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The Friendship Group as a Protective Environment for Political Deviants*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Ada W. Finifter
Ada W. Finifter*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Abstract

This is a study of the relationship between partisan preference and social integration in natural work groups in several automobile plants. The basic finding is that the number of work group friends increases from the Democratic to the Republican end of a standard party identification scale. Since the political context of the study sample is heavily Democratic, attention is focused on the fact that Republicans in this environment are political deviants. It is suggested that friendship integration is a function of perceived deviance in that deviating from group norms leads to social insecurity, cognitive dissonance, and a need for opinion evaluation, all of which motivate affiliative behavior. Several hypotheses are deduced from this proposition. The first is that Republicans have less political contact in nonwork contexts, but more in the work group, than Democrats do. Second, the relationship between partisanship and friendship integration should be greater for members of social groups in which the pro-Democratic norm is stronger than for those in which this norm is weaker. Third, strength of identification with the norm-bearing group ought to be positively related to friendship integration among deviants, since identification would make the group's norms more salient and increase the deviant's discomfort. Fourth, political deviants should tend to choose each other as friends to a greater extent than political conformers do. Finally, since friendship alliances apparently serve a protective function for political deviants, it is hypothesized that among deviants (but not among conformers), friendship integration should be related to political participation. All the hypotheses are supported. The results are interpreted in terms of the critical function of social support for political deviants in pluralist societies. Since pressures for conformity are strong, it is important to understand the ways in which minorities deal with them. Friendships in work groups, ostensibly nonpolitical, therefore have important political functions.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , June 1974 , pp. 607 - 625
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1974

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Bernard M. Finifter, and Frank Pinner, Paul Abramson, and Nancy Hammond for comments on an earlier version of this paper. Patricia Conlin and Christine Dunning assisted with computer runs. I am also grateful to the Department of Political Science and the Computer Institute for Social Science Research, Michigan State University, for support. This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 5–9, 1972.

References

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2 Verba, Sidney, Small Groups and Political Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 21ffGoogle Scholar. The classic statements of this position in the voting behavior literature are Lazarsfeld, Paul, Berelson, Bernard, and Gaudet, Hazel, The People's Choice (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1944)Google Scholar and Berelson, Bernard R., Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William N., Voting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1954)Google Scholar.

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7 The sample was designed by and the data collected under the direction of Donald E. Stokes and Warren E. Miller. I served as Assistant Study Director. The data were collected through the Detroit Area Study of the University of Michigan.

8 The universe of work groups was stratified by company, shift, political activity level of local union leaders, and ability of the work group to talk informally during the working day. The work groups were then chosen randomly to balance the stratification variables.

9 This is similar to Landecker's definition of group cohesion as “communicative integration.” Landecker, Werner S., “Types of Integration and Their Measurement,” in The Language of Social Research, ed. Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Rosenberg, Morris, (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1955), pp. 19–27 Google Scholar.

10 Some measurement error results from the fact that response rates were not 100 per cent for any of the work groups. This meant that some, respondents gave one or more of their choices to individuals with whom we did not secure interviews, so that reciprocity was precluded. For these respondents, the number of reciprocated choices may underestimate the number of friends they actually had. An additional possible source of difficulty is that the groups varied in size. Because respondents were asked to choose five friends from the list of persons in their work group, the measure appears to favor individuals in smaller-sized groups, where the likelihood of reciprocation is greater. A number of corrections to the raw score were attempted to adjust for this possibility, but none of these measures had as good validity as the raw score itself. And, as reported in Table ID, the anticipated difficulty of a negative correlation between the raw number of reciprocated choices and group size did not materialize. This fortunate result appears to have been caused by an interesting “natural” correction mechanism in the sociometric question, whereby people in smaller groups tended to give fewer choices than we requested, while those in larger groups insisted on giving more (all choices were coded). Thus, the probability of a reciprocated choice in the different sized groups was substantially equalized by this phenomenon.

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21 Some research suggests that deviants also reject conformers. Norrison, W. F. and Corment, D. W., “Participation and Opinion Change in Two Person Groups as Related to Amount of Peer Group Support,” British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 7 (09 1968), 176–183 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

22 For a discussion of Durkheim's methods of subgroup comparison as a type of replication, see Selvin, Hanan C., “Durkheim's Suicide: Further Thoughts on a Methodological Classic,” in Emile Durkheim, ed. Nisbet, Robert A. (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 113–136 Google Scholar. For a discussion of a variety of statistical procedures for “pseudoreplication” of findings on the same data set, see Finifter, Bernard M., “The Generation of Confidence: Evaluating Research Findings by Random Subsample Replication,” in Sociological Methodology 1972, ed. Costner, Herbert L., (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1972), 112–175 Google Scholar. Since the basic purpose of significance tests is to suggest the degree of reliability of a finding, Finifter argues that replications serve this purpose without making distributional and other assumptions. Following this logic and because of the nature of the present sample, I have refrained from using significance tests except in the section on the composition of the friendship groups, below.

23 For a discussion of “systematic” and other types of replication, see Sidman, Murray, Tactics of Scientific Research: Evaluating Experimental Data in Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1960)Google Scholar.

24 Even after controls for ten life-situation variables were introduced (representing region, size of place of residence, and social class), nonsouthern blacks were almost 12 per cent more Democratic in their voting behavior than were comparable whites. Campbell, Angus, Converse, Phillip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1960), pp. 300–306 Google Scholar.

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28 Technically, this is a “specification” analysis, in which the focus is on identifying the conditions under which the initial relationship is weakened or strengthened. The reader should note, however, that in controlling for the specification variables we are also in effect checking on the possibility of a spurious relationship resulting from any association between the control variables and the independent variables. That the resulting relationships become both stronger and weaker in a systematic pattern suggests that the spurious relationship type of interpretation is inappropriate. An analysis which presented only one partial correlation for each control variable (interpretable as an average relationship in the subcategories of the control variable) would obscure this pattern.

29 Berelson, et al., Voting, p. 126 Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

30 Briefly, normative reference groups set standards which the individual is motivated to follow; comparative reference groups are used by the individual to evaluate himself and others. The same group may also perform both functions. See Kelley, Harold H., “Two Functions of Reference Groups,” in Readings in Reference Group Theory and Research, ed. Hyman, Herbert H. and Singer, Eleanor, (New York: The Free Press, 1968), pp. 77–83 Google Scholar.

31 Festinger's hypothesis, which has been supported by experimental evidence, is that dissonance as a function of disagreement with a group increases with the importance of the group to the individual. Festinger, and Aronson, , “Arousal and Reduction of Dissonance,” p. 130 Google Scholar.

32 The subgroup size difficulties are amply illustrated in the impossibility of doing a within-group analysis of black Republicans. There were only three of these and all were highly identified with their racial group and perceived it to have a Democratic political norm.

33 Previous analyses have shown that group identification increases compliance with group norms. See, for example, Campbell, et al., The American Voter, pp. 295–332 Google Scholar. The present analysis in a sense focuses on one aspect of the unexplained variance in this relationship, i.e., what is the effect on high identifiers of not conforming?

34 Because the same reference group questions are used for both of these social categories, they are combined in the analysis. For the total sample, the gamma between income and education is .60.

35 I am grateful to Leo Katz, Director of the Statistics Laboratory at Michigan State University, for advice on this analysis.

36 The pooled chi2 value is simply the sum of the separate chi2 tests and the sum of the degrees of freedom, which is then evaluated in the usual way. “In effect, we are saying that if a relationship comes out roughly the same each time but the probabilities of the separate results are each greater than .05, we still may ask ourselves how likely such a combination of outcomes would be if there were no relationship in any of the … tables.” Blalock, H. M. Jr., Social Statistics, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2nd ed. 1972), pp. 309–310 Google Scholar. In the present case, 8 of the 18 individual relationships were also separately significant. Chi square is, of course, highly sensitive to N, and the Ns for these analyses are rather small. In fact, the use of chi square in the individual work groups is technically inappropriate because the expected values for dyad types involving Republicans and Independents frequently fall below the generally accepted minimum. Nor does any combination of categories that is theoretically meaningful solve the problem. The results should therefore be interpreted in a tentative and exploratory spirit.

37 Some work group tables had fewer than four degrees of freedom because they had no or only one Independent, thus eliminating the II and/or ID, IR lines.

38 Lone Republicans in the remaining groups had slightly fewer friends than Republicans in these groups where like-minded partisans were available (although still more than Democrats); they demonstrated their partisan selectivity by disproportionate friendships with Independents over Democrats.

39 Cartwright and Zander, Group Dynamics, argue that “public behavior is more likely to be conforming than private behavior” because of the greater likelihood of sanctions being invoked when deviance becomes known (p. 145). Some Wallace campaign activists, for example, reported in the media that during the 1972 presidential primaries there were numerous cases of individuals who covertly expressed support for Wallace but who could not be induced to participate in his campaign until they were persuaded that their “friends and neighbors” were for him too.

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42 See, for example, Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society; also Verba, , Small Groups and Political Behavior, pp. 52–54 Google Scholar.

43 See, for example, Pollis, Nicholas P. and Cammalleri, Joseph A., “Social Conditions and Differential Resistance to Majority Pressure,” Journal of Psychology, 70, 1 (09 1968), 69–76 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Allen, Vernon L. and Levine, John M., “Social Support, Dissent and Conformity,” Sociometry, 31, 2 (06 1968), 138–149 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

44 While the experimenter's ability to control and manipulate variables is enviable, one must not forget his concern that the artificiality of the laboratory situation may severely limit the generalizability of findings. See, for example, Blake, Robert R. and Mouton, Jane S., “Conformity, Resistance and Conversion,” in Conformity and Deviation, ed. Berg, Irwin A. and Bass, Bernard M. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), esp. pp. 5–7 and 24–25 Google Scholar. Replication of experimental findings in real-life situations is thus especially necessary.

45 Milgram, Stanley, “Liberating Effects of Group Pressure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1, 2 (02 1965), 127–134 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

46 Blau, Peter M., “Patterns of Deviation in Work Groups,” Sociometry, 23, 3 (09 1960), 245–261 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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