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Behavioral Correlates of Political Support*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Edward N. Muller
Edward N. Muller*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Stony Brook
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Abstract

Theories of the behavioral consequences of political support coincide in the prediction that political support will correlate positively with indices of conventional behavior, negatively with indices of unconventional behavior. Survey data drawn from three communities in the Federal Republic of Germany show that an index of support for the structure of political authority is negatively correlated both with an index of actual participation in aggressive political behavior and with an index of participation in conventional electoral/pressure-group politics. Since the political behavior indices are themselves positively correlated, it is useful to construct a typology which differentiates between “pure” types – no participation, participation only in conventional, participation only in aggressive – and “mixed” types – participation in conventional and moderately aggressive, participation in conventional and highly aggressive. When the relationship between political support and the political-action type index is examined, it turns out that two of the types are associated with medium political support, while four of them occur at low support. To achieve more accurate explanation of types of political behavior, a model for prediction of each action type is proposed, taking into account interaction between political support, sense of personal political influence, and belief in the efficacy of past collective political aggression. The test of the model yields positive results, suggesting that it represents a fruitful beginning toward development of a theory of behavioral consequences of political support.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 71 , Issue 2 , June 1977 , pp. 454 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1977

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Footnotes

*

This report is from the project Gesellschaftliche und Politische Indikatoren für Unterstutzung/Opposition, Zufriedenheit/Unzufriedenheit und Beherrschung/Machtlosigkeit, supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Professors Rudolf Wildenmann and Wolfgang Hirsch-Weber of the University of Mannheim are sponsors of the project. The author is principal investigator. Jonathan Pool of the State University of New York at Stony Brook participated as co-investigator in this phase of the project. Helpful assistance was provided by Walter Wehrli. The paper is a revised version of one delivered at the Conference, “Alienation and System Support,” Iowa City, Iowa, January 8–11,1975.

References

1 See Finifter, Ada W., “Dimensions of Political Alienation,” American Political Science Review, 64 (June, 1970), esp. Figure 1 at page 407 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paige, Jeffery M., “Political Orientation and Riot Participation,” American Sociological Review, 36 (October, 1971), esp. Chart 1 at p. 812 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Schwartz, David C., Political Alienation and Political Behavior (Chicago: Aldine, 1973), esp. p. 156 Google Scholar.

2 On the Detroit study, see Aberbach, Joel D. and Walker, Jack L., Race in the City (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973)Google Scholar; on the San Francisco Bay area study, see Citrin, Jack, McClosky, Herbert, Shanks, J. Merrill, and Sniderman, Paul M., “Sources and Consequences of Political Alienation: A Progress Report on Indicator Development,” paper delivered at the conference, “Public Support for the Political System,” Madison, Wisconsin, August 12–17, 1973 Google Scholar.

3 The interview schedule was prepared by the author and Jonathan Pool. We are grateful for the helpful advice received from many colleagues at the University of Mannheim, especially Rudolf Wildenmann and Uwe Schleth, and from Yola Laupheimer, director of the fieldwork, and Dorothea Reppart, assistant director, both of the Economics Research Bureau, Infratest GmbH & Co., Munich.

4 Dorn-Dürkheim had shown relatively high support for the NPD in the late 1960s; Mannheim-Schönau had shown relatively high support during the late 1940s and early 1950s for the KPD (there has been hardly any electoral support anywhere in present-day West Germany for the new version of the Communist party – DKP); the University of Heidelberg had experienced relatively high levels of disruptive collective protest during the academic year 1972–73.

5 These items are intended to measure the concept of diffuse political support, proposed by David Easton. For his most recent elaboration of the concept, see Easton, , “A Re-Assessment of the Concept of Political Support,” British Journal of Political Science, 5 (October, 1975), 435–457 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 There is some reason to believe that the format of the cardsort sheet might have encouraged respondents with no real opinion about a given item to place it in the Neutral box, since the sheet did not contain a Don't Know box. At least, when the Neutral category is excluded, correlations with other variables go up. But there is no systematic way to determine which respondents “really” meant “neutral” and which respondents really meant “don't know.”

7 The phrasing for many of these items comes from a pretest questionnaire developed for a substantively parallel study which is being carried out in West Germany under the direction of Max Kaase and Hans Klingemann of the Zentrum für Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen, Mannheim.

8 See Galtung, Johan, Theory and Methods of Social Research (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1967), p. 223 Google Scholar.

9 See Finifter, “Dimensions of Political Alienation;” Schwartz, Political Alienation and Political Behavior.

10 Schwartz, p. 163.

11 Finifter, p. 408.

12 Schwartz, p. 140.

13 Finifter, p. 407.

14 Schwartz, pp. 163, 179.

15 There is, of course, an enormous gap between frequency of voting and frequency of engaging in the other conventional actions. See, for example, Milbrath, Lester W., Political Participation (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), pp. 16–27 Google Scholar.

16 On the topic of concurrent validity, or criterion validation, see Leege, David C. and Francis, Wayne L., Political Research (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 160–162 Google Scholar.

17 Paige, , “Political Orientation and Riot Participation,” pp. 811–812 Google Scholar.

18 Finifter, , “Dimensions of Political Alienation,” p. 408 Google Scholar.

19 Schwartz, , Political Alienation and Political Behavior, pp. 158–159 Google Scholar.

20 Finifter's dimensions-of-alienation theory has not been tested. Paige tested the political trust theory on a sample of black males interviewed some six months after the July, 1967, civil disorders in Newark. He found that among blacks high on political information, there was a statistically significant, positive linear trend between participation in the riots and level of political distrust. But a negative linear trend between being registered to vote in 1964 and level of political distrust was very slight. Since the question of whether one is registered to vote is not a very reliable (or even desirable measure of participation in conventional political activity), the test of the prediction of a negative relationship between level of distrust and conventional activity probably is best ignored. Also, since the equivalence of amount of political information (used as an indicator of political efficacy) and sense of political efficacy is debatable, it probably is best not to regard the information variable as one that enables any kind of precise test of political efficacy and political trust interaction hypotheses. Schwartz's alienation theory has not been tested against measures of overt behavior. Schwartz does report correlations between a national political alienation index and measures of behavioral orientation for a sample of students and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and a sample drawn from black ghettoes in North and West Philadelphia. In the case of the University of Pennsylvania sample, a statistically significant negative correlation obtained between the political alienation index and the behavioral orientation labeled Conformity; but this correlation is suspect because, since three of the four items in the Conformity index appear to be measuring the same thing as the items in the political alienation index, political alienation is, at least in part, just being correlated with itself (see Schwartz, pp. 269, 273). In the case of the Philadelphia ghetto sample, the meaning of the statistically significant negative correlation between political alienation and Conformity is unclear because the single item used to measure the conformity orientation does not appear to have much at all to do with conventional political behavior per se (see Schwartz, p. 179). The political alienation index does show statistically significant positive correlation with Revolutionism in both samples. However, tests of the hypothesis of an interaction between political alienation and sense of personal efficacy in the determination of Revolutionism are performed incorrectly (all variables are entered additively into a multiple regression analysis).

21 This hypothesis is suggested by Paige on p. 818 of “Political Orientation and Riot Participation,” where he proposes that civil rights activity will be the preferred political tactic of those who are high on political efficacy and medium on political trust.

22 The inclusion of the single case of Nonconformative Opposition in Table 5 does not affect the stability of chi-square, as evidenced by the fact that V, a chi-square-based statistic, is .3995 when the Nonconformative Opposition case is excluded.

23 Rural communities such as Dorn-Durkheim did show rather high support for the rightist party, Nazionaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, during the late 1960s; but there is some question whether this party is actually an antiregime party in the same sense as, say the German Communist Party. In this sample, three of the four NPD identifiers from Dorn-Durkheim are at the Medium level on SAS, the other is at the High level. Of the four respondents from Heidelberg who identify with the DKP (newly reconstructed Communist party), three are at the Low level of SAS, the other is at the Medium level.

24 Muller, Edward N., “A Test of a Partial Theory of Potential for Political Violence,” American Political Science Review, 66 (September, 1972), 928–959 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 This is the role proposed in Gurr's, Ted Robert, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, though not in his “A Causal Model of Civil Strife: A Comparative Analysis Using New Indices,” American Political Science Review, 62 (December, 1968), 1104–1124 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Empirical evidence supporting such an assumption is reported in Muller, pp. 931–932.

27 The text of the items is: “Sind Sie der Ansicht, dass Sie einen grossen Einfluss, einen nennenswerten Einfluss, kaum oder keinen Einfluss darauf haben, wie die Bundesrepublik regiert wird?”

28 The text of the items is: “Um Veränderungen an den Universitäten herbeizuführen, haben Studenten Lehrveranstaltungen gestört und Raume und Mobiliar beschädigt. Was glauben Sie, hat dies den Gruppenzielen im allgemeinen genützt, im allgemeinen geschadet oder weder noch?” “Einige Cruppen haben öffentliche Gebäude gestürmt und sich mit der Polizei geliefert, um gegen Tätigkeiten der Regierung zu protestieren. Was glauben Sie. …” “Einige Geheimorganisationen-so hauptsächlich die Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe-haben zur Guerilla Taktik gegriffen, um gegen die gegenwartigen gesellschaftlichen und staatlichen Strukturen in der Bundesrepublik zu protestieren. Was glauben Sie. …”

29 The party identification question listed all the major parties. Three respondents from Heidelberg chose the option, “other.” Which party this meant was not determined; but one is on fairly safe ground in assuming that “other,” in this context, referred to a radical party.

30 If the different propositions predicting to the same action type are collapsed to form five general categories, each predicting to a single action type, Cramer's V is .540. If proposition Va and the Nonconformative Opposition type are excluded from the table for want of sufficient cases, Cramer's V remains unchanged at three decimal places.

31 I am speaking, of course, not about unmotivated contagion, as in the random outburst theory of urban riots proposed by Banfield, among others. A good discussion of this appears in Sears, David O. and McConahay, John, The Politics of Violence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), chap. 7Google Scholar.

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