of Parliament is an effective way of drawing the attention of the authorities to his grievances, but this is not inconsistent with his view that some are born to rule and he is not one of them. In fact, the 'civil culture', the prevalence of which among the people will ensure the stability of a democratic regime, is just such a mixed culture; there must be some element of subject orientation or the citizenry will be at the barricades every week. This brings us to the second dimension of Almond and Verba's model; the extent to which the political institutions of the country reflect and take account of the cultural attitudes and opinions of the citizens. Finer and Luttwak both point out that a system of government about which nobody cares, or has the leisure or energy to care, will easily be overthrown, especially by those who control the nation's stock of weapons. To use Almond and Verba's terminology, the extent to which the political system is congruent with the culture of its citizens must now be assessed. Once again, their model is characteristically structional-functional; the question to be answered is how well political institutions and actors perform the tasks required of them by the populace. This can be assessed by considering three further variables. First, in order to form an attitude towards their country's government, people must have access to and possess information about it; the extent of such knowledge must be assessed — the cognitive

53

The idea of political culture

orientation of the citizen to the system. Second, we need to measure people's feelings about the system, those who operate it, and their performance. One may wish to ask how highly people regard their political leaders, or of what, in their country, people are most proud. In the case of the second question, the rank given to the political system is obviously important. Almond and Verba call this second variable the affective dimension. Finally, we need to consider how people react to information about the system and to the effect it has on their lives — their evaluative orientation towards the political system. For instance, we may inquire how citizens react to new taxation proposals or to a change of government. Almond and Verba thus propose three means of assessing the congruence of the system with the attitudes of its citizens — cognition, feelings or affections, and their evaluation of the system's operation. We can then define three states of mind about politics among citizens, according to whether their responses in terms of each of these three orientations are positive, neutral or negative. This is illustrated in Table 3.3: Table 3.3 Attitudes towards the political system Allegiance Cognitive orientation Affective orientation Evaluative orientation

+ + +

Apathy + 0 0

Alienation + — —

+ = positive response 0 = indifference (no response) — = negative or hostile response (Source: Almond and Verba, op, cit., Table 1-3, p. 21.)

The higher the neutral or negative content of the table in any particular case the less stable is the political system likely to be, since it is either not highly valued or regarded with hostility. The total effect of Almond and Verba's model is to allow one to define three ideal types of culture (parochial, subject, and participant) which may be, indeed normally are, mixed in the case of any actual political culture, and then to assess how well the political system of the country is suited to the attitudes and

54

Political behaviour

opinions, the culture, of its inhabitants. Their chief mission is to establish what mixture of the three types of culture is most likely to permit the creation and survival of a democratic political system, though the model could just as easily be applied to other types of government, for example totalitarian or military regimes. A similar conceptual framework is offered by Harry Eckstein in his theory of why and when democratic systems remain stable. [73] Like Almond and Verba, he seeks his explanation in the relationship between the political system and other social structures, and the attitudes of the people. Having considered various explanations of successful democracy, such as the existence of a general consensus on the form of government or of a party system which successfully aggregates the various interests in society to an extent sufficient to mobilize continuing support for government on a scale which ensures its survival for a reasonable length of time, he argues that we need to penetrate further; to understand what factors bring about these situations. All governments rely on authority. The decisions of some people are accepted by others as binding upon them, or as J.R. Lucas put it, 'A man or body of men has authority if it follows from his saying "Let X happen" that X ought to happen.'[74] Authority can be acquired and exercised in different ways, as Weber pointed out. It can be acquired by legal conferment, often coupled with a symbolic announcement of that legal grant of authority by the wearing of a badge or of other marks of office which are generally accepted as denoting a person who has had authority conferred on him — the policeman's uniform, the judge's wig and gown, the Speaker's chair. This was Weber's legal-rational authority. At the other extreme, a man may gain authority through the force of his personality or the persuasiveness of his oratory: Weber's charismatic authority, the authority of Hitler, Mussolini and many other dictators: LEAR: KENT: LEAR: KENT:

Who wouldst thou serve? You. Dost thou know me, fellow? No, sir, but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.

The idea of political culture LEAR: KENT:

55

What's that? Authority. [75]

All social organizations have an authority pattern, but both its nature and the mode of exercising authority within it vary. Authority may not only be legal-rational, charismatic, or a mixture of the two; it may also be exercised by methods ranging from persuasion to insistent and dominating command. Eckstein argues that the stability of a political system depends upon the extent to which its authority pattern is similar to or congruent with the authority patterns of other social institutions, especially of those closely related to the political system. British politics, he says, exhibits a mixture of democratic, authoritarian, and constitutional attitudes. We have elections and a parliament, but we expect governments to govern and we expect everyone to play the political game strictly according to the rules. Similarly, our political parties have democratic structures — party conferences and democratic local bodies — but party leaders have considerable freedom of action, even to the extent of openly defying the party conference on occasion and rejecting its decisions. However, in such an eventuality and many others, pressure is exerted on all to abide by the party's constitution or rules.[76] Thus we have a mixture of an expectation that the citizens in one case, or the ordinary party members in the other, can play their part in determining government or party policy; but leaders are allowed to make many decisions without reference to the decisions of the democratic procedures while being expected like everyone else to obey the rules laid down for the conduct of political activity, whether in state or party. Some social institutions, especially those concerned with the link between generations, must be more authoritarian than others: 'Families and schools can be permissive, but this is merely to say that they can be authoritarian in a lax or lenient manner.'[77] The army and the bureaucracy cannot be democratic either, but according to Eckstein the patterns must fit one another; there must be a certain resemblance and the inculcation of the appropriate attitudes: these should 'dovetail with, or support, the governmental pattern, however indirectly*.[78] There must be both vertical congruence between generations and horizontal congruence among adult

56

Political behaviour

institutions, with those closest in function to government and most involved in political activity possessing the closest congruence of authority patterns. Eckstein then raises what have become the textbook examples: Britain as a stable democracy with congruent authority patterns, and the Weimar Republic, where the political system and the authority patterns were glaringly inconsistent (see p.51 above), as illustrations of his theory. Obviously, there will always be stresses within a political system. A democratic system must contain authoritarian elements — government must govern — if it is to bring stability, peace of mind, and a reasonable standard of living to the people. At the other extreme dictatorships attempt to stifle man's basic need for self-expression. These strains must be managed by the system, but if the inevitable contradictions within the system become too polarized, confusion or anomie will result. The citizen will become uncertain how he should behave, bewildered, and resentful. We are all both in authority and under authority, 'but being tossed back and forth among radically different authority patterns is another matter*. [79] Being allowed freedom to express oneself at home will mean confusion and misery if masters and prefects order a boy around peremptorily at school. Eckstein's theory increases our understanding of the link between the structure of society and the attitudes of its members on the one hand, and the political system on the other. If people are used to running their private lives democratically — if their fathers allowed them to discuss what the family should do on Sundays, their schools had elected councils, their employers listen sympathetically to their grievances and welcome their suggestions — they will expect their government to be run on the same lines and will be able to accept the problems and responsibilities that go with such a system. Coping with the continual presentation of contradic­ tory proposals, voting, writing to Members of Parliament and local councillors, and so forth, will be easy and natural. Perhaps the most serious weakness of Eckstein's theory is that it ignores the difficulties of consensus and cleavage, and the influence that social institutions can have on this problem. When he assesses the extent to which the presence in a country

The idea of political culture

57

of a large proportion of Roman Catholics reduces democracy's chances of success, he considers the authoritarian structure of the church of Rome — the infallibility of the Pope, the respect and fear in which the priesthood is held; he says nothing about the problems created by Catholic insistence upon a separate education system for Catholic children, which can mean the existence of virtually separate socialization agencies and the creation of a situation in which people of different religions know and understand little about each other. From here it is only a short step to suspicion, intolerance, and religious violence. Ireland is, of course, the classic example. Nonetheless, Eckstein's theory does much to elaborate the relationship between the political system and the society it governs. The idea of political culture, then, has emerged from studies of opposite forms of government — military dictatorships and democracies. One can sum up the conclusions of these various studies by stating four areas which we need to study in order to assess the likely stability either of a country's existing political system or of any system that country may adopt or have thrust upon it. These areas of study are: 1. The extent of political knowledge and understanding among the people and the kinds of social organizations they possess. 2. Whether the people believe that they can, or should be able to, influence the government and other powerholders. 3. The willingness of the people to accept what the govern­ ment does for them and to them and to accept its instruc­ tions. 4. Whether they accept the way in which their governors came to power as the proper way to achieve that power. All governments depend on consent; the nature of the government depends upon the attitudes and knowledge of the people. In the next two chapters we shall explore these relationships further.

Chapter 4 The good citizen A central issue when discussing political culture and the stability of political systems is the relationship between the attitudes of individual citizens and the machinery and processes of government, one of the oldest subjects of debate among political theorists. Aristotle wrote that ... a citizen is one of a community, as a sailor is one of a crew; and although each member of the crew has his own function and a name to fit it — rower, helmsman, look-out and the rest — and has therefore his goodness at that particular job, there is also a type of goodness which all the _crew must have, a function in which they all play a part — the safe conduct of the voyage; for each member of the crew aims at securing that. Similarly, the aim of all the citizens, however dissimilar they may be, is the safety of the community, that is, the constitution of which they are citizens. [80] The citizen must desire the maintenance of the community and must be prepared to play his part in its maintenance. The community may also affect the citizen, though — its rules may force him to behave in ways which he dislikes or which frustrate his natural desires, yet he may feel obliged or constrained to obey. Rousseau believed that all communal regulations interfere with man's natural happiness and liberty: Natural Man is everything to himself; he is a numerical unity, a complete entity, who has no sympathy except with himself or his mate. Man in civil society is only a fractional unity which belongs to its denominator and whose value is in his sympathy with the whole, the social body ... He who wishes to preserve in the civil order the primacy of natural desires, does not know what he wants. Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his desires and his

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-6

The good citizen

59

duties, he can never be either man or citizen; he can seem good neither to himself nor for others. [81] If this contradiction between an individual's passions, instincts and desires and the pressures of society becomes too great; if, to introduce a term more often associated with Hegel and Marx, his alienation becomes too extreme, the individual will react or rebel. Rousseau, Hegel and Marx all saw alienation, defined differently by each of them of course, as the motive force of revolution and progress; the alienated citizens would eventually combine to overthrow and radically change the political and social system in which they lived. Alternatively, a man may respond to social pressures which are unacceptable to him by retreating into his own individual world — his village, his family, or even his own feelings and imagination: If I no longer feel attached to property, no longer care whether or not I am in prison, if I have killed within myself my natural affections, then [the tyrant] can no longer bend me to his will, for all that is left of myself is no longer subject to empirical fears or desires.[82] This would be the attitude of Diogenes or Timon of Athens. The work of behavioural social scientists has rendered such concepts as alienation more precise and increased our understanding of them and of their effects. Aristotle's point is made anew by Almond and Verba's definition of three types of political culture — participant, subject and parochial[83] — since the type of culture existing in a society will determine the part the citizens play, and expect to play, in its affairs. Almond and Verba use the concept of alienation as an indicator of how far citizen attitudes are out of sympathy with the system of government. The extent of allegiance, apathy or alienation among the population of a particular country can be investigated first by finding out how far people are conscious of the political system in which they live, then by examining their feelings towards the system and their evaluation of political activity and its results. Almond and Verba assume, of course, that the political systems of their five countries can be ranked in order of their successful adoption and retention of democratic constitutions and governments. Hence America and Britain have democratic systems which

60

Political behaviour

have survived with only gradual and piecemeal adaptation to meet new circumstances and demands, whereas both Italy and Germany have in the recent past submitted themselves to the rule of dictators. Mexico is somewhere in between; she has a democratic politv with competing parties and a vigorous revolutionary tradition, but she is a developing nation needing strong government in order to achieve rapid economic progress and is subject to the tensions between traditional and modernizing elites characteristic of most Third World countries, (see pp.36-7 above). Thus Britain and America are the most stable democracies, the other three all being problem cases in one way or another. The first dimension in terms of which Almond and Verba examine the relationship between citizen attitudes and the political system is that of cognition, although a more accurate term might be recognition, since they are concerned not only with how much people know about politics and the state, but also with how far people feel that political affairs concern them. Thus they sought to measure the extent to which citizens of their five countries felt that the activities of national and local government affected them; Table 4.1 shows a clear pattern in respect of both levels of government. Table 4.1 Percentage feeling that government has a great effect on their lives National Local government government United States United Kingdom Germany Italy Mexico

41 33 38 23 7

35 23 33 19 6

(Source: Almond and Verba, op. cit., Tables 2-1 and 2-2.)

None of the responses reveal any extensive parochialism in the sense that there is no striking discrepancy in the case of any country between the figure of those who feel the impact of

61

The good citizen

national government and those who feel that local government affects them greatly. In particular, in no country in the survey do more people see the impact of local government as greater than that of national government. Fewer Italians and Mexicans, especially the latter, seem to feel that government affects their lives as compared with Americans, Britons and Germans. It should be noted in passing that the belief that local government has a considerable impact is strongest in the two federal states, the United States and Germany. People who do not feel that the government affects their lives are not likely to take the trouble to learn much about politics or government or to receive many messages about politics from neighbours, friends, newspapers or television; hence one would expect an investigation of people's knowledge of politics and of the extent to which they follow political events to reveal a pattern similar to that revealed by any study of the perceived impact of government upon people's lives. Table 4.2 shows that this is indeed the case: Table 4.2 Percentage reporting that they regularly follow accounts of political events United States United Kingdom Germany Italy Mexico

27 23 34 11 15

Percentage able to four or more party leaders 65 42 69 36

5

(Source: Almond and Verba, op. cit., Tables 2-4 and 2-7.)

Taking an interest in political affairs is a minority activity in all five countries, but the minorities were much smaller in Italy and Mexico than in the other three countries, and ignorance of the rames of government leaders is also great in these two countries. Too much should not be made of the low British score on knowledge of party leaders, since normally the leaders of the two major parties are the only politicians who are

62

Political behaviour

constantly thrust before the eyes of the people; there may simply not have been four figures the public generally recognized as party leaders. Here the British figure was about the same as the American and the German, with the Italian and Mexican percentages very much higher. The figures were: United States 16

United Kingdom 20

Germany 12

Italy 40

Mexico 53 [84]

A majority of the Mexican respondents were unable to name any party leader, and this in a country with an elected president. Other survey findings reinforce the argument that the extent to which people recognize the importance for them of the state is linked to the amount of interest they take in political activity and the degree to which they are willing to receive political communications. The authors of The American Voter [85] traced several factors which were linked with a person's decision to perform the one political action available to every citizen in a modern democracy: to vote. Two which are relevant to the present discussion are the level of interest in election campaigns and the extent of the respondent's concern about the outcome; figures relating to the 1956 presidential election are shown in Table 4.3: Table 4.3 How interested was the voter in the campaign? Percentage voting:

How much did the voter care who won? Percentage voting:

Not much Somewhat Very

Not at all Not very much Somewhat Very much

58 72 87

52

69

76

84

(Source: A Campbell et al, op. cit., Tables 5-4 and 5-5.)

The conclusions are not, perhaps, very surprising: the greater the interest or concern the respondent felt, the more likely was

63

The good citizen

he to go out and vote. S.M. Lipset pointed out that turnout in elections tends to rise at times of major and well-publicized crises in a country's system of government. [86] This, then, is the first indication of a link between politics and the citizen: the extent to which he feels that politics should concern him and about which he therefore gains some knowledge. From here we must move on to consider people's feelings and evaluations of politics and government, and this we can divide into a consideration of people's reactions to input and output functions. In the case of inputs, the chief question is how far citizens feel that the means provided for them to influence the government are effective: whether their views are noticed and whether the choice they make when marking their ballot papers is a real one. Thus in a survey of voters in Stockport, 60 per cent of the sample thought that voters had a big influence on the way the country is governed, with only 35 per cent feeling that voters had not much influence. [87] Again, the authors of The American Voter found a strong correlation between the feeling that the voter could influence the government and the propensity to vote, the percentage turning out increasing markedly with a greater sense of political efficacy, as Table 4.4 shows: Table 4.4 Relationship between sense of political efficacy and voter turnout Sense of political efficacy

LOW

Percentage voting

52

HIGH 60

75

84

91

(Source: The American Voter Table 5-6, p. 105.) A n o t h e r indicator of allegiant attitudes a m o n g A m e r i c a n voters was the presence in a large p r e p o n d e r a n c e of t h e m of a strong sense of duty to vote; the stronger the sense of duty, the greater the propensity to vote. T h i r t e e n per cent of the 89 p e o p l e with a low sense of duty to vote, d i d so, c o m p a r e d with 85 per cent of the 812 w h o h a d the strongest sense of duty. [88] Comparative data adds further c o n f i r m a t i o n to the argument

64

Political behaviour

that a high value placed by citizens upon the input functions of the system is an important concomitant of successful democratic politics. Almond and Verba asked their samples whether they felt that they could do something about an unjust local or national regulation; their findings are shown in Table 4.5: Table 4.5 Percentage who say that they can do something about an unjust regulation

United States United Kingdom Germany Italy Mexico

Local

National

77 78 62 51 52

75 62 38 28 38

(Source: Almond and Verba, op. cit., Table 4-1, p. 142.)

The percentage of people who feel that they can do something about unjust regulations declines as one moves away from the most stable and oldest established democracies, Britain and the United States. In the last three countries there is a marked difference between the attitude to national and to local government which does not exist in Britain and America. The difference is particularly marked in Germany and Italy, neither of which was unified as a nation-state until the eighteen-seventies, and parochial attitudes and loyalties still seem to be strong in both countries. Almond and Verba also studied the attitudes of the citizens of the five countries to voting and elections, and sought to determine how far the people thought these institutions performed their intended functions. Thus, while 71 per cent of Americans felt a sense of satisfaction when going to the polls, only 43 per cent of Britons, 35 per cent of Germans, 30 per cent of Italians, and 34 per cent of the Mexican respondents enjoyed the same sense of satisfaction. When they were invited

The good citizen

65

to give their reactions to election campaigning by candidates and parties, a similar pattern emerged; 66 per cent of Americans and 52 per cent of Britons sometimes found such campaigns pleasant and enjoyable, contrasted with 28 per cent of Germans, 18 per cent of Italians, and 34 per cent of Mexicans. [89] Italians in particular do not appear to value the input function of their political system at all highly, and apparently regard them as useless and futile; typical Italian responses to the question on feelings when going to vote were: 'I am afraid I always worry about voting, and that I might do the wrong thing*, and 'The last time I went to the polls with a feeling almost of disgrace, of indifference/[90] Voting causes feelings of anxiety or alienation among Italians. One odd finding relates to Germany, where the more education a person had received, the less he felt attracted to the inputs of the political system, whereas the opposite was the case in all the other countries. Almond and Verba explain this in terms of the authoritarian structure of German education and the fear of politics engendered by the experiences of the middle classes in the Third Reich and under the Allied occupation which followed Germany's defeat in the Second World War. (Many middle-class Germans also felt ashamed of having supported the Nazi Party before and during the war, and did not want to risk becoming involved in another political movement which might lead them to similar disasters and to commit similar crimes.) So, as far as input functions are concerned, there are clear differences between the five countries. In particular the extent to which their peoples regard such activities as voting and electioneering as having any significance for them individually varies considerably. Both in terms of feelings about the input side of the political system and in terms of evaluations of its usefulness, the citizens of the less stable and successful democracies produced more apathetic and alienated responses to Almond and Verba's questions. Turning now to the output functions of the political system, we find similar phenomena. One product of the system is political leadership, and thus a useful pointer to the extent to which outputs are accepted and valued is how people regard their political leaders. In Britain, for example, it would seem

66

Political behaviour

that politicians are fairly highly regarded; Rose and Mossawir found that political influence was more acceptable to their respondents in Stockport than was the influence of other elite groups, as Table 4.6 shows: Table 4.6 Influence of personalities or groups on government decisions

A lot Prime Minister Members of Parliament Big Business The Press Trade Unions

Percentage saying: Too much

62 54 52 46 39

5 4 29 11 24

(Source: Rose and Mossawir, op. cit., Table 2, p. 185.)

A majority of respondents thought that politicians had power and very few thought that power excessive, whereas the influence of other groups on government decisions, especially that of the two sides of industry, was recognized as considerable and regarded by many respondents as illegitimate. These findings can be given a comparative perspective by considering the responses Almond and Verba obtained when they asked people of which aspects of their countries they were most proud. Three important sets of answers are shown in Table 4.7. In the Anglo-Saxon democracies, politics and government were definitely top of the league, whereas in the European countries they took a very low place indeed, with other national activities gaining a clear preference over politics. Mexicans were more proud of their politics than were Germans or Italians, but they have a revolutionary tradition to give them that pride. The high level of subject culture in Germany is particularly noted by Almond and Verba, who commented: The German respondents, who infrequently took pride in their political system, included the largest proportion who took pride in their national economic accomplishments. They also included the largest proportion who expressed

67

The good citizen Table 4.7 Selected aspects of their countries in which people take pride United States UK. Germany

Italy

Mexico

Percentage feeling proud of: Governmental and political institutionss Economic system Contribution to the arts

85 23

41 10

7 33

3 3

30 24

1

6

11

16

9

(Source: Almond and Verba, op. cit., Table 3-1, p. 64.)

pride in the characteristics of Germans as people (frugality, cleanliness, hard work and efficiency).[91] In the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, when the samples were taken, the German economic miracle was a frequent talking-point throughout Europe. More interesting from our point of view are the characteristics which the German respondents attributed to themselves with pride, which related chiefly to an ability to work hard and well and cause no trouble, essentially the responses of a people imbued with a subject cultural orientation. These findings can be more specifically related to the output functions of the political system when we consider what the respondents considered was the impact of national government upon their lives. The percentage feeling that national government improved people's condition of life was markedly higher in Britain and America than in the other three countries; the figures were: United States 76

United Kingdom 77

Germany 61

Italy 66

Mexico 58[92]

Responses to outputs are thus definitely more allegiant in the first two countries, although in all five countries a majority of

68

Political behaviour

respondents regarded their national governments as beneficial rather than damaging to their interests. In order to obtain more specific information upon what people felt about what their governments actually do for and to them, Almond and Verba investigated people's feelings about government at the two points at which they most frequently make contact with it: at the counters of government departments and in dealings with the police. Once again, considerable differences emerge between the five countries. Taking contacts with the bureaucracy first, the proportion feeling that they were fairly treated in each country is shown in Table 4.8: Table 4.8 Percentage of people expecting fair treatment bureaucrats in: United States 83

United Kingdom 83

Germany 65

Italy 53

from

Mexico 42

(Source: Almond and Verba, op. cit., Table 3-2, p. 70.) In America, Britain, and Germany fair treatment is expected by a considerable majority of people. The finding relating to Germany should be contrasted with the Germans' low opinion of politicians and government in general, reported in the previous two tables; once again a dominance of subject orientations is indicated by the dissonance between the Germans' alienation from the political system and their high regard for their bureaucratic masters. These findings also indicate the shallow roots so far sunk by democratic attitudes and institutions in German society. The findings relating to expectations of fair treatment by the police are similar. In every country except Mexico the police were somewhat more highly regarded than the civil service, but in that country the police were regarded with markedly more suspicion. [93] The author has been told that one-way streets in Mexico City are not marked in any way, so that motorists frequently drive down them the wrong way. If one does so, at the end of the street there may be a policeman who will report the motorist for Rrosecution unless he is paid the

The good citizen

69

equivalent of £2.50 sterling. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that Almond and Verba report that over half their Mexican respondents did not expect fair treatment from the police. [94] Feelings of alienation from bureaucracy and police were found to be strong in both Italy and Mexico. In the former country, a typical response to the question on treatment by civil servants was that of a gymnastics instructor: For Heaven*s sake! The last time I was at a government office there was a poor man with a paper to fill out. He was asking the official how to fill it out. The official wouldn't pay attention, but told him, Till this paper out and that paper out and come back tomorrow.' The poor man did not know what to do. So I told the official he was there because I was paying him: everyone was paying him to be there and give explanations. He didn't open his mouth, and filled out the paper for the man.[95] Similar feelings existed among Mexicans: 'The people that work in those places are not attentive. They don't do it willingly. They are despots and get angry', said a Mexican blacksmith.[96] In both countries allegations of bribery and corruption were made against both civil servants and policemen. Almond and Verba's five countries, then, contain citizens who exhibit markedly different combinations of participant, subject and parochial cultural attitudes and who respond to various aspects of the political and governmental systems with different degrees of allegiance, apathy or alienation. In Britain and America, participant orientations and allegiant attitudes predominated, though more markedly in the latter country, and the system, its inputs and its outputs, were on the whole well regarded. In Germany subject orientations were strong and allegiant responses occurred mainly with reference to output rather than input structures, while in Italy and Mexico parochialism and alienation were common in attitudes to all aspects of government and politics. We can summarize this part of our discussion by stating four characteristics that, on the basis of the information we have considered, the good citizen in a liberal democratic polity should possess. They are:

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Political behaviour

1. He must know a certain amount about politics and recognize that this knowledge is of some importance to him. 2. He must believe that he can have some influence upon the course of political events. 3. He must believe that he will normally get fair and reason­ able treatment from the government, both in policymaking and in his individual contacts with its servants. 4. He should hold political institutions and actors in a certain regard. If these characteristics, or any of them, are lacking among the citizenry generally, a democratic polity is unlikely to command their allegiance and will probably fail to survive the onslaughts of those demanding or promising 'true freedom* or 'clean government*. In Finer's terminology, the system's supports are likely to be inadequate to ensure its stability. (See pp.42-5 above.) One further problem which this poses, the solution to which may go a long way towards explaining how the attitudes we have been considering develop, is how people acquire participant, subject or parochial orientations to their governors and to their place and role in society. Here we can offer some confirmation of the validity of Eckstein's notion of the congruence of authority patterns, since Almond and Verba have some interesting material relating to authority patterns and their integration both vertically and horizontally, to use Eckstein's terminology. (See pp.55-6 above). They examined three social environments which would probably be so central to most people's lives, and thus so crucial in the formation of their attitudes to those set in authority over them in any context, that they would play a large part in determining political attitudes and particularly in forming what Almond and Verba call the sense of civic competence. This is the feeling that a person can have a meaningful influence upon the government, can hope to be listened to and sometimes procure a change in a policy or decision. These environments are the family, the school, and the workplace. The first two constitute links between generations and are thus involved in

71

The good citizen

the process of transmitting ideas and attitudes from one generation to the next, while at the place of work the individual is exposed to influences and ideas which may either reinforce or conflict with those gained during the process of socialization up to the time he leaves school. Comparative figures showing how far individuals felt that they could influence family, school, and job decisions reveal considerable differences in the degree to which respondents in Almond and Verba's five countries perceive authoritarian or democratic structures and attitudes in these three areas, as Table 4.9 shows. Table 4.9 Percentage of respondents who felt that they:

United United States Kingdom

Had some influence on family decisions. 73 Could participate in school discussions and debates 55 Are sometimes or often consulted about decisions at work

78

Germany

Italy

Mexico

69

54

48

57

24

17

15

36

80

68

59

61

(Source: Almond and Verba, op. cit., Tables 11-1,11-2 and 11-3, p. 275-81.)

In all five countries schools emerged as the most authoritarian institutions — this is only to be expected given their role — but the proportion reporting freedom and the ability to participate varies considerably and in the expected direction. The countries whose citizens reported the highest rates of participation in these three non-political areas also reported the highest sense of civic competence. For example, Britons and Americans felt that they were more likely to be able to do something about an unjust regulation than did Germans, Italians or Mexicans (see p.64) and they also felt the most

72

Political behaviour

satisfaction in going to the polls (see pp.64-5). Almond and Verba were also able to show that the influences of these three environments were cumulative. Using responses to such questions as those relating to ability to alter unjust regulations and satisfaction when voting, to which we have just referred, Almond and Verba prepared scores of subjective citizen competence and prepared a series of tables, comparing the percentages of those achieving the highest scores among those who did or did not participate in discussions or decisions in family, school, and at work. The results are shown in Table 4.10: Table 4.10 Percentages with highest subjective civic competence scores among: Family participants Family non-participants Job participants United States United Kingdom Germany Italy Mexico

Job nonparticipants

Job participants

Job non­ participants

77

70

70

45

75

58

64

61

38

59

60

44

50

56

52

43

37 37 24 45

(Source: Almond and Verba, op. cit., Table 11-7, p. 298.) In most cases, participation in either or both fields increased the sense of competence, the feeling that one can influence political decisions. The more a person is allowed to participate in decisions affecting his personal and social life, the more likely is he to expect and feel able to participate in politics, which suggests that Eckstein was right to link authority patterns outside politics with the stability and success of political activity and the political system. To sum up, then: for a democratic polity to survive, its

The good citizen

73

citizens must have certain attitudes and the good citizen can be defined in terms of personal beliefs, opinions and attitudes. The same exercise could, of course, be performed for any other type of regime. That the investigation of the relationship between the state and citizen attitudes has not been extended in this way is partly a consequence of the preoccupation of the behavioural students of politics with democratic politics and partly, perhaps, because authoritarian regimes would probably not allow the bases of their support to be explored in this way. The act of research might kindle subversive ideas among the people. It is unfortunate that so little comparative work has been undertaken in this field; it is necessary to rely too heavily on Almond and Verba's book, especially in view of the need to treat their findings with some caution. (See p.64 above.) Nonetheless, their work and that of other behaviour­ alists has thrown new light on and has suggested new approaches to the question of the attributes of the good citizen, and the link between individual attitudes and the nature and stability of the political system under which those individuals live. Much, however, remains to be done.

Chapter 5 Aspects of toleration If men wish to engage in politics, to distribute their limited resources and make common decisions by a process of debate and communal decision, they must respect one another's opinions and interests. If one group cannot accept government by another or cannot accept a decision which is not in its own favour, then politics becomes impossible. If groups within society become isolated from one another to such an extent that one regards another as lacking some essential element of humanity, or so wicked that it cannot be allowed any say in running society's affairs, then one group will seek to prevent the other playing such a part by all possible means, including violence and subversion of the system of decision-making itself. This may happen if issues pile up, as it were, before they can be resolved; if religious prejudices, class interests, and regional allegiances all coincide and lead to disputes, a stable political system is less likely than when disputes are resolved one by one, pragmatically, and when no one group is consistently denied favourable decisions. As Lipset put it in a key passage: A stable democracy requires relatively moderate tension among its contending political forces. And political moderation is facilitated by the system's capacity to resolve key dividing issues before new ones arise. If the issues of religion, citizenship and Collective bargaining1 are allowed to accumulate, they reinforce each other and the more reinforced and correlated the sources of cleavage, the less likelihood for political tolerance. Similarly, the greater the isolation from heterogeneous political stimuli, the more background factors 'pile up' in one direction, the greater the chance that the group or individual will have an extremist perception. These two relationships ... are joined by the fact that parties reflecting accumulated and unresolved issues

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-7

75

Aspects of toleration

will further seek to isolate their followers from conflicting stimuli. [97] An Ulster Unionist political activist, who is also a member of a lodge of the Orange Order, attends a church of one of the more fundamentalist Protestant sects, lives in a solidly Protestant area, and drinks in a Protestant p u b , will have no social or intellectual contacts with R o m a n Catholics at all and will receive a great n u m b e r of anti-Catholic messages and very few tolerant or pro-Catholic ones. He is therefore likely to be highly intolerant of them and to believe that it would be both sinful and dangerous to allow such people any say in the affairs of the community. His acceptance of Sir James Craig's slogan, 'A Protestant country for a Protestant people 1 , is likely to be firm. Similarly, people working in isolation, like lumberjacks or farmers, are likely to find the world outside their settlements and their trades strange, intimidating, or at best irrelevant and will therefore tend to be apathetic towards the political system or alienated from it. T h e authors of The American Voter found that people working on American farms were consistently less involved in national politics than other sections of the population, even non-farming country dwellers, and certainly less involved than city dwellers — even than unskilled urban workers. Table 5.1 presents some of their figures: Table 5.1 Political involvement groups, 1952 Level of political involvement: percentages

Farm

High Medium Low

19 51 30

of various

occupational

Rural non-farm

Urban residents

Unskilled workers

31 41 28

42 34 24

28 33 39

(Source: A. Campbell et aL, op. cit., Table 15-5, p. 411.) T h e physically isolated nature of farm work is reflected in a remarkably high level of political apathy. Only when their

76

Political behaviour

economic position is directly threatened by government action, if then, are these farmers likely to play an active and distinctive political role. Toleration, then, is first of all dependent upon the extent to which people mix with a varied selection of their fellows. It also depends in part upon the level of affluence; if a person is slaving to scratch a bare living, he is unlikely to be very tolerant of his fellow men. In a consideration of attitudes towards free speech for Communists, critics of religion, advocates of nationalization and other exponents of minority views, research in America has shown that the lower strata of society are less tolerant than those above them, as Table 5.2 shows: Table 5.2 Percentage of male respondents giving the more tolerant responses with respect to civil liberty, by occupation Professionals and semi-professionals Proprietors, managers and officials Clerical and sales staff Manual workers Farmers or farm workers

66 51 49 30 20

(Source: S.M. Lipset, op. cit., Table 2, p. 104.)

Once again, agriculture emerges as a distinctive sector apart from the decline in toleration with decreasing income and status. Of course, such a statement ignores the link between the level of education received and the level of toleration, a point we shall consider later. In general, toleration depends upon the extent to which people mix with a varied selection of their fellows and on their level of affluence which can include, at a societal level, the amount of education available. From such general conclusions we can move on to make a number of more specific points about the conditions under which a society's members will be tolerant and a democratic regime can survive.

Aspects of toleration

77

Regional or racial conflict can be fatal to the survival or effectiveness of any regime and can lead to the disruption of the entire country by civil war, as happened in Nigeria and the Congo. Edward Luttwak pointed out that even a military government is by no means proof against such problems; indeed the existence of a tribal or regional entity strong enough to resist its takeover can be fatal to its continuation in office. This is because a coup d'etat can succeed only where there is a single centre, command of which will entail domination over the whole country. Luttwak writes that the United States ... was the product of a more or less voluntary union of states and, until the development of Presidential authority in the course of the nineteenth century, the government in Washington was little more than an agency for the common problems of the states. Thus a coup staged in Washington in, say, 1800 would have seized an empty symbol, but by 1900 the development of federal authority was such that a coup would have led to control over much of the country. [98] The success of a coup d'etat depends largely on ensuring speedy domination of the country and thi§ can only be obtained when seizure of the capital city gives one such domination. Independent, autonomous, or even important rival power centres render it impossible to obtain unchallenged control. In democratic systems, equally, the refusal of a sectional or regional grouping to accept the legitimacy of the government can undermine the entire political system — hence the outcry in Canada over President de Gaulle's Vive le Quebec litre speech which was seen as encouraging French-Canadian separatism and as increasing the threat to the unity of the country posed by French-Canadian disaffection. Turning to the psychological dimension, we have seen in the last chapter that the stability of a political system is dependent, at least in part, upon the attitudes of its citizens towards it, and we have argued with Lipset that in the case of democracy, toleration of opposing interests and viewpoints is essential. H J. Eysenck has prepared a model of political personality based

78

Political behaviour

upon two dimensions: an ideological left-right dimension and a personality dimension which lies between 'tough-minded' and 'tender-minded* people; this dimension might also be described loosely as an authoritarian-liberal personality dimension. [99] The ideological dimension lies between radicalism and conservatism and is easily analysed in terms of partisan feelings and opinions in a given political context. For example, in Britain Labour Party supporters are radical and Tories conservative, with Liberals somewhere in the middle. The other dimension is somewhat more difficult to describe, but is linked with authoritarian and intolerant attitudes over a wide range of issues, from 'coloured people are inferior' and 'Jews are too powerful' to insistent demands for sexual permissiveness, which will allow the tough-minded person's aggression and self- assertiveness free rein .[100] To quote Eysenck: On the tough-minded side we have openly aggressive and sexual attitudes. The aggressive ones favour flogging, the death penalty, harsh treatment for criminals; corporal punishment for children and so forth. The openly sexual attitudes are those in favour of companionate or trial marriages; easier divorce laws; the abolition of abortion laws, thus making abortion easily available to everyone and so on. On the other hand, attitudes characterizing the tender-minded end of the continuum emphasize ethical and religious restraints and pacifism; the giving up of national sovereignty; going back to religion; and making religious education compulsory; the making illegal of birth control and the abolition of flogging and the death penalty — these are characteristic of tender-minded views.[101] Not all these attitudes necessarily correspond to the same end of the continuum; for example, adherence to dogmatic religious beliefs could be a sign of aggression and therefore tough-mindedness, but Eysenck is able to show, for example, that adherents to the most authoritarian and intolerant political creeds, Fascism and Communism, obtain higher aggression scores than their more liberal or more apathetic fellows. [102] The result of Eysenck's definitions is a model on which political parties and movements, or individuals, can be located, as in Figure 5.1:

79

Aspects of toleration Figure 5.1

TOUGH Communists

Fascists

CONSERVATIVE

RADICAL

Conservatives (Tories)

Socialists Liberals TENDER

The model can be applied by administering a questionnaire to individuals or samples and has been used now on quite a large number of occasions.[103] Clearly, excessively toughminded attitudes in particular are inconsistent with a democratic political system and the tough minds of both Left and Right are members of the Fascist and Communist movements, the two foes of democracy in modern times. The same dimensions have been applied to British, German and Japanese citizens and have been used to examine the attitudes of judges,[104] The findings can be correlated with partisan allegiances and attitudes to the political and judicial systems of the countries concerned. Almond and Verba approached the same problem from a different perspective — a more limited one in the sense that, as with the rest of their work, it is concerned with the survival of democratic polities. They took for their starting-point the assumption that if you hate or fear the opposition parties or groups sufficiently, you will go to any lengths to prevent them

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Political behaviour

obtaining power, or even, perhaps, obtaining a share of power. The reactions of Chilean lorry owners to Marxist government or of the more extreme Northern Ireland loyalists to proposals for power-sharing with Roman Catholic politicians provide two contemporary examples. There should, therefore, be a connection between stable democracy and the prevalence of tolerant attitudes towards supporters of opposing political parties, in both political and non-political contexts, For example, Almond and Verba asked their subjects what their reactions would be to their sons or daughters announcing that they intended to marry opposition supporters. They carried out this exercise with both conservatives and radicals, but in order to reduce the complexity of our presentation, we shall consider only the responses of conservatives here. Table 5.3 shows that there were markedly different responses to the question: 'Would you be pleased, displeased or indifferent if your son or daughter married a fellow conservative [here the name of the appropriate conservative party would be given] or an opposition supporter?* In Britain and America toleration was extensive, with the vast majority of respondents indifferent to the political allegiances of future sons- and daughters-in-law. The Germans were rather keener on their children marrying into the Christian Democratic Union and it should be remembered that this party has religious links with the Catholic Church, especially in southern Germany; religious and political influences thus reinforce each other. Furthermore, the relationship between Church and State is still a source of political controversy in West Germany, whereas in Britain this is no longer the case, although she still has an established Church. In Italy, where party politics and religion are strongly associated and the Communist Party still subjected to bitter Church hostility, there is much less toleration as can be seen in a typical Italian response: when asked how he would react if his children wanted to join a political party, the respondent answered: 'If I knew about it, I would tell them to choose a party of the right, never of the left. If they became

Aspec

Table 5.3

Pleased Displeased Indifferent

United States Rep. to Rep. 16 0 84

United Kingdom

Germany

Rep. to Dem.

Con. to Con.

Con. to Lab.

CDU to CDU

CDU to SPD

3 4 93

23 0 77

0 12 87

42 0 48

1 19 61

Italy Pleased Displeased Indifferent Key to parties:

of toleration

Reactions to son or daughter marrying a fellow conservative or an opposition supporter:

Mexico

DC to DC

DC to PCI

DC to PSI

59 1 29

1 58 28

1 46 39

PAN to PAN 23 7 65

PAN to PRI 2 22 70

United States: Republican and Democrat United Kingdom: Conservative and Labour Germany: Christian Democratic Union and Social Democratic Party Italy: Democristiana, Italian Communist Party, Italian Socialist Party. Mexico: Party of National Action and Revolutionary Party

(Source: Almond and Verba, op. cit., adapted from Tables 4-6 to 4-10, p. 97 - 101.)

oo

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Political behaviour

Communists, I would beat them like dogs and hate them/[105] The typical German response, by contrast, was to be extremely chary of any party ties whatever and to discourage children from joining parties. 'It is better for him [her son] to stay away. Under Hitler we went through that mess. I hardly think it would be any better today', was a German housewife's response to the question of reactions to a child wishing to join a political party.[106] In Mexico, where the parties have no religious connotations, tolerance and indifference were once more the order of the day. Thus it can be seen that where religion and politics are linked, levels of toleration tend to be reduced, a proposition also considered by Eckstein.[107] S.M. Lipset also gives examples of the ways in which other attitudes influence the level of political toleration, although they are not as precisely established as those given by Almond and Verba: Political systems are linked in different societies to ethnic religious caste or regional economic systems. Their perpetu­ ation may seem contradictory to one need, such as the economic, but of major relevance to others. For example, one party may be viewed as the party of the immigrant Catholics, while the other is the party of the Anglo-Saxons. In Massachusetts it has been almost impossible for a person of Irish or Jewish extraction to achieve position in the Republican Party. The London Economist, discussing contemporary British practices in selecting Parliamentary candidates, reports that 'The chairman of the Labour Party's national executive was excluded from consideration for one seat because he was not a Roman Catholic. Despite Disraeli, it is still difficult to get a Tory seat if you are a Jew' ... The traditional left-right cleavage in France ... is related to religious affiliation. Secular, anti-clerical, or Protestant and conservative French businessmen will not vote for a clerical conservative party, and religious radical Catholics will not vote for a radical anti-clerical party. This seeming irrationality, when politics is viewed along economic interest or liberal-conservative lines, may actually be an expression of the greater salience to a group and its members of other values and tensions. [108]

Aspects of toleration

83

It is what seems important to people that matters; the depth of their feelings and the extent to which opinions and feelings reinforce one another and isolate their holders from their fellows, is what will determine their effect on the political system. One determinant of the variety of opinions and experiences to which a person is exposed is education. At secondary school and even more at university or college, adolescents and young adults meet contemporaries from a wide range of social, religious, and regional backgrounds. A boy educated in rural southern England may never meet a coloured man, a Roman Catholic or a Yorkshireman, but if he goes to university he may well meet and become friendly with any or all three of these unfamiliar types and realize that after all they are quite reasonable people. Education should also give a person a deeper understanding of his own views and station in life, besides giving him more information about other people's backgrounds. He will, therefore, become more tolerant to others who have different origins, beliefs, attitudes or accents from his own. S.M. Lipset gives figures which show that in America willingness to recognize that Negroes are entitled to civil rights increases with education, where social class is held constant. In a survey taken in 1955, among unskilled workers only 13 per cent of those with the minimum grade school education showed high levels of liberal attitudes towards Negroes, compared with 40 per cent of high school graduates from the same social class. Similarly, among the upper white-collar groups the percentage showing a high level of toleration for Negroes and a high degree of acceptance of their entitlement to civil rights began at 26 per cent of those who had finished their education with grade school, rising through 56 per cent of high school graduates to 83 per cent of university graduates. [109] Again, in 1953 a sample of West Germans were asked whether they favoured a political system containing several political parties; the affirmative response from manual workers was 29 per cent from those who had finished their education with elementary school, and 52 per cent from those who had gone on to high school or further education. The equivalent figures for government officials were 59 per cent for ex-elementary school pupils and 78 per cent for high school

84

Political behaviour

and higher graduates.[110] Unfortunately, Almond and Verba did not relate their findings on toleration to levels of education, but a general pointer may be their findings on the extent to which the citizens of three of their five countries took pride in their political systems. Table 5.4 shows that the percentage taking pride in the political system under which they lived rose with increasing education: Table 5.4 Percentage taking pride in their country's political system, by education Elementary only United States United Kingdom Mexico

81 41 22

Some university education 92 75 38

(Source: adapted from Almond and Verba, op. cit., pp. 67-8.) In Italy and Germany, the most problematic countries in terms of the congruence of their political systems with the attitudes of their peoples, education made little difference to the low levels of allegiance to the political system in these countries. Education, then, is often, although not always, an important determinant of levels of toleration. Political attitudes, including toleration, are linked with other attitudes and these are formed by the social activity groups of which the citizen is a member. Opinions and group memberships are either superimposed one upon another, presenting the individual with a series of compatible views of the world which support and strengthen one another, or cross-cutting, presenting a variety of different and possibly incompatible views. This latter collection of attitudes and affiliations is more likely to lead to toleration, since it will accustom citizens to dealing with and reconciling different points of view within their own minds. Superimposed opinions or memberships will simply confirm the individual in the rightness of his existing convictions. Hence the degree of exposure of an individual, a group, or a society to either superimposed or cross-cutting opinions or activities will have

Aspects of toleration

85

important consequences for his or their level of toleration. Membership of a trade union reinforces the tendency of British working-class people to vote Labour. The authors of a study of affluent workers in the Vauxhall Motors town of Luton in the early nineteen-sixties found that 79 per cent of union members intended to vote Labour at the next General Election, compared with 55 per cent of non-members. All respondents were working class.[Ill] Lipset argued that the reason for the distinctive political behaviour of American farmers is that they live in isolation and tend to see only their own kind, so that cross-cutting influences are rare. Angus Campbell and his colleagues found that farmers did not react strongly to economic pressure by paying more attention to politics —­ seemingly irrational behaviour from the point of view of men concerned with their own wellbeing. Between 1952 and 1956 American farmers suffered from falling prices and rising costs, yet political interest among farmers at best remained constant between the two presidential elections; the farm sector of the sample 'still failed to register political interest equivalent to that of the skilled worker in the urban status hierarchy'[112] despite the fact that the rural sample included farm owners and managers as well as workers — the whole of the agricultural class hierarchy, in fact. For farmers, even when under economic pressure, politics remained largely irrelevant because of their isolation from all but a narrow range of societal influences. Here, then, we have two examples of groups whose activities and surroundings strengthen certain political attitudes — in the one case allegiance to a left-wing party and in the other rejection of politics as irrelevant — to the exclusion of others. A particularly interesting set of social institutions from the point of view of the creation of tolerant or dogmatic political attitudes are the churches. Most churches are authoritarian structures — the Roman Catholic Church more so than most others — and their members tend to be associated with one party or another. David Butler and Donald Stokes showed, for instance, that not for nothing has the Church of England been described as the Tory Party at prayer; in their sample 41 per cent of Anglicans were Conservatives, compared with 23 per

86

Political behaviour

cent of Methodists and 24 per cent of Roman Catholics. [113] We have already seen that Almond and Verba's survey showed that where political parties have a religious significance, toleration of members of opposition parties and their views tend to be lower than where this is not the case;[114] religious and political attitudes reinforce one another and lead to greater isolation from other points of view. This conclusion is strengthened by the same authors1 finding that the more frequently one goes to church, the less tolerant one tends to be of the political opposition. Table 5.5 amplifies these points. Table 5.5 Percentages of conservatives who would be displeased if their son or daughter married a left-winger, by frequency of church attendance. Attend church at least weekly United States United Kingdom Germany Italy Mexico

3 23 25 60 24

Attend church less than weekly or never 4

10 13 44 18

(Source: Almond and Verba, op. cit., Table 4-11, p. 102.)

In all the countries except America, toleration of a filial marriage to a left-winger was markedly less prevalent among regular churchgoers than among the irregular or lapsed members of their churches. This difference was, as one might expect, most marked where religious affiliations have a political significance, as in the case in Germany and Italy. Social groups and organizations, then, clearly have a considerable influence upon political attitudes and the extent to which a citizen is exposed to diverse or consistent opinions will help to determine the strength of his party self-image and the extent to which is he prepared to tolerate the opposition being active and winning power. They thus have a large role in determining whether conflict in a given society is of a type that can be mediated by political means or whether intolerance is

Aspects of toleration

87

sufficient to render the political system unworkable. So far, we have been concerned with situations in which the level of intolerance may be so high that orderly debate and peaceful compromise become difficult or impossible and hence democratic politics either unstable or unsuitable for dealing with the society's problems. Meaningful democracy will also be impossible, however, if there are insufficient expressed differences of opinion to give rise to a political debate about which members of society can care sufficiently to involve themselves in it, or at least to give it a reasonable share of their attention. Alexis de Tocqueville warned that in an increasingly affluent society in which democratic political institutions and liberties were taken for granted, the citizenry might become entirely preoccupied with enjoying their affluence and ensuring their own comfort, and watchful that their standard of living does not fall behind that of their neighbours. In such a situation, the political debate might lose its vitality and ultimately disappear altogether; he warned that men like liberty but they love equality, and might sacrifice the former in order to ensure the latter: I believe that democratic peoples have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves, they will seek and treasure it and will not willingly allow anyone to take it from them. But for equality they have an ardent, insatiable, ineradicable and everlasting passion; they want equality in conditions of freedom, but if they cannot thus obtain equality, they will seek it in slavery. They will suffer poverty, servitude, barbar­ ism, but not aristocracy. [115] He warned that all citizens in the future might become equal in serving an all-powerful government which guaranteed them equality with their neighbours, a fear which his friend and correspondent, John Stuart Mill, shared.[116] In modern times, political thinkers and researchers have on several occasions warned that this state of affairs may be in the process of developing; that in an age when most citizens of the democracies enjoy a self-satisfied affluence, they are ceasing to value their democratic political institutions; and that politics is being reduced to a technological debate about how to ensure the continuance and increase of affluence. They have argued

88

Political behaviour

that political controversy is thus declining to vanishing-point and democratic politics becoming increasingly without significance for the bulk of the populace. In Britain such a warning was sounded by a sociologist not concerned very much with politics. Richard Hoggart, in his seminal work, The Uses of Literacy, [117] argued that modern mass communication methods were being used, especially by advertisers, in a way which would increasingly cause people not to think beyond the satisfaction of their immediate passions and desires and the alleviation of their immediate ills. More distant goals and ideals would disappear, as would the importance for the citizen of norms and rules which might be irksome in the short term but beneficial in the long run. Hoggart was particularly alarmed at the decay of workingclass culture, about which he waxes rather sentimental. On politics he warned his readers that ... there can arise ... not the assertion of a freedom to be non-political; nor simply its use, in disappointment and puzzlement, 'to contract out' of the shouting and generalities which assail everyone today; but a deep refusal to be committed outside the small known area of life. 'Anything goes* is related to 'Live and let live1, but carries the matter a good deal further; the open mind has become a yawning chasm ... In this condition people will accept almost anything without objecting ... The tolerant phrases have been joined by others in a similar dress; the new depreciate the old and together they have become the ritual uniforms of a shared unwillingness to admit that freedom can have its punishments. Anything goes and there is no scale.[118] The firm and fair-minded toleration of *I disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it1 is replaced by a resigned 'What does it matter? They'll do anything these days'; meaningful debate declines and eventually vanishes. It was this last eventuality that Lipset warned against in his famous postscript to Political Man entitled 'The End of Ideology?1. Political issues, he said, were being reduced to *a little more' and 'a little less', and he feared that as a result

Aspects of toleration

89

democratic debate would cease to be valued and might in the end disappear. Like Hoggart, he viewed with concern the increasing preoccupation with status and immediate pleasure encouraged by advertisers and others, and pointed out that answers to the problems of modern society are being sought in sociology, not politics.[119] Evidence for the development of a politics without ideological content or class conflict is hard to come by though. When the Labour Party lost its third successive General Election in 1959, some of the political pundits argued that its position was becoming hopeless. The workers were increasingly affluent and as they began to adopt a middle-class way of life they were also adopting middle-class politics and voting Conservative. This thesis was advanced by David Butler and Richard Rose in the Nuffield College study of the 1959 election;[120] it was later given some support by a sample survey carried out by Dr Mark Abrams for the journal Socialist Commentary, mouthpiece of the 'Gaitskellite' wing of the Labour Party, and subsequently published under the title Must Labour Lose?[\2\] A table much discussed and quoted at the time showed that the self-assigned class of objectively working-class non-Labour voters was higher than the class assigned to themselves by objectively working-class Labour voters. [122] This thesis was later brought into question, partly by further survey research such as the Luton study, [123] which showed that however affluent workers became they retained their working-class political affiliations; partly also by the fact that in the nineteen-sixties Labour won two General Elections. It is significant, though, from the point of view of the thesis advanced by Hoggart and others, that there is some evidence that the basis of people's party self-image is changing. In particular, a working-class identification with Labour as the party of that class is tending to give way to support for the Labour Party based on an expectation that the party will pursue policies likely to improve workers' standards of living.[124] Thus political loyalties may now depend to a greater extent on the fulfilment of material expectations; if these are not met, the voters may desert their party or lapse into apathy. We shall consider this phenomenon more fully in a later chapter, but it may give some justification to the fears of Hoggart and others that the peoples of the Western

90

Political behaviour

democracies are becoming excessively preoccupied with their own material wellbeing. Certainly it is true that on both sides of the Atlantic turnout in elections has been tending to fall for some considerable time now. Meaningful, effective and stable democratic politics is thus dependent for existence on the presence of both consensus and cleavage. The rules of the political game must be acceptable to the players, who must be content to play within these rules. Political actors must regard one another with some respect and trust; at the very least, their hostility towards one another must stop short of the point at which one group is unable to accept and abide by decisions reached by or given in favour of another group. Equally, there must be disagreement openly expressed and sufficient to ensure a lively and interesting debate, and to hold the attention of the general public. If the public's attention cannot be caught by politics, they will cease to value their votes and their political liberties, and they will move towards a condition in which they may be willing to accept the curtailment and abolition of their liberties by an authoritarian regime which promises to ensure their continued economic wellbeing. At the same time, stable and effective government will be possible only if most citizens are prepared to concede that certain of their number have a right to issue commands which they expect the rest to obey. The process whereby people come to accept the structure of authority in the society into which they are born or into which they move is the subject of our next chapter.

Chapter 6 The hierarchy of politics Political systems are hierarchies. At the top are prime ministers and presidents, surrounded by their ministers and senior civil service advisers. Below them come national public representatives and senior party officials, local councillors and officials, and at the bottom the electorate. Each has his distinctive part to play and may at times become important for those higher up the hierarchy. At election time the electorate determine the. composition of the higher levels of the hierarchy, for example. In general, though, a stable political system will still resemble the system described by Ulysses in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cresstda: How could communities, Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogenity and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark, what discord follows! [125] Each member of the political system has his role to play, as voter, party worker, councillor, member of Parliament, civil servant and so forth, and each performs a function or functions: voting, canvassing, asking parliamentary questions and many more. The question with which we shall be concerned in what follows is: How do people discover what their roles are, and how is hierarchy established and maintained? People learn a political role in childhood and may establish or change it in adolescence or adulthood..Peter Berger gives the example of a private soldier who is promoted to officer rank and has therefore to learn a new military role. At first he will feel himself still one of the ranks and will be

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-8

92

Political behaviour

embarrassed at being saluted by men who were once his mess­ mates, but within a short time he will come to accept each salute as 'an act of obeisance, received as a matter of course by the one who returns it*. His view of himself as 'a superior somebody' will be reinforced with each salute he receives: He not only acts like an officer, he feels like one. Gone are the embarrassment, the apologetic attitude, the Fm-just­ another-guy-really grin. If on some occasion an enlisted man should fail to salute with the appropriate amount of enthusiasm or even commit the unthinkable act of failing to salute at all, our officer is not merely going to punish a violation of military regulations. He will be driven with every fibre of his being to redress an offence against the appointed order of his cosmos.[126] The new officer thus learns his role and acquires the attitudes that go with it within a fairly short period after his formal appointment to his new position. In politics most of this process of role identification is normally completely in childhood and adolescence. Writing of the British political system, Richard Rose said: An Englishman's political actions will reflect a wide variety of influences, some of which were prominent in the political system long before his birth, and have been transmitted to him by parents, childhood friends and early education. By the time a young Englishman is old enough to vote he will have had sufficient indication of what is expected of him so that there will be predispositions towards certain forms of political activity. But adult influences, particularly for those involved actively in political parties and government, can be effective in teaching new attitudes towards politics or altering old ones. Political socialization occurs throughout an individual's lifetime; in many instances, however, what is freshly learned, serves primarily to reinforce what was learned previously. [127] By voting age, most of us know our place in the political hierarchy and only a minority will seek to change their position after this stage in life. This assumption has led many political sociologists to concentrate their attention on the circumstances

The hierarchy of politics

93

of a person's birth, and the influences which come to bear on him in childhood and adolescence, when seeking to explain the process whereby individuals locate themselves in the political hierarchy.[128] One approach to the study of the political hierarchy is to identify leading decision-makers in a particular polity and examine their origins, early upbringing, and education. In 1957 the report of a Tribunal of Enquiry, appointed to investigate allegations that a proposed change in the Bank Rate had been improperly 'leaked' to the advantage of certain banks and city firms, was published[129] and this report gave a detailed account of who was involved in making financial and economic decisions in Britain. The origins, family background, and education of the people who emerged as influential (including Cabinet and other ministers, senior civil servants, Bank of England and joint stock bank directors and directors of city firms) were examined by Thomas Lupton and C. Shirley Wilson with the aid of reference publications such as Who's Who, Burke's Peerage and Debrett's Peerage, with a view to ascertaining how they had arrived at their powerful positions and what their relationships with one another might be.[130] These top decision-makers were shown to be related to one another by family or marriage[131] and also, in many cases, to have been educated at certain schools and universities. Table 6.1 shows the educational background of six groups of top decision-makers discussed by Lupton and Wilson. Table 6.1 shows that many members of the British political and economic elites were educated at one school, Eton, and two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which are traditionally regarded as the providers of education for those of wealthy and established background. Only in the case of the higher Civil Service, entrance to which is by competitive examination, was there no large proportion of Etonians, but Oxford and Cambridge were remarkably successful in supplying suitable candidates. For the rest, Reginald Bevin's comment that, for admission to the British governing elite, 'To be landed is no longer a must. Eton is',[132] is amply confirmed. In every case except that of the civil servants, around one-third of the members of the elite groups came from this one school.

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Political behaviour

Table 6.1 School and university education of top decision-makers: percentages Elite Groups

Eton

Cabinet and other ministers 32.4 Senior civil 4.1 servants Bank of England directors 33.3 Directors of "Big five" Banks 29.7 Directors of city firms 32.7 Directors of insurance companies 30.9

School Other public schools

Total

University Oxford and Cambridge

17.6

50.0

25.0

15.1

19.2

50.0

33.3

66.6

9.0

18.3

48.0

74.0

10.3

43.0

37.0

16.1

47.0

57.0

(Source: Adapted from Lupton and Wilson, op. cit., Tables 1 and 2,

pp. 10-11.)

The role played by educational and other institutions in teaching members of a society how to play their political roles was considered by Almond and Verba in their work on the inculcation and reinforcement of participant or subject attitudes in the family, at school and at work, which we discussed in an earlier chapter. [133] If the family and the school allow participation, the citizens they produce are likely to be well equipped to cope with the demands of a democratic society, especially if participation in decisions is permitted and encouraged at work as well. The political learning of British adolescents has been examined in some detail in recent years by two teams of researchers, the first seeking to explore differences in conceptions of political roles between pupils at a public school, Winchester College, and those at Taunton's school, a grammar school in the same town. [134] They found that in establishing his likely place in the occupational hierarchy of British society, the grammar-school boy was more dependent

95

The hierarchy of politics

on advice and assistance from his school than was his public-school counterpart, who tended to turn to his family for such advice. The findings are shown in Table 6.2: Table 6.2 Responses to the question, 'Who is the best person to go to for advice on seeking a career?*. Percentages: Public-school boys Parent Teacher

65 16

Grammar-school boys 27 53

(Source: Adapted from D. McQuail et aL9 op. cit., Table 3, p. 261.)

The authors use R.H. Turner's terminology of 'sponsored' and 'contest' social mobility[135] to analyse this difference between the two groups. Public-school boys, whose parents are themselves paying for their children's education, come from well-off families in which the parents hold prestigious and senior places in society. They are therefore in a position to assist, or sponsor, their children in fulfilling their ambitions; indeed paying for education at a public school is itself a form of such sponsorship. The grammar-school boy, by contrast, is likely to come from a lower-middle- or working-class background which cannot give him much help in pursuing a career which, by virtue of his having secured a grammarschool place, is likely to be in a different level of society from that of his parents. He must, therefore, look to his school to equip him for his future career and to assist him in embarking upon it. He obtains upward social mobility by winning a contest with his fellows, for which he is prepared by his school. His entry to a grammar school was itself secured, of course, by success in a competitive eleven-plus examination. There are also interesting differences between the two groups* evaluation of politicians. Table 6.3 shows that the public-school boys had the more jaundiced opinion of political leaders. Grammar-school boys also professed a greater sense of duty when it came to taking part in politics; 60.4 per cent of them acknowledged such a sense of duty, compared with 51.2

96

Political behaviour

Table 6.3 Public school

Grammar school

Percentage who: Agree that most politicians are in politics to serve the community

41

63

Disagree with the view that most politicians are mainly just out for themselves

59

74

(Source: McQuail et al, op. cit., Table 8, p. 265.)

per cent of the public scholars. Although both groups were potential members of social and governing elites, the grammar-school boys showed a greater faith in the system than their public-school confreres and the latter were more subject to family than school influences. They would be more likely to be acquainted with political leaders through family connec­ tions than the grammar-school boys, for example, and it is worthy of note that they had the lower opinion of such leaders. A more recent study of British schoolchildren by Robert Stradling and Elia Zureik,[136] based on a sample covering grammar, independent, comprehensive, and secondary modern schools — fifteen schools in all, sought primarily to examine how the educational system generated attitudes congruent with the political system. The study is directly concerned with when and how the kinds of attitudes which give the political system its support, which we have discussed in the last two chapters, are acquired. The authors examined the emergence of a number of characteristically British attitudes and divided their sample by social class and age group. Thus, for example, they found that the children's responses to the question, 'Why do you think some people are poor and others not?' became increasingly pragmatic as they grew older; the ten- and eleven-year-olds made few responses, but among the older children larger majorities replied in terms of specific forms of poverty rather than by using the kind of universal, generalized explanations beloved of Marxists and others. [137]

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97

Turning to matters more specifically related to the political system, the authors found some differences between middleand working-class children, although all were in one way or another willing to accept- the restrictions imposed upon their freedom by those set in authority over them: Few of the young people from either social class defined freedom as absence of political restraint. Even at the age of 18, only 19 per cent of the middle-class and 2 per cent of the working-class adolescents in this age group define freedom conservatively as the right to do anything the law permits, and a further 33 per cent define freedom in terms of free speech and freedom of movement. On the other hand, few of the working-class youths in this age group chose the prevailing middle-class definitions. Rather, their definitions are inter-personal. Over 40 per cent define freedom as being able to do as they please without teachers, parents or other immediate authority figures restraining them. However, although these working-class definitions differ from the dominant idea of liberty they do not present a radical alternative to it.[138] Children in both groups accept that their freedom will be limited by rules and commands of one kind or another and are prepared to conform to such restrictions. Stradling and Zureik also found that 'there is a fairly deeply inculcated acceptance of inequality among young people'. Thus values central to a society in which strong government and a hierarchical social order are important traditions are developing in the minds of young people during their adolescent years. As one might expect, however, attitudes towards the political system are less favourable among the less fortunate and privileged members of British society. If we take three characteristics of secondary schoolchildren: their ambitions in terms of their future employment; the age at which they expect to leave school; and whether they expect to go on to higher or further education, we find that those who expect to do best in these three spheres have the most favourable attitudes to the political system. For example, the sample were asked, 'Do you agree that the British people have the chance to express their opinions about the way the country is run?', and some of the

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data relating to their answers is presented in Table 6.4. The less successful pupils were more alienated from the system and were also shown to be more apathetic and ignorant, so that in all three of Almond and Verba's orientations to the political system the less privileged, not surprisingly, were less likely to support that system. However, when examining attitudes towards the class structures of British society, the Marxist 'power* model of one class dominating another and exploiting it was shown to have little currency among the British. Only a Table 6.4 Percentage of positive answers to the questions on the influence of people on governments, by occupational aspirations and educational plans

Positive replies

Occupational aspirations

Intended schoolleaving age

High 69

15 48

Low 43

16 55

16+ 66

University attendance Will Will not 66 57

(Source: Stradling and Zureik, op. cit., Tables 3 and 4, p. 296-7.)

quarter of the working-class children showed any inclination to accept this kind of view, the one most likely to lead to opposition to the existing power structure. More popular were the ideas that prestige is won by hard work and good personal qualities, and that money confers social status and should be sought by collective action. The attitudes of the young are, therefore, not likely to provide a basis for the subversion of British society; conflict between classes and with the authorities is present, but children are trained to restrain it within limits which will protect the political and social system from disruption or destruction. In both the articles we have been considering the place of families and schools in enabling children to determine their proper social roles and learn how to perform them. By the time they come of age, then, most people have established both what their role in society is and how they are going to perform it. In Britain, almost everyone sees himself as a member of a social class and for most it is one of two — middle or working. David Butler and Donald Stokes found

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that everyone in their sample in 1963 was prepared to assign himself to a class, 53 per cent to the working class and 25 per cent to the middle class; the rest opted for variations upon one or other of these themes.[139] In America, by contrast, social class plays a much less central role; the authors of The American Voter found that one third of their sample did not think of themselves as belonging to a class;[140] other groupings are more salient in America, as we shall see later. Another aspect of role identification is that the level of a person's activity in one field is likely to affect his activity in others. The social world is divided into 'joiners' and 'non-joiners' and a person's identity as one or the other can be detected in different fields of activity. In his study of the Walton division of Liverpool, David Berry showed that activity in a political party is correlated with playing an active part in other social organizations. His evidence is reproduced in Table 6.5, which shows the relationships between membership of a party and other social activities. Table 6.5 Activity in other social organizations:

Members of parties: Labour

Conservative

Electors (non-party members):

Committee member and/or attends meetings

23

20

11

Non-participant

32

29

50

Total

55

49

61

(Source: D. Berry, 'Party Membership and Social Participation', Political Studies, Vol. 17 (1969), Table 5. p. 204.)

In three groups of roughly equal size, Labour Party members, Conservative Party members, and ordinary voters, between one-third and half the party members were also active in other organizations, compared with one-sixth of the electors. If Berry had been able to separate the office-holders from attenders at meetings, his point might have emerged even more clearly. Frank Bealey, Jean Blondel and W.P. McCann

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came to a similar conclusion in a study of Newcastle-under­ Lyme.[141] They said: Overall, those who belong to associations, whatever the character of those associations, appear to be more politically interested than those who do not. Tables associating club membership with [political] discussion outside the family were found to be significant in three wards. [142] They go on to comment that club membership is likely to reinforce interest in politics, since attendance at a club gives greater opportunity for political discussion than would exist if the individual stayed at home. But the authors continue, ... it is also true that people often become members of clubs because they choose to join them. Politics is one of the social activities and it is perhaps logical that socially active persons (relatively speaking) should be more politically aware, although it is of course impossible to say whether the sheer fact that they join clubs is in itself a sign of social interest which extends to political as well as to other social activities. It is impossible to determine whether the chicken or the egg comes first — where the syndrome starts. What is clear is that political interest and general social activity and concern occur together. Politically interested people will be generally active and concerned people. Looking at the same phenomenon from the opposite side, so to speak, Richard Hoggart linked his fear that political interest is declining in the affluent society with his general thesis that as people become more affluent, they become more wrapped up in their individual lives and less active in society; the springs of action are more loosely coiled in society generally and in politics in particular. So far, we have considered the process of socialization as it involves the ordinary citizen and in particular the young person. At the opposite pole of political society we should consider the process of elite recruitment and what Mosca called the circulation of elites.[143] The members of a ruling elite will be anxious to ensure that new recruits will conform to the existing methods of government and will be able to integrate themselves with the elite's present members. There is

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also the question of how an elite can adapt itself when the composition or structure of the society it rules changes, through a process of industrialization, for example. The importance often given to ensuring that new recruits will fit into the existing pattern of social and professional relation­ ships within an elite group can be illustrated by an assertion by a former administrative civil servant that administrators who read the same course under the same tutors at university are likely to be able to co-operate with one another easily when running government departments. [144] A discussion of two major accounts of the adaptation of elites to changing circumstances, C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite[l4b] and W.L. Guttsman's The British Political Elite,[l46] will indicate the problems elites face when social change occurs. Wright Mills was concerned with the United States and Guttsman with Britain, but both show how, over the last two centuries, elites of landowning aristocrats or social notables have given way to new elites thrown up by the process of industrialization, in turn, self-made businessmen and professional managers and administrators. Wright Mills's book has a wider scope that Guttsman's — he covers economic and military power-holders as well as the political elite, while the latter is almost entirely concerned with parliamentary politicians. Both studies are of necessity historical and descriptive rather than statistical in nature; they are, however, part of the behavioural tradition both in the sense that the ideas contained in them have stimulated research which is more characteristically behavioural and in that their concern was to establish the true composition of the elites and the actual location of power as precisely as possible. Wright Mills traced the rise of five successive groups to the control of American society. From the War of Independence until the early nineteenth century, control lay with social notables, the people listed in 'Mrs John Jay's Dinner and Supper Lists for 1781 and 1788'. Wright Mills said of these people: Social life, economic institutions, military establishment and political order coincided, and men who were high politicians also played key roles in the economy and, with their families, were among those of the reputable who made

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up local society. In fact, this first period is marked by the leadership of men whose status does not rest exclusively upon their political position, although their political activi­ ties are important and the prestige of politicians high. [147] The social notables ran all aspects of American society. In the eighteen-twenties these pecfple began to be displaced at the top of American society by property owners. This was the period of America's expansion westward, symbolized by the Louisiana Purchase. At the same time, the elite ceased to be united and consisted of loose, overlapping groups: No set of men controlled centralized means of power; no small clique dominated economic, much less political affairs. The economic order was ascendant over both social status and political power: within the economic order, a quite sizeable proportion of all the economic men were among those who decided. For this was the period — roughly from Jefferson to Lincoln — when the elite was at most a loose coalition.[148] With almost unlimited territory to expand into and make one's fortune in, large numbers of men obtained economic and political power which thus became widely dispersed. With industrialization in the eighteen-seventies, however, came the rise of corporate power and the control of affairs by great industrialists, which was maintained until disaster struck them in the nineteen-thirties; this was the period Wright Mills called the period of rule by the Robber Barons. Economic power became supreme: 'With revenues greater and employees more numerous than those of many states, corporations controlled parties, bought laws and kept Congressmen of the "neutral" states .'[149] This was the era of unfettered industrial capitalism. It came to an end, of course, as a result of the Great Crash in 1929 and the industrial slump which followed it. During the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, it became accepted that workers, labour unions, and consumers were entitled to consideration by the State just as much as were industrial capitalists, and after the famous battle with the Supreme Court, governmental intervention in economic affairs became accepted. As a result, control of government passed to other

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interests — manufacturers and organized labour, the farm lobby and so forth, the capitalists were discredited; Wright Mills wrote of Roosevelt that 'by his policies, he subsidized the defaults of the capitalist economy, which had simply broken down; and by his rhetoric balanced its political disgrace, putting 'economic royalists* in the doghouse'.[150] With the rise of interests, though, came the rise of managers. With the entry of the United States into the Second World War and the continuing world role she has played since, the military (whose role in the days of isolationism and neutralism had been limited and subordinate) acquired a new importance. They, too, were now managers, with technically advanced equip­ ment and immensely complicated organizations to operate. The combination of State intervention, corporate manage­ ment, and the new importance of the military led to what Wright Mills saw as the current state of affairs, which he called 'the new state of the corporate commissars'.[151] in which the leadership, the elite, consists of professional politicians, the senior managers of the great corporations, and the newly important and increasingly politicized military leaders. Although these three groups might seem quite diverse in terms of their activities and interests, Wright Mills argued that they had more in common than might at first sight appear to be the case, and that together they constituted the power elite. He described the situation as he saw it in the mid-nineteen­ fifties: The shape and meaning of the power elite today can be understood only when ... three sets of structural trends are seen at their point of coincidence: the military capitalism of private corporations exists in a weakened and formal demo­ cratic system containing a military order already quite political in outlook and demeanour. Accordingly, at the top of this structure, the power elite has been shaped by the coincidence of interest between those who control the newly enlarged means of violence; from the decline of the profes­ sional politician and the rise to explicit political command of the corporate chieftains and the professional warlords; from the absence of any genuine civil service of skill and integrity, independent of vested interests. [152]

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The political system had been weakened by the affluence of the electorate and the resultant decline in political interest and conflict; the United States has never possessed a career civil service on the British or European model, which can, by virtue of its members' security of tenure in their posts, remain to some extent aloof from the vested interests of the time. These two factors allowed the three groups of professional men to rule and normally they remained more or less united in order to protect their common interests. This unity was assisted by the fact that most of the power elite's members were educated either at the Ivy League universities or at the prestigious military academies of Annapolis and West Point. [153] These members co-operate to protect the position of the military arbiters of America's fate, the production of the great corporations (much of it to meet military demands), and the power and status of the top professional politicians. It must be said that, to some extent at least, Wright Mills's views were probably influenced by the circumstances of the time in which he was writing. The president was Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general with dubious health and in any case a tendency to leave affairs of state to others where he could, although he was, of course, capable of decisive intervention when he felt it was necessary. Since his time, not only have presidents governed more positively but there has been a massive revulsion of popular opinion against the military as a result of the prolonged agony of the war in Vietnam — a revulsion of which the professional politicians were obliged to take notice. Partly as a result of the circumstances of the time, Wright Mills overstated his case. W.L. Guttsman, in his study of the British political elite, similarly traced a series of stages through which political leadership has passed over the last 150 years or so. In the period before the mass of the people began to be admitted to the franchise, British Cabinets were almost entirely made up of landowners or members of their families. Of 103 Cabinet ministers who held office between 1830 and 1868, fifty-six were landowning peers of considerably property, and their sons, and a further twelve were country gentlemen, landowners on a smaller scale. The remainder was made up of twenty-one drawn from the mercantile and administrative classes, and

The hierarchy of politics

105

twelve hommes nouveanx of no family, mainly lawyers.[154] Thomas Erskine May wrote of this period that ... notwithstanding the more democratic tendencies of later times, rank and station still retained the respect and confi­ dence of the people. When the aristocracy enjoyed too exclusive an influence in the government, they aroused hostility and jealousy; but when duly sharing power with other classes and admitting the just claims of talent, they prevailed over every rival and adverse interest and — what­ ever party was in power — were still rulers of the state. [155] This aristocratic predominance was changed, not so much by the creation of a mass electorate as such but by the development of party organizations capable of mobilizing the new electors in their large numbers — large, that is, by comparison with the size of the electorate before 1867, although the Radicals* aim of universal manhood suffrage was far from being achieved even by the end of the nineteenth century. Even after the passage of the Reform Act of 1885, roughly two out of every five adult males were still denied access to the ballot box.[156] Nonetheless, mass party organizations were created in the eighteen-seventies and eighteen-eighties, under the leadership and inspiration of Joseph Chamberlain in the Liberal Party and Lord Randolph Churchill and others in the Conservative Party. These organizations provided a road to political power for professional politicians from the business and professional classes. In the late nineteenth century, too, came the rise of powerful interests concerned to present their demands and obtain a share of political representation. Apart from trades unions, employers formed the major interest group, and they increasingly created organizations to combat the growing power of the trade union movement, both by legislation and by fighting the unions in the courts. In 1901, the decision of the House of Lords in the Taff Vale case that a trade union was legally liable for damages arising from the disruption caused to an employer by industrial action, a decision which threatened to force the unions into either passivity or bankruptcy, compelled the unions to engage in political activity and in

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Political behaviour

particular caused them to support the efforts of the recently formed Labour Representation Committee to secure the election of large numbers of working-class members of Parliament. [157] These two factors, the creation of mass party organizations and the rise of powerful and politically-active interests within industry, brought about a major change in the composition of governments and parliaments, with land ownership giving way to party membership and loyalty as the basic prerequisite of a political career: Today parliamentary leadership, governmental office and public eminence is closely linked to party leadership. Party loyalties, buttressed by the marked, though decreasing anta­ gonism and conflict between the two major parties, help towards cohesion of leading groups of politicians. It is as partisans that political leaders keep their status when electoral defeat has swept them from office. Others gain prominence through the parties with which they identify. Service to party brings loyal followership and in the end often the rewards of office. To study the British political elite today means also to study the leadership of the two major parties.[158] The British political elite, in so far as it consists of parliamen­ tarians, is now more open than it was before 1868, since the parties provide ai road to power in which less regard is paid to a person's background than in the times of the old elite of landed aristocrats. If a politician has the ability and perseverance to win a place near the top of a party's power structure, he is assured of influence and prestige. One odd fact about the process of recruitment to the British parliamentary elite is that it is controlled from points quite low in the parties' organizational hierarchies — the constituency organizations. Austin Ranney[159] found that the central party organizations had little influence, and that rarely exercised, over the process of selecting parliamentary candidates. Even where they did make such an attempt, they were by no means always successful for the local parties were very jealous of their autonomy in this matter. The Conservative Central Office has long wished to see more women adopted as parliamentary candidates, but cannot

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either persuade its local organizations to take the same view or compel them to select more women. In the Conservative Party the choice of a candidate rests with the committee of the constituency Conservative Association, which will normally present one name to a general meeting of the Association's members for acceptance or rejection; in the Labour Party the final choice is made by the General Management Committee of the Constituency Labour Party from a short-list prepared by the Constituency Party's executive committee. The central organizations of both parties retain a power to approve or veto selections, but it is rarely used and constituency parties can defy, and on occasion have defied, the central organization. In fact, constituency parties tend to choose people of higher social status than their own members. Ranney wrote that ... the candidates are generally of higher social status; they have more formal schooling, more by far have attended high prestige schools and they hold mainly business, profes­ sional or white collar jobs, while many of their voters and Party workers are manual labourers. Socially, then, each party's candidates do not represent its rank and file; rather they occupy a considerably higher level in the party hierarchy. [160] He then quotes Guttsman's view that as we ascend the power structure of British political parties, *the social character of the group is slightly less 'representative' and slightly more tilted in favour of those who belong to the middle and upper levels of our society\[161] The constituency members of both parties, Ranney concludes, exhibit a certain deference, or choose candidates who are likely to have the time to give to party work and the polish likely to make a good impression on the electorate. Dennis Kavanagh reached a very similar conclusion in his study of electioneering in Britain.[162] Thus the British political elite, though not in control of the selection of its new members, remains socially unrepresentative, both of party members and electors. The work of C. Wright Mills and W.L. Guttsman portrays either a single united elite or two or three competing elites which dominate and control the affairs of government; in this they follow the theories of Pareto, Mosca, Michels and others.

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The view that British and American polities are dominated by such elite groups arises from the concentration of Mills and Guttsman, like many other sociological students of politics, on the origins and recruitment of elite members rather than upon the content of political roles or the attitudes such members acquire in the process of rising to membership of the elite and in taking part in its activities. Having been educated at Eton, Oxford, Harvard or West Point may ensure a certain similarity of outlook and a certain sense of identity with fellow products of the same institutions, but it does not ensure identity of views. Equally, the nature of different jobs or roles will vary, and a person may be faced with choices about how to do the job or play the role, which different people will resolve differently. Elite and oligarchy theories relate to the study of the origins, education, and careers of persons involved in government; they are not concerned with how they carry out their tasks, nor do they consider to any great extent how such elites carry on their affairs. In order to develop a more balanced picture of life at the top, we must now consider the content of roles.

Chapter 7 Political socialization: games politicians play Instead of conceiving the political system as a hierarchy, we can alternatively imagine it as a game played according to rules, like football or chess. In this case there is an analogy between politics so conceived and Wittgenstein's explanation of meaning as word games, which has been applied to social science by Peter Winch. In his book The Idea of a Social Sczence[\63] Winch pointed out that rule-following is an important aspect of all social behaviour. It has two aspects: One has to take account not only of the actions of the person whose behaviour is in question as a candidate for the category of rule-following, but also the reactions of other people to what he does. More specifically, it is only in a situation in which it makes sense to suppose that somebody else could in principle discover the rule which I am following that I can intelligently be said to be following a rule at all.[164] For a person to be engaging in rule-governed activities, two conditions must, therefore, be fulfilled. The person must behave in the same way on the same kinds of occasion and someone else must be able to grasp what it is that the first person is doing and be able to imitate him. Rules of conduct can be private, but it must be possible in principle for others to understand what an actor is doing. From this view of rule-governed activities can be derived the idea of a mistake, which is *a contravention of what is established as correct; as such it must be recognizable as such a contravention'.[165] We can also derive the idea of authority, as Winch as shown elsewhere. [166] He has written that 'What one does is directed ... by the idea of the right way of doing things in connection with the activity one is performing,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-9

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Political behaviour

and the authoritative character of an individual's will derives from its connection with that idea of a right way of doing things.'[167] A teacher has authority because we accept that he can tell us the right way of carrying on a particular activity; he is an authority on that activity. Thus I can choose whether or not to play chess, but to learn how to play I have to accept someone else's guidance, to submit to his authority. When he tells me that I may not move a castle diagonally or a bishop forward or sideways, I must accept his rulings as correct or fail to learn the game. Equally, one's involvement in social activity involves, of necessity, the acceptance of political authority: The fact that one is a human social being engaged in rulegoverned activities and on that account able to deliberate and choose, is in itself sufficient to commit one to the accep­ tance of legitimate political authority — its existence is a precondition of rule-governed activities. [168] To carry on a social activity at all one must accept authority and so the conception of society as a hierarchy emerges once more. This kind of approach, however, directs our attention not only to the authority structure of society but also to the way in which social activity is carried on, and this has been the focus of attention for some behavioural students of politics. Thus Robert Presthus conceived the process of socialization in terms of the learning of norms, rather than of locating oneself in the social hierarchy: 'In some large measure man is taught to honour on-going norms by a process called socialization. Socially accepted and functionally necessary behaviour is rewarded, while aberrant behaviour is sanctioned by tactics ranging from the mother's gentle reprimand to the judge's prison sentence.'[169] The demands of social norms may come into conflict with individual personalities, however: The organization's attempts to socialize its members evoke discrete patterns of accommodation and these variations can only be explained by differing individual perceptions of and reactions to the bureaucratic situation.'[170] Different people come to fit into the social situation in different ways and to different degrees.

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An interesting example can be found if we consider what happens in a modernizing country when the demands of Western norms adopted by that country's ruling elite come into conflict with traditional ways of doing things. Fred W. Riggs has studied the situation of the bureaucrat in such a country, which he calls a 'prismatic' situation, since the newly-learned Western norms are distorted by the society's traditional attitudes and practices as rays of light are distorted by a prism.[171] Life is a mixture of village and city, of feudal court and modern bureaucracy, of the primacy of family and tribe versus the dispassionate application of regulations. As a result, the rules are applied uncertainly and inconsistently and can be regarded as little more than formal regulations to be applied or not at the bureaucrat's will; they lack authority. Riggs said that, in such a situation, ... the laws on the statute book are one thing; the actual behaviour of the official is another. Not that the law is irrelevant to behaviour. Indeed, the official may insist on literal performance of the law, or he may disregard it utterly. What permits formalism is the lack of pressure towards programme objectives, the weakness of social power as a guide of bureaucratic performance, and hence great permissiveness for arbitrary administration. Whether an official chooses to enforce a law to the letter or permit its total violation depends, presumably, upon his inclinations and his advantage. [172] The rules lack authority, therefore the official can follow his own inclination and the door is wide open for bribery, corruption and nepotism. The conflict between traditional and modern norms is brought out more clearly later in Riggs' essay: An official, while publicly adhering to a modern set of norms, may secretly reject them as meaningless or not bind­ ing ... He can adhere publicly to the norm of objective, achievement-oriented standards of recruitment, equality of status and universalistic norms, but privately subscribe to more subjective ascription-oriented standards, to a rigid hierarchy of status and particularistic norms. He can publicly castigate bribery and corruption, but secretly

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encourage it. He can insist one moment on a strict and literal enforcement of regulations, but the next moment wink at their open violation.[173] A sort of collective anomie arises when officials sometimes apply one of their two sets of norms, sometimes the other; the public is left bewildered, not knowing what to expect from officialdom, and is subjected to arbitrary decisions and the need to engage in bribery and corruption. Both officials and public are unclear as to the proper content of their roles. Another way in which we can examine the usefulness of looking at the political system in terms of role content — as a game played according to rules — is to consider the British administrative system in the light of this model, and in particular to look at the significance for the bureaucrat of the constitutional convention of ministerial responsibility. Students of politics have in recent years made much of the convention's ineffectiveness as a sanction against ministers; resignations because of mistakes or bad decisions made in government departments are rare indeed these days, and where a resignation does occur the minister has been unfortunate, in a weak position in his party, or has himself chosen to resign. [174] Ministerial responsibility still has great significance within Whitehall itself, however, in that the higher Civil Service has come to see its task almost entirely in terms of the convention* its members are there to assist ministers to avoid trouble, in parliament or elsewhere. C.H. Sisson, a serving civil servant, wrote in 1959 that near ministers stand 'a group of officials, now usually fairly numerous, who, whatever the subject matter of their particular work, may be said to specialize in the awareness of ministerial responsibility1. [175] One of their tasks is to assess proposals coming from lower down the departmental hierarchy, including proposals made by expert advisers, in terms of how likely they are to arouse opposition in Parliament or elsewhere. The expert's role, according to Sisson, must, therefore, be a subordinate one: 'The standard of odium is not a matter on which the expert is expert',[176] and the administrators who advise the minister 'have to learn to extract from the specialist flowers around him the honey the minister needs, explaining as they do that the minister does not live on honey'. Equally, the

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advice given to ministers is not necessarily the true or the best expert advice; it is the course of action which in the opinion of the administrators is likely to cause least trouble. The advice and opinions of civil servants, says Sisson, 'are a mediocrity arrived at, not because they are likely to be true, though sometimes they may even be that, but because in a system of protests and objections man may hold them and escape without too many rotten eggs plastering his head'.[177] He quotes Pepys* diary with approbation: 'Reckoning myself to have come off with victory, because not overcome in anything or much foiled1 .[178] Here, then, we see a complete conception of an administrative role built upon the convention that ministers must answer in Parliament for the activities of their departments. This conception of its role provides the higher Civil Service with a justification for its lack of expertise; what matters is skill in avoiding controversy and trouble, not knowing something about the department's field of work. It accounts for the belief that a good administrator can administer any department; indeed, he should be moved around fairly frequently so that he does not become too immersed in any one field or too committed to any particular policy. There has been a great deal of criticism of the higher Civil Service in recent years, but because many of the critics have failed to examine the content of the administrative role as it is conceived by its practitioners, much of it has been misdirected. The Fulton Committee, for example, missed the point despite their attack on the 'generalise administrator. They proposed some recognition of the need for expertise, but failed to see that so long as the administrator's main preoccupation was with the operation of the system rather than with forward planning or helping to devise policies, the Civil Service would be unable to make use of experts even if more were to be recruited. The lack of concern with planning has meant that the information on which forward planning could be based has often been unavailable,[179] and also the effects of past decisions have not been adequately monitored. We have suggested that the basic defect of the Fulton Report was the result of the Committee members' preoccupation with the work of their management consultants. From this preoccupation

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resulted the Committee's failure to investigate the impact which the constitutional convention of ministerial responsibil­ ity has had in forming civil servants' conception of the nature of their duties. Sometimes the higher civil servant's preoccupation with ensuring a quiet life for his minister is carried to absurd extremes. Dudley Seers wrote, of the decision to limit action against Rhodesia (after her unilateral declaration of independence) to the imposition of economic sanctions, that civil servants repeatedly assured ministers these would suffice to bring about the rapid collapse of the illegal regime. 'This prophecy was worked out in great detail, with "estimates" of how fast the national income would fall, prices rise, employment grow, etc. each month until the Ides of March.' [189] He describes this economic intelligence as 'almost unbelievably bad' and alleges that the Zambian Civil Service was better informed than the British. In a significant footnote he revealed that he was present 'when the official who had been largely responsible for some of these fantasies rather sheepishly told an official committee that he had prepared them because this was the picture he thought ministers wanted' .[181] Ministers themselves were not permitted to know the full reality of the situation. On the contrary, to assuage ministerial, public and parliamentary concern about the Rhodesian situation was more important than keeping ministers fully informed of the facts upon which they were basing their decisions. Lord Balogh commented in a famous essay on the consequences of the Civil Service conception of its role for economic policy. He argued that the Civil Service as at present constituted could operate only in a free enterprise, laissezfaire economic system: In a planned economy, the crossword puzzle mind, reared on mathematics at Cambridge or Greats at Oxford, has only a limited outlet. Such minds must defend themselves against a system in which positive action is in order because they can only express themselves by transferring decisions from the realm of economic realities into the sphere of pseudo moral philosophy. This is only possible in a 'free* economy where the State has no or very limited functions. Complicated

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problems are then cheerfully solved by the application of socalled 'general principles* ... The end products of these dialects are the drive towards convertibility, the dissolution of the Sterling Area, dear money and the slowing down of productive investment — the roots, in short, of all our present discontents. [182] Expertise can never play a full part in policy-making, however, until the content of the role played by the higher civil servant is altered, in short until the rules of the administrative game are changed. Unless this can be done, the importation of more experts will be fruitless, as the frustrations suffered by Mr Wilson's 'irregulars* in the late nineteen-sixties showed.[183] The understanding of their role which senior civil servants developed as a result of the convention of ministerial responsibility has now been carried to a point at which some of them appear to believe that only they are truly able to run the government and make major decisions. An example was Lord Bridges' reference to 'the practical philosophy of the department' which must 'wash against ideas put forward by [its] ministerial master',[184] and another is the pressure exerted upon ministers as described by Denys Munby: The assumption seems to be that ministers cannot decide anything and need to be told exactly what line to follow. Civil servants are in general cynical about ministers' capacity to take unpleasant decisions or to decide anything at all. But they continue to press agreed views on ministers, even when ministers by their actions make it clear they do not agree with the views presented to them.[185] The impact of a minister on policy is therefore severely restricted. Reginald Bevins, an ex-Postmaster-General, quoted a civil servant who once said to him that 'every department has a policy and ministers don't influence it much'.[186] There is very real danger that, rather like what happened in the case of the British monarchy, the need to be able to say that ministers have done no wrong will lead to a state of affairs in which ministers can do nothing. The analogy which we have been considering here, between politics and administration, and games played according to rules, can be pursued further in considering the fairness of the

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rules themselves. They may favour some players at the expense of others and players may re-interpret the rules in ways which suit themselves, especially if the referee is insufficiently watchful. Again, the British political and administrative system has provided an interesting example. Because the minister is responsible for everything that happens in his department, civil servants assume that he should be the only source of information about the department for Parliament and the public. A senior civil servant, T. D. Kingdom, lecturing to the Royal Institute of Public Administration in 1966, put it thus: Those who judge it not improper, but indeed salutary, to probe between civil servants and the ministers they advise, do not perhaps see it in the same way as probing between a family solicitor and his client. The solicitor will naturally refuse either to make unauthorised disclosures of his client's affairs or to say what advice he gave or to be drawn into expressing a personal view. Nobody will suppose that in taking up that standpoint the solicitor is an obscurantist or is erecting a screen for the sake of a quiet life; but suggestions that civil servants might not advise freely and candidly if their minutes were liable to be exposed to the public gaze have met with the irrelevant reproach that they ought to be made of sterner stuff.[187] This statement entirely ignores the difference in role between a solicitor advising a client on his personal affairs and a civil servant advising his minister on matters of public policy. The solicitor's responsibility is to his client alone; his task is to advise him and if need be represent him to the best of his ability, whereas the civil servant is concerned with the preparation of policies which affect not merely the minister — his 'client' —• but the entire population of the country. Furthermore, through his minister he is answerable to the public's representatives for the policies he devises in collaboration with his colleagues and his minister. This statement is therefore a remarkably narrow definition of the role of the senior civil servant, but is commonly advanced to justify the privacy in which the business of government is conducted in Britain, a privacy regarded by many observers as

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excessive. [188] Nonetheless, this privacy is jealously guarded. Protecting this privacy was made easier by a rule laid down by the courts of law which tilted the balance of the rules considerably in favour of the Executive, the doctrine of Crown privilege. [189] This was defined by the House of Lords in 1942 in circumstances which arguably distorted the process of judicial reasoning. The case of Duncan v. Cammell Laird and Co. Ltd[190] concerned the loss of the submarine Thetis with ninety-nine men on board on trials in Liverpool Bay in 1939. Relatives of the dead men sued the company for negligence and in order to establish their case demanded that the hull and engine-room plans of the Thetis be produced as evidence in court. By the time the case was heard, Britain was fighting for her life against Nazi Germany and it was obviously undesirable, therefore, that plans of her latest type of submarine should be exposed to the public eye. The First Lord of the Admiralty, A.V. Alexander, therefore swore an affidavit to the effect that production of the plans in question would be contrary to the public interest and this decision to withhold the plans was eventually upheld in the House of Lords despite the danger that the case would not be decided fairly in the absence of major pieces of evidence. In giving judgement the Lord Chancellor, Viscount Simon, said not only that ministers had a discretion to withhold production of specific documents required as evidence in court, but that they could also refuse the production of a document because it was a member of a class of documents all of which -must be kept secret in the public interest. A very wide discretionary power was thus conferred on ministers and civil servants, and one open to abuse. It is one thing to maintain the secrecy of the design of weapons in wartime, quite another to give protection to documents on the grounds that their production in court might prove embarrassing to ministers or civil servants; but the decision in the Duncan v. Cammell Laird case would allow a minister to refuse production of a document required in order that the court should have before it all the information relevant to a case, with no opportunity for the court to assess whether the discretion was being exercised in a justifiable manner. The ruling in the Duncan case was handed down in the middle of a war when, as a member of the Court of Appeal

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was to suggest many years later, *It may be true that amidst the clash of arms the voice of the law is not silent, but it is not invariably heard in its purest tones'.[191] Such a ruling ought not, therefore, to constitute a precedent binding on the courts in vastly altered circumstances. Once the war was over, judges came to suspect that the doctrine of Crown privilege was being invoked by ministers and civil servants for totally inadequate reasons; the Executive was unduly exploiting a rule of the game to its own advantage. In the case of Ellis v. The Home Office, involving a suit for damages in respect of negligence by the prison authorities which had resulted in injury to a prisoner on remand, [192] Mr Justice Devlin, as he then was, was moved to say that the Home Secretary's use of Crown privilege had caused him anxiety: 'Before I leave this case I must express ... my uneasy feeling that justice may not have been done because the material before me was not complete and something more than an uneasy feeling that, whether justice has been done or not, it certainly will not appear to have been done.'[193] This and other cases resulted in anxious questions in Parliament, as a result of which the government gave assurances of future good conduct; but in the nineteen-sixties the courts altered the rules of the game to reduce the advantage conferred upon ministers and civil servants by Lord Simon's ruling in the Duncan case. In the case of Conway v. Rimmer[194] the House of Lords ruled that a judge could overrule a ministerial claim to Crown privilege and order the production in court of the material for which privilege was claimed. Preparatory to so doing, the judge could order the production of the material to himself in private, in order that he might assess the validity of the claim that production of it in court would be contrary to the public interest. In the Court of Appeal, Lord Denning made it plain that he felt that in the case of Conway the government was obstructing justice for no good reason: The long and short of it is that if justice is to be done between these two parties, these documents ought to be produced in evidence. I cannot see how either party litigant can hope for a fair trial unless the ban on them is lifted ... I do not think that the reasons given by the Secretary of State

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are sufficient to justify their being withheld ... I would allow this appeal and order production.[195] The documents concerned were not the plans of a new submarine, but routine probation reports on a police constable, and in the House of Lords Lord Reid shared Lord Denning's anxiety about the government action in claiming privilege for them: If the minister who has no duty to balance ... conflicting public interests, says no more than that in his opinion the public interest requires concealment and if that is to be accepted as conclusive ... it seems to me not only that very serious injustice may be done to the parties, but also that the due administration of justice may be gravely impaired for quite inadequate reasons. [196] The House of Lords asserted the existence of a residual right for the courts to order production of documents despite a claim of Crown privilege and instructed the lower courts to exercise that right in the Conway case. The courts had changed the rules of the administrative game to reduce the advantage they gave to ministers and civil servants. Here, then, we have an example of two roles, the judicial and the administrative, coming into conflict in a situation where both were highly developed and long established. Both the role of civil servants as the confidential advisers of ministers, and that of the courts as the independent guardians of justice, are well established in Britain and in the matter of Crown privilege they were in conflict. The rules of the game were initially biased in favour of administrators as against judges, but were revised by the latter when seen to operate unfairly. The British administrative system, then, provides useful ground on which to test the conception of political activity as a game played according to rules. That the rules of the game can be changed raises a further question; what happens when a change occurs or is impending which would threaten the roles of some of the players or render them redundant? If such a threat is posed, especially to an established elite group, the players threatened are likely to resist the proposed change in order to protect their roles or to

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seek to create new roles for themselves within the new rules. Should they fail to achieve either objective, there may be dire consequences for at least some of their members. In the early nineteen-sixties there was considerable unease among British elite groups about the possibility that Britain might join the European Economic Community. They had governed a system which was formerly based on the Empire, since transformed into the Commonwealth, in an international situation in which Britain's ties were with countries scattered throughout the world rather than with those of the regions nearest to her. Since the Second World War, however, Britain has become increasingly involved in European groupings of states, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the European Free Trade Area and so forth. Negotiations for entry to the Common Market portended a considerable acceleration of this trend, bringing as it would involvement with the institutions of the Community and the prospect of intervention in Britain's affairs by the Common Market's own 'Eurocrat* elite. The power and importance of the British political and administrative elite was thus likely to be reduced and its role changed. Mark Abrams carried out an investigation into the reaction of members of various British elite groups to their country's changing international role and found a very strong sense of attachment to traditional alliances and relationships as opposed to new ones. [197] Thus in his sample of elite members, 67 per cent described the Commonwealth as very valuable, compared with 48 per cent giving the same evaluation to the United Nations, 43 per cent to the Common Market and only 21 per cent to E.F.T.A.[198] Abrams commented that these figures 'show that, clearly, there remains a very strong sense of attachment (among British elites) to the highly visible symbol of their historic grandeur; the Commonwealth',[199] and this attachment was particularly high among politicians and in the professions. Only the young, academics, communicators and readers of the Guardian were less firmly attached to the Commonwealth.[200] The Common M arket, by contrast, was assigned great value only by minorities, though even these minorities were larger than those assigning great value to E. F. T. A., the European trade grouping of which Britain was at that time a member. The

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British political elite is slow to desert its traditional fields of activity. Where role change is imposed upon an elite group by factors outside its own control, considerable tensions may be created among its members. Philip Abrams considered the problems faced by retired British army officers in the nineteen-fifties, at a time when the development of increasingly complicated and novel weapons and techniques of warfare were forcing increasing numbers of officers, unable or unwilling to train for the new methods, to retire prematurely. [201] Here the change in an elite role was brought about by technological advances and led to the displacement of quite large numbers of elite members. Despite efforts by the officers1 associations and the Ministries of Defence and Labour to resettle them in suitable civilian posts, many were left in unsatisfying and poorly paid occupations. Abrams described the problem as follows: The picture of the ex-officer in the eyes of the man in the street, of Punch and of politicians of all parties was ... ambiguous. On the one hand, the retired officer was seen as a mandarin of civil life, a man whose 'connections' carried him as a sinister military voice into the highest councils of industry and government ... But the officer was also the slightly pathetic socially displaced person, reduced to the indignities of obscure retirement or demeaning civil chores — the salesman who cannot forget the habits of command, the familiar middle-aged advertisers chasing a 'position of responsibility*. Indeed, he still appears frequently enough in both roles in Parliament ... In reply to a Conservative statement, in the House of Commons in June, 1956, that there was 'some anxiety among officers, particularly briga­ diers', about post-service employment, a Labour speaker asked whether this was to be taken to mean that there was now *no room in the ranks of the normal occupation of exBrigadiers* namely, on the Conservative back benches. [202] Some retired officers achieve considerable success in civilian life; General Sir Brian Robertson, for example, became Chairman of the British Transport Commission and Abrams quoted Mr Punch's salute:

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In short, although the transport world I'm not

an Alexander in,

I am the very model of a modern railway mandarin. [203]

So easy a transition to civilian elite status is rare, however; Abrams gave Ministry of Labour statistics showing that in 1958 and 1959, of 200 officers starting civilian employment, 64 per cent began work at salaries of less than £1,000 a year, which even then was not a high salary for a middle-aged man trained to accept responsibility. In 1959, the future for many of these men looked bleak; Abrams wrote that 'even the Advisory Board could hold out nothing but a precarious future* to officers over the age of forty-six, whatever their ability; an officer writing in the Army Quarterly in answer to the questions, 'Are there any prospects in industry?', was forced to reply for this age-group, 'Emphatically, no.'[204] With premature retirements rising in numbers as a result of technical change — in 1957 the government envisaged premature retirement for some 8,000 officers over the following five years[205] — the number of displaced former members of the military elite suffering low pay, frustration, and unhappiness seemed likely to increase rapidly. Some resistance to modernization resulted, but change was inevitable. Where change threatens but may be prevented, elite members will quite understandably try to resist it. In evidence to the Fulton Committee the Treasury suggested that the method of graduate entry to the Service might be altered. Instead of the better graduates being recruited to the Administrative Class at Assistant Principal level[206] and thus being virtually guaranteed a career in the administrative elite, with other graduates passing into the Executive Class with much reduced chances of promotion to the top posts, all graduates would be recruited at a common level but some would be 'starred', marked out for early promotion to the higher posts if they proved to be of sufficiently high quality.[207] The Administrative Class, however, saw this as a threat to its potential recruits and their professional organization, the Association of First Division Civil Servants, said in its written evidence to the Committee that many of its

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younger members would not have joined the Civil Service at all under the Treasury's proposed conditions: Many of our Assistant Principal members ... assure us that they would not have been interested in joining under these conditions. They saw a real incentive in seeking to join what they regarded as an elite, with prospects of interesting and demanding work at a fairly early age on promotion to Principal, and of further increases in responsibility, for those who proved themselves, through further promotion ... The Treasury proposals purport to offer the substance of the present Assistant Principal career, but in a way which will be difficult to present to these graduates. They will see only a lowering of the grduate entry standard and in place of membership of an elite, a vague promise of preferential treatment. [208] The Administrative civil servants were afraid that they might no longer be able to attract the best graduates since they could no longer be given a virtual promise of elite status, and hence the nature of the elite would change. In the event, the Treasury proposals were emasculated by the Committee and the administrative elite's status and methods of recruitment largely protected, though a form of 'starring' has since been adopted by the civil service Department in the form of the Administration Trainee Scheme. The examples we have discussed reveal different aspects of the usefulness of seeing political activity as a game played according to rules. We began by considering a case where the rules were new and uncertain and went on to consider the development of a complete role from a single rule of the game — ministerial responsibility — and the scope for exploitation of rules which favour a particular group within the political system. Excessive exploitation of a bias in the rules can lead to changes in the rules to eliminate the bias. Finally, we have considered the consequences for players of changes in the rules. All these have been examples of games politicians and bureaucrats play and of how they play them. To provide these examples it has been necessary to stray rather far from the truly behaviouralist literature, but at present research is

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lacking, especially research using the more precise behavioural techniques which would enable us to examine this conception of politics in a behaviouralist spirit. One role which has been fairly extensively studied by behavioural students of politics is that of the judiciary; to a consideration of this we shall now turn our attention.

Chapter 8 Judicial behaviour The role of the judiciary has attracted the attention of a number of behavioural students of politics, partly because of the involvement of the Courts in political issues and events, especially in the United States, but partly also because of the intrinsic interest of the judicial role. Every judge in modern society is confronted with a dilemma, a choice between his own assessment of what would be just in the case before him and what is laid down for him by the legislature and by his colleagues and predecessors in other cases. This dilemma can best be elucidated by considering J.R. Lucas's model of the Four Judges: Judex I decides individual cases but does not record decisions or give reasons. Judex II decides individual cases, treating like cases alike, and records his decisions, but does not give reasons. Judex HI decides individual cases, treating like cases alike, records his decisions and gives his reasons. Judex IV subsumes individual cases under general, antecedently promulgated laws, but ideally has no authority to interpret the law or make any innovation in it.[209] The first three judges all have an essentially creative role to play. Judex I 'is a good man who sits in his tent and judges Israel wisely';[210] his is the judgement of Solomon, deciding cases individually in accordance with his individual instinct as to what is right. Judex II is restricted by an obligation to ensure distributive justice in his decisions; the same treatment should be meted out in the same circumstances, and Judex III is under the further obligation to explain himself. All three, however, have in common a power to decide cases in accordance with their own lights, and must be equipped with

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-10

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the wisdom, intelligence and learning to make just and acceptable decisions. Judex IV, by contrast, 'does not have to be wise or more than minimally good. His function is merely to certify that a certain regulation applies to the case, and make the appropriate particular order' .[211] In any actual circumstances, however, the law is always to some extent ambiguous or uncertain, and in any case judges are usually left an area of discretion especially in sentencing. The concept of justice is itself complex, including as it does both the notion of distributive justice: that persons or cases which are alike in relevant particulars should be treated alike;[212] and the notion that the punishment should in some sense fit the crime and the reward the virtuous deed: that there is a level of punishment, reward or compensation appropriate to the misdeed, beneficial act or damage under consideration. [213] The judge must, therefore, constantly seek to reconcile the demands of desert with those of equity, as well as seeking both to apply the law properly and to hand down a decision acceptable to the parties to the case and to society at large. All these elements must be considered by he who seeks to act justly. The judicial dilemma is given yet a further dimension by demands that judges should seek, as it were, to interpret society to itself; to determine the gravity with which society views a given offence, to divine the limits of toleration of various types of conduct, and to determine the balance between the necessary powers of government and the rights of the individual in a way which both government and citizens regard as appropriate and reasonable. Thus Dr Johnson wrote of Lord Mansfield that 'he made law serve life'. More controversially, Lord Justice Devlin has suggested that the courts are under an obligation to define what society is prepared to tolerate, and sees the jury system as an essential part of this process of definition: How is the law-maker to ascertain the moral judgements of society? It is surely not enough that they should be reached by the opinion of the majority; it would be too much to require the individual assent of every citizen. English law has evolved a standard which does not depend on the count­ ing of heads. It is that of the reasonable man ... For my

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purpose, I should like to call him the man in the jury-box, for the moral judgement of society must be something about which any twelve men or women chosen at random might after discussion be expected to be unanimous.[214] Lord Devlin's views arose in part from a case in which the House of Lords had asserted the existence of a duty laid upon the courts to act as custos bonos mores et decorum on behalf of society[215] and the judicial reasoning in this case emphasized that the courts must seek to interpret and establish the limits of what society is prepared to tolerate. All these demands for a creative or interpretative role conflict, however, with the demand that judges should dispassionately apply the law as it is laid down in statutes and regulations, the common law and precedent cases. The dilemma is still more acute in the United States, where the Supreme Court has taken upon itself the power to interfere in the legislative process by judicial review of Acts passed by Congress. This power and its use by a Supreme Court, the majority of whose members wished to protect the private enterprise system from the increased interference or regulation by the Federation Government proposed in the New Deal legislation, led to the celebrated clash with President Roosevelt in the nineteen-thirties.[216] Since that time the Court has played a crucial role in the struggle to establish negro civil liberties and has sought to reduce the amount of gerrymandering in American elections by handing down a ruling that the citizen's right, guaranteed in the Constitution, to equality before the law extends to his vote. Each vote must have a weight equal to any other and must, therefore, be exercised in an electoral district of size equal to any other in terms of population. All these examples show that the Supreme Court has always been deeply involved in the political process, and it has therefore attracted the attention of academic and other students of politics, including the behaviouralists. From the point of view of the behavioural students of politics, the Supreme Court has another advantage as a subject for study. It is a body comprised of nine members appointed for life, so that its membership changes only slowly, as Justices retire or die. Furthermore,' all nine Justices take part in all the

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Court's major cases, so that it is possible to build up a picture of the attitudes of individual Justices in a series of related cases and form a picture of the attitudes of the members of the Court. Such an exercise was first carried out by C. Herman Pritchett in a study of the 'New Deal' cases of the nineteen-thirties, the subject of the dispute with Roosevelt, [217] and has since been developed by Glendon A. Schubert, who used a number of statistical techniques which he claimed revealed the existence of blocks of consistently liberal, moderate and conservative Justices on the Court between 1953 and 1956. [218] Thus, taking cases in which individual Justices dissented, votes cast with the liberal, centre or conservative blocks in this period can be aggregated in the form shown in Figure 8.1: Figure 8.1 Douglas Black Warren

Clark

Minton Reed

Burton

Frankfurter Harlan

Douglos Black Warren Clark Minton Reed Burton Frankfurter Harlan

1 ™

1 Centre

Right

(Source: Schubert, op. cit., p. 1010.) Only in the case of Mr Justice Burton was there any doubt as to which block he belonged; the centre or the right. Schubert went on to use scalogram analysis and content analysis to confirm and explore more extensively the nature and existence of these enduring blocks. He also examined the effect upon Justices of knowing that their decision is marginal; that it is likely to affect the outcome of the case, by the use of game analysis. In 1936, at the height of the struggle between president and Court, the latter contained a block of four conservative Justices and three liberals, with the Chief Justice, Charles Evan Hughes, and a recent recruit to the Court, Owen Roberts, in the middle. Their votes were therefore crucial and, according to Schubert, their rational strategy would be one which would 'maximise both [the Chief Justice's] own authority within the Court and the degree of unanimity in the Court's

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decisions, while at the same time directing the Court to as liberal a course as possible, in order to forestall the possibility of the more drastic reforms proposed by the President'.[219] The game is zero sum; that is, one side cannot gain without the other losing, and if Hughes and Roberts, denoted by the composite term 'Hughberts' in the essay, seek rationally to achieve this objective they will have *a pure strategy, which in essence requires that [they] form a coalition of the Left where possible, that [they] form a coalition with the Right when splintering or non-participation makes it impossible for [them] to form a winning coalition with the Left, and that [they] always choose to join the coalition with the Left and the Right when the other players do not choose to adopt conflicting strategies*.[220] The three groups are regarded as having equal potential power, and an analysis of decisions during the 1936 term showed that all jhree groups largely followed the strategies one would expect, as Table 8.1 shows: Table 8.1 Left

Hughberts

Right

Total decisisions conforming to rational strategy

.3639

.3136

.3225

Expected share of power

.3333

.3333

.3333

Supreme Court Decisions in the 1936 term (The Hughberts Game), Source: Schubert, op. cit., p. 1023. All figures are fractions of 1.

The share of power reflected in the actual decisions of the Justices closely approximated that expected if each group followed the rational strategy derived from the nature of the game. Thus it seems that Supreme Court Justices do cast their votes in ways which will maximize their influence upon the Court's decisions. Schubert thus portrays judges as seeking to achieve decisions which conform with their individual opinions and attitudes, not as dispassionate and disinterested seekers after abstract justice. This view of the judiciary brought Schubert into conflict with traditional students of the judicial process because they believed that he was bringing the law into

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disrepute; at a conference Schubert was accused of portraying Chief Justice Hughes in the above analysis as an unscrupulous seeker after power, unconcerned with his duty to dispense justice. [221] The substance of his accusation was perhaps fair, but if the behavioural student of politics is to stick to his last, he must reveal as precisely as possible the phenomena he has observed, even if by doing so he will weaken constitutional mythology, such as the belief that judges act without regard for their own attitudes, prejudices and opinions.[222] In any case, to see judges as concerned with their own positions and views is a view at least as old as the Parable of the Unjust Judge. Since the appearance of Pritchett's and Schubert's work, the study of judicial behaviour, or 'jurimetrics' as it has come to be called, has expanded and diversified, mainly under Schubert's inspiration. An increasingly wide range of techniques has been used in various countries to analyse the behaviour of judges, and some interesting and varied examples appeared in a book edited by Schubert with David J. Danelski which appeared in 1969.[223] J.A. Dator, for example, explored the usefulness of HJ. Eysenck's inventory of political attitudes[224] as a means of assessing judicial attitudes. He drew on the work of others to show that the inventory has been used in a number of countries and in different societal contexts, including a study of American judges by Stuart Nagel, and he went on to apply it to Japanese judges. He is able to show a preponderance of right-wing attitudes coupled with a fairly even distribution over the 'tough-tender' dimension of the inventory. Judges are predominantly conservative, but in different ways.[225] Glendon Schubert himself undertook, in collaboration with Victor A. Flango, a graduate of the University of Hawaii, a comparative study [226] of the Hawaiian and Philippine High Court members. Both courts are closely modelled on the American system, and the authors attempt to determine whether attitudes towards purely judicial issues, such as the importance judges attach to the doctrine of stare decisis (adherence to precedents), is determined by attitudes towards economic, social, or political issues. Constitutional mythology in a case-law system demands that stare decisis should be respected whatever the merits of the case, but Flango and

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Schubert demonstrated that among the Hawaiian and Philippine judges this was not the case. The authors prepared a hypothetical case concerning a hospital patient who was suing the hospital on account of the alleged negligence of a nurse. The result of following precedent in this case, which was called Charney v. Mercy Hospital,[227] would be that the patient would not be awarded damages against the hospital. He might be awarded damages against the nurse, who would almost certainly be unable to pay, but the judgements given in the previous cases allowed scope for a left-wing judge to argue that the patient should receive damages despite the precedent, because of the suffering he had been caused and the probable inability of the nurse to pay damages awarded against him personally. In both Hawaii and the Philippines a majority of the judges favoured sharing the liability between the hospital and the nurse, thus ensuring that the patient would receive at least part of the damages awarded.[228] Flango and Schubert related this finding to the judges' attitude towards stare decisis and were able to establish that 'attitudes towards stare decisis have no causal effect upon the attitudes towards the policy issue; but that, conversely, attitudes towards policy have a substantial and negative effect upon attitudes towards stare decisis\[229] Thus the judge's attitude towards the decisions of his predecessors will be determined by the policy preferences of the judge rather than by respect for the legal principle of respect for precedents. In the Philippines there were six judges whose Conservative beliefs in a policy of non-liability for hospitals and in the sanctity of precedents were mutually self-reinforcing so that in the hypothetical case, they experienced no cognitive dissonance[230] when voting to free the hospital from liability*. Their attitude could be contrasted with four other judges who 'indicate relatively liberal policy views, moderate sympathy for stare decisis, and liberal (anti-hospital) votes in the case'.[231] The conclusion Flango and Schubert came to was that these Filippino judges 'opted for contemporary concepts of social justice rather than for the policy preferences of their imputed predecessors1.[232] Thus once again the perception of reality obtained through empirical observation of the judicial process tended to undermine the established constitutional mythology of a

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case-law system, in that the doctrine stare decisis et non quieta movere is shown to have less force as a rule of judicial conduct than has traditionally been supposed. The science of 'jurimetrics' has thus come far since Pritchett's pioneer analysis of American Supreme Court decisions, and has done much to throw light on the ways in which judges in many different system and cultures reconcile the dilemma between applying the law and imposing decisions which seem to them, to those who appear before them, and to society generally, to be appropriate and fair. The conclusions that judges are everywhere conservative but that some are more so than others, and that some are 'hanging judges*, by inclination more severe than their colleages, are hardly surprising, although much of interest is disclosed on the way to these conclusions. The dependent relationship of legal values upon policy preferences in the minds of judges, revealed by Flango and Schubert, is intrinsically more interesting than their final conclusion. Few attempts have been made to apply either the concepts and ideas of the jurimetricians to the British legal system. To do so is difficult because the higher courts in Britain are not collegiate and one does not get the same set of judges hearing a series of similar cases, as often occurs in the United States or in judicial systems modelled on the American pattern. The British Court of Appeal sits in divisions whose membership is changed from time to time, and in the House of Lords not all the Law Lords sit in judgement on cases coming to the House. Lower down the hierarchy, cases are heard by a single judge, with or without a jury. It can and does happen that a particular judge hears a series of similar cases and by his decisions influences the development of a particular aspect of the law[233] but there is not the opportunity for the aggregation of closely related data on the opinions of judges on particular issues that exists in America. It can also happen that a judge, or a group of judges, can campaign and bring about changes in the law, especially as the House of Lords gave itself permission in 1966 to overrule its own precedents.[234] Such a campaign took place in the nineteen-sixties over the doctrine of Crown privilege and was

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led by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning.[235] In 1965 three cases came before the Court of Appeal in which the same three judges, Denning with Lords Justices Harman and Salmon, asserted that, despite the precedent established in the Duncan case, the courts had a residual power to overrule a ministerial claim to privilege where the judge felt that the case in question could not be satisfactorily decided without production of the documents the minister was seeking to protect. They also argued that the circumstances in which the Duncan v. Cammell Laird case had been decided reduced its precedential validity,[336] but in none of the three cases did the Court of Appeal actually exercise the power it claimed to possess to overrule a claim to Crown privilege, since the judges felt able to decide the cases fairly without seeing the material for which privilege was being claimed. They did, however, feel sufficiently uneasy about the use the government was making of the doctrine to assert the existence of the power to overrule privilege claims, thus serving notice that sooner or later it might be exercised. Lord Denning, for example, complained that Viscount Simon's statement in the Duncan case, that documents could be withheld because they belonged to a class of material production of any of which would impede the proper functioning of the public service, was being used as if it were the words of a statute: The practice seems to have grown up of giving a certificate in common form using these words. All that a Secretary of State has to do is to put in the words, as if pronouncing a spell, and this makes all the documents taboo. The formula has only to be set out and the Court is for ever blindfold. I must say that if that state of affairs were to be accepted, it would indeed be deplorable. [237] Three years later, in the Conway v. Rimmer case, Lord Denning not only reasserted once more the existence of a residual power of the courts to overrule ministerial claims to Crown privilege, but urged its use to order the production of Home Office documents; in this case reports on a probationer police constable. This time, however, his two colleagues both felt that the Duncan case constituted a binding precedent; as one of them put it, it was 'conclusive authority'[238] and that

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whatever they might think of the use to which Crown privilege was being put, they could not challenge it. The case went on appeal to the House of Lords, which upheld Lord Denning's view. These cases allow one to draw several conclusions about the roles played by members of the Court of Appeal. First, concern at the use which ministers and civil servants were making of Crown privilege led to a desire to alter the law; thus a feeling that judges must adopt a more militant attitude towards the State where the latter appeared to be obstructing the course of justice led to a rejection of the doctrine of stare decisis as far as Crown privilege was concerned. Second, one Lord Justice of Appeal, Lord Denning, played a key role by consistently asserting the existence of the residual power to overrule claims to privilege and by doing so he enabled the argument to be resolved by the House of Lords by his dissenting judgement in the Conway case. Finally, the members of the Court of Appeal had quite widely varied conceptions of their role in the matter. Lords Denning, Harman, and Salmon were more ready to challenge both the Executive and an established judicial ruling in the interest of reducing the area of discretion available to the State than were Lords Davies and Russell, who sat with Lord Denning on the Conway case. It would be interesting to follow up these conclusions with work based on Eysenck's inventory of political personality or on the work of Flango and Schubert in analysing the link between judges1 policy preferences and their attitudes to the judicial role. The behavioural approach to the study of the judiciary has thus thrown a good deal of new light upon how judges resolve the perpetual dilemma which confronts them and which we discussed at the beginning of this chapter, but this has been done at the price, some would say, of devaluing the judicial role itself in the eyes of observers and citizens. Maurice Duverger came close to declaring that judges' expressed view of their profession was little more than humbug when he wrote: Notions of legitimacy, and especially of legality, result in recognizing the decisions of political power as valid because of their form, not their content, because of the power held by government leaders, not their ability or sense of justice. It

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is enough to be arrayed in purple and to receive a sceptre or be crowned and anointed at Rheims, or to have received a popular endorsement in order that one's commands may become law, justice and social order. Jurists further this mystification, usually unconsciously, by considering things from a theoretical rather than a practical point of view ... They declare that judges render justice, whereas judges express their conception of justice, which reflects their social status, their education and their personal likes and dislikes. The law is one of the great means of camouflaging power. [239] The behavioural political scientist claims to approach the study of justice from a practical point of view, and in doing so weakens or even tears down the camouflage and exposes the power and influence of judges as individuals. In the case of the administration of justice the camouflage is particularly important; people coming before the courts must believe that the case will be decided on the basis of their arguments and the evidence they will present. The activities of behavioural social scientists in the study of the judicial role will therefore always be peculiarly controversial.

part 3

Local politics

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-11

National and cross-national studies are expensive and time-consuming and some students of politics have sought cheaper and more easily managed fields in which to study the problems which interest them. In the case of political power, studies of states are often impossible because power-holders are too remote or aloof, or the processes of government too secret, for the academic political scientist to obtain sufficient information to form any useful conclusions. The study of local government is more manageable in terms of cost and travel and is often easier in that local power-holders are more accessible and often more willing to talk about the way they operate thdn, say, ministers or senior administrators in large industrial states. This said, some local politicians are obsessively secretive or suspicious of enquiries into the nature of their power; and, of course, some states, especially small ones, are easy to study and their senior politicians and administrators readily approachable. Nonetheless, a lot of work has been done on political power in local communities, and it is with this work that the next five chapters are concerned.

Chapter 9 The study of local politics So far we have considered large-scale politics: the politics of states and the making of comparisons between states. It can be argued that the state is the definitive and most important stage upon which the play of politics is acted out and that activity on other and smaller stages, such as sports clubs, trades unions or local communities, is simply an imitation of national politics on a smaller and less significant scale. One might borrow terms from the economists and talk about macropolitics and micropolitics, the former being the study of the politics of states and nations and the latter of politics in sub-groups within the state. As in economics, though, micropolitics may have its own truths to teach us. The studies of political culture and political socialization which we have discussed so far were concerned entirely with macropolitics and as such involved considerable expenditure of time and resources. Almond and Verba's project, for example, involved the drawing of samples from five countries, the preparation (in four languages) of a questionnaire adapted to each country's national institutions, circumstances, and personalities yet designed in such a way that the data obtained could be easily and meaningfully compared. Finally, the questionnaire had to be administered and the results analysed. This kind of work is both expensive and time-consuming, and it is not, therefore, surprising that there are many gaps in the data and that research moves forward only at a slow pace. The question has been posed of whether it is possible to seek answers to basic problems about political activity, such as the nature of political power, the role of democratic institutions and practices, the nature of elites and ruling classes, and so forth, by studying them in a micropolitical context; in short, whether it is possible to observe the drama of politics on a smaller and more manageable stage than that of the nation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003620792-12

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state. The chief objection in principle to such a method of proceeding is that the action on the smaller stage may resemble that on the larger so faintly that conclusions drawn from it may not be valid when applied to the larger stages of national or international politics. If one were to stage Verdi's Aida in a small provincial repertory theatre, it would be a far cry from what is possible at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, or at the Caracara Baths in Rome, and the production would make a completely different impression on the audience. Be that as it may, there have been many attempts to explore basic questions about political activity in small-scale contexts, of which by far the most popular is the local community. Local government lacks certain of the attributes of central government. On the one hand it is never sovereign; its freedom of action is curtailed by the demands of central legislation and financial control, so that the limits of the area of local controversy and decision are more or less clearly defined. Furthermore, the channels of communication between governors and citizens are likely to be less sophisticated where the populace is numbered in thousands rather than millions; there will be less need for parties or pressure groups where representatives can establish personal contact with a large proportion of their electors, as may well happen in a small toVn or village community. On the other hand, local politics, like national politics, is concerned with government and is thus more likely to resemble national politics than is political activity in, say, a trade union or a sailing club, whose objectives are at once more clearly defined and more limited than those of governments charged with ensuring peace within the community and the wellbeing of its members. For these reasons, studies of local politics have proliferated steadily both in America and, more recently, in Britain, and have been concerned in particular with the nature of political power as it emerges in the local context. In America the conduct of community power studies has now come close to acquiring the status of a national pastime. In what follows we shall consider three studies which have done much to establish the procedures and concepts upon which studies are based and which will enable us to delineate the conceptual and methodological

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controversies which community power studies have generated. The first of these studies is that carried out by Floyd Hunter in Atlanta, Georgia, concealed under the name of 'Regional City*. [240] He stated his objective in terms which anticipated his conclusions; he said that major policies suddenly appear and most of us do not know how or why they emerge. His object, therefore, was to discover who are our 'real leaders'. [241 At once we enter the world of political conspiracy. Those whom we elect as councillors, the mayor or chairman we see opening a new building — these may or may not be our real leaders, and indeed they probably are not. In order to identify the leaders of Regional City, Hunter first studied documentary sources, including the local Press, to identify 175 'notables', people who were publicly associated with decision-making. He then constructed a 'jury' composed of a mixture of citizens and 'notables' — its membership is nowhere described — who were asked to select the 'top leaders'. The jury produced a list of forty leaders, whom Hunter sought to interview in depth. He obtained 27 interviews and also saw 14 'under-structure professionals', officials concerned with the execution and administration of policy. Each of the leadership figures was asked to name the ten top leaders who had, in their opinion, the greatest power and their answers revealed 'considerable unanimity' (sic). One individual got 21 votes out of a possible 27, eight got at least a dozen votes, and ten at least ten votes. There was thus considerable agreement among the influential themselves as to who the top decision-makers were. Hunter also asked the people he interviewed how many people's co-operation was needed to implement a major project in the town. The answers he got ranged from 10 to between 50 and 100, but the larger estimates included many who were concerned with the execution and administration of decisions; all were agreed that the 'men of independent decision'[242] were a small group. They were nominated as leaders more frequently, they sat with one another on more committees, and they were better acquainted with one another than they were with others outside the group. Thus in committee work the top leaders worked on average with 29 of the 40 original nominees, lower

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leaders with 21, and under-structure professionals with 10 of the 40 top leaders identified by the jury. Hunter commented that 'there is a definite drop ... in the rate of interaction between each of the three groups and the group of forty leaders. Each group has access to the other, but those in the upper limits group are in contact with other leaders more frequently, in committee work at least'.[243] Again, in terms of social acquaintance the higher leaders knew on average 34 of the 40 top leaders, compared with 28.7 leaders known to the lower group of leaders, and 7.3 leaders with whom the under-structure professionals claimed acquaintance. Hunter said that 'Over and over, the same persons were named as influential and consequently able to "move things" in Regional City' and that the group of top leaders was clearly identifiable and had been isolated by the study: 'It has been shown that they interact among themselves on community projects and select one another as leaders'.[244] This, then, was the first major conclusion Hunter came to; that Regional City was run by a small group of leaders who could be identified both by a process of seeking nominations of those considered to be influential and by observing who sat on the most civic committees. Having established the existence of this elite, the next step was to establish who its members were and how they had acquired their elite status. On the basis of the 40 leaders originally identified, Hunter stated that 'what men do for a living ... locates them in a community setting\{245] Eleven were businessmen, 7 bankers and financiers, 5 were lawyers, another 5 had major industrial responsibilities, 4 were in government posts, and 2 were labour leaders. The group was completed by 5 'leisure personnel* and a dentist;[246] the majority of elite members were thus involved in the economic and business life of the town. Hunter said that the test for admission to the top leadership was 'almost wholly a man's position in the business community in Regional City'[247] and such leaders would often 'clear' proposals with one another. A final question relating to the personnel of the elite was whether the top leaders were involved in most decisions, or whether the influence of a particular leader was specialized, so that he would be involved in some decisions but not in others. Hunter found that while the under-structure personnel were

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specialized, as one would expect, the leaders were not. Town planners or social workers or teachers, say, would be involved in the taking of a particular decision, but whatever the field in which a decision was needed, the same group of leaders would call the tune: 'the under-structure might be likened to a keyboard over which the top structure personnel play, and the particular keys struck vary from project to project. The players remain the same, or nearly so, however.'[248] The elite thus took most civic decisions, whatever their subject-matter, making use of the appropriate specialists to implement them. This delineation of a united elite which dominated all Regional City's decision-making processes was alluded to by C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite, for he regarded it as a local example of what he claimed was happening to the Federal Government. [249] Having established that an elite existed and controlled all significant decisions, and having also established the origins and occupations of its members, the final issue to which we must turn is the elite's modus operandi. The means by which its members both asserted control over the community and maintained their own unity were explored by Hunter. Turning first to the elite's control over the rest of the community, Hunter quoted Homans: A social system is in a moving equilibrium and authority exists when the state of the elements that enter the system and the relations between them, including the behaviour of the leader(s) is such that disobedience to the orders of the leader(s) will be followed by changes in the other elements tending to bring the system back to the state the leader(s) would have wished to reach if the disobedience had not occurred. [250] The elite would seek to bring dissenters into line and the power of the elite in Regional City with regard to sub-leaders and professional officers was great: 'The omnipresent threat of power sanctions used against recalcitrant underlings is recognized by the lower echelons of power, and they generally go along with most decisions, grumbling in private with close associates, if at all.'[251] Hunter gave several examples of the kinds of pressure which could be brought to bear by elite

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members. A newspaper columnist wrote an article which caused offence to a prominent manufacturer in the town, referred to in Hunter's book as Cruthers, who rang up the columnist and delivered a tirade which left the latter 'both frightened and rebellious1. [252] Cruthers also contacted the owner of the paper, who then tried to persuade the columnist to write a recantation of the offending column; this he refused to do. He was then told that Cruthers was *out to get you' and from that time on his relations with his employer deteriorated, his work was carefully checked and he was reprimanded about minor incidents. In the end he was forced to move away from Regional City. Again, a housing official was dismissed for having been too outspoken; commenting on this incident, Hunter wrote that ... the forces for conformity were greater than the individual ... Most of the under-structure personnel around Joe were privately in sympathy with his fight but publicly they declared that his actions were foolhardy ... The power structure holds the means of coercion in Regional City, and most of the professions are well aware of the potential force of these elements.[253] The elite has ample means of enforcing its will, and its members inspire respect, almost terror: One of the top leaders in Regional City has a habit of closing his eyes and softly whistling to himself as he pats his fingers together when a subject of which he disapproves is up for discussion. Such signs as these are watched for carefully by the under-structure personnel. A community agency dependent upon the goodwill of one of the top leaders is extremely careful not to incur his displeasure and be thereby excluded from his interest and beneficence. [254] Social work and education agencies are often to a considerable extent dependent on private donations in the United States, and this gives the businessmen who make the donations considerable influence, apart from their control over political parties and other community activities. The business elite thus has ample means of enforcing its will upon the rest of the community, but if it is to do so collectively

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it must maintain its unity. Each elite member must be prepared to use his power and influence in the common interest even when his own interest might prompt a different course of action. To ensure united support, projects were discussed by the elite's members and once agreement was reached members would be expected to implement the common decision. This unity was reinforced by frequent social contact, at the clubs frequented by most elite members and at luncheon clubs where the proceedings were dominated, Hunter says, by 'ham, hocum and horseplay*. Hunter commented that 'the jovial greetings, the laughter, the good feeling of belonging, and the horseplay give the participants in these club meetings a glow which comes with belonging to and being on familiar terms with a "right bunch" \ The amusement is part of the technique of keeping the group together. Such gatherings had a more serious purpose as well — proposals would be discussed, coalitions formed, deals made, and thus the elite's activities concerted. Once decisions were made, though, members were required to exercise discipline: 'When the time for discussion is past and the line is set, then unanimity is called for. Pressures are put upon dissenters, and the project is under way.'[255] Controversy was to be avoided, for it might impose intolerable strains upon the elite's unity and difficult decisions could be delayed by an interminable series of meetings and lunches; one professional remarked that 'there are those who believe in salvation by luncheon'. Both leaders and others were sensitive to criticism and were obliged continually to assess what 'will go' and what 'will not go'. A leader who persistently isolated himself or obstructed agreed policy could be ousted from the elite by a process of gossip which 'may reach a low plane'. Smear and 'build-up' techniques would be used to reduce a leader's influence and drive him out of the social circle of the powerful. Since controversy was rare, a wider public was almost never involved in the affairs of Regional City; the elite would not wish to have to share its power with voters or anyone else. Hunter summed up the picture he painted by saying that 'Expressions of fear in community life are prevalent among the top leaders. Pessimism is manifested among the professionals, and silence is found in the mass of the citizenry in Regional City*. [256] The

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members of the elite watched one another and did not risk putting their positions and influence at risk, the professional workers had no control over the policy decisions which determined their activities, and the public was ill-informed and apathetic. Both the elite's decision-making process and its use of the social forces its members controlled were employed to eliminate controversy or conceal it from the public gaze. A united elite controlled all decisions in Regional City except in times of major crisis. Floyd Hunter thus presented a picture of domination of a community's affairs by an economic elite, whose activities were concealed but ubiquitous, and whose powers were great, embracing all fields of community activity. This picture of politics in Regional City was built up largely on the basis of interviews and an examination of the reputations of the power-holders. This 'reputational' method of determining the location of community power has been challenged by other scholars, who have used different methods and claimed to have found different kinds of power structure. Foremost among these has been Robert A. Dahl, who studied local politics in New Haven, Connecticut, and painted a picture of local political activity very different from that presented by Hunter.[257] His object was to establish whether the town's political system was oligarchical or pluralistic and whether inequalities of power were cumulative, that is, concentrated in a few hands, or dispersed among a large number of political actors. He posed eight questions about the town's power structure which indicated a more comprehensive approach than Hunter's; they were 1. How are important political decisions made? 2. What kinds of people hold the most influence? 3. Do the same people have the most influence over all decisions? 4. From what social strata are the leaders drawn? 5. Is there a ruling group, or must decisions be made by bargaining. 6. How important is the vote? 7. Is it a durable or a changing pattern? 8. What is the importance of the citizen's beliefs about democracy?

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The second, third, fourth and fifth questions cover the same ground as that covered in Hunter's book and the answers could be the same, but the first