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Issue Conflict and Consensus among Party Leaders and Followers1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Herbert McClosky ,
Paul J. Hoffmann  and
Rosemary O'Hara
Herbert McClosky
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
Paul J. Hoffmann
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
Rosemary O'Hara
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

American political parties are often regarded as “brokerage” organizations, weak in principle, devoid of ideology, and inclined to differ chiefly over unimportant questions. In contrast to the “ideological” parties of Europe—which supposedly appeal to their followers through sharply defined, coherent, and logically related doctrines—the American parties are thought to fit their convictions to the changing demands of the political contest. According to this view, each set of American party leaders is satisfied to play Tweedledee to the other's Tweedledum.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , June 1960 , pp. 406 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1960

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Footnotes

1

This article is the first of a series reporting the findings of a national field study of political belief and affiliation among american party leaders and followers. The study was carried out through the Laboratory for Research in Social Relations at the University of Minnesota under grants made to the senior author by the Committee on Political Behavior of the Social Science Research Council, and supplementary grants from the Graduate School Research Fund. The manuscript was prepared at the Survey Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, under a Fellowship in Legal and Political Philosophy awarded to the senior author by the Rockefeller Foundation.

References

2 Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties, their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (New York, 1955), p. 102.Google Scholar

3 The analysis of these and related tendencies associated with the American party system is ably set forth in Herring, Pendleton, The Politics of Democracy (New York, 1940), p. 102 Google Scholar and passim. Also, Burns, James M., Congress on Trial: The Legislative Process and the Administrative State (New York, 1949), p. 34.Google Scholar

4 See especially Schattschneider, E. E., Party Government (New York, 1942), p. 92 Google Scholar and passim; and Key, V. O., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 4th ed. (New York, 1958), ch. 8Google Scholar; Penniman, Howard R., Suit's American Parties and Elections, 5th ed. (New York, 1952), p. 162.Google Scholar

5 Goodman, William, The Two-Party System in the United States (New Jersey, 1956), p. 43.Google Scholar

6 Duverger, op. cit., pp. 187, 418.

7 Pendleton Herring, op. cit., p. 133.

8 American State Legislatures, ed. Zeller, Belle (New York, 1954)Google Scholar; but see also Jewell, Malcolm E., “Party Voting in American State Legislatures,” this Review, Vol. 49 (Sept. 1955), pp. 773–791.Google Scholar

9 Report of the Committee on Political Parties, American Political Science Association, Toward A More Responsible Two-Party System (New York, 1950)Google Scholar, passim.

10 Data bearing on these generalizations will be presented in companion articles which specifically deal with sectional and rural-urban influences on issue outlook.

11 Cf. Prothro, James W., Campbell, Ernest Q., and Grigg, Charles M., “Two Party Voting in the South: Class vs. Party Identification,” this Review, Vol. 52 (March, 1958), pp. 131–139.Google Scholar Also, Odegard, Peter H. and Helms, E. Allen, American Politics: A Study in Political Dynamics (New York, 1947 ed.), pp. 809–821.Google Scholar

12 This gratifyingly large number of returns of so lengthy and detailed a questionnaire was attained through a number of follow-up mailings and special letters. These and other procedures designed to check the adequacy of the sample will be fully described in the volume containing the report of the overall study. The difference in the number of returns from the two parties was largely a result of the greater number of Democratic delegates to begin with.

13 The measure of dispersion used for this purpose was the standard deviation, which was computed by using the scores of 0, .50 and 1.00 as intervals in the calculations. To avoid having to calculate separate significances of difference for each of the comparisons we wanted to observe, we simply made the assumption—erring on the side of caution—that the maximum variance of ·50 had occurred in each instance. The magnitude of the significance of difference is, in other words, often greater than we have reported. The significance test used in this procedure was the critical ratio. Unless otherwise indicated, all the differences reported are statistically significant at or beyond the .01 level.

14 See, for example, the congressional roll-call results reported by Turner, Julius, Party and Constituency: Pressures on Congress, The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science Series, LXIX, #1 (1951).Google Scholar The complexities affecting the determination of party votes in Congress are thoroughly explored in Truman, David B., The Congressional Party: A Case Study (New York, 1959).Google Scholar

15 Conservatism is here used not in the classical but in the more popular sense, in which it refers to negative attitudes toward government ownership, intervention, and regulation of the economy; resistance to measures for promoting equalitarianism and social welfare through government action; identification with property, wealth, and business enterprise; etc.

16 Key, op. cit., p. 239.

17 The friendlier attitude toward farmers among Democratic leaders than Republican leaders is borne out in the responses to eeveral other questions used in the study. For example, the Republican leaders list farmers as having “too much power” far more frequently than do the Democratic leaders. Equally, the Democrats are significantly more inclined to regard farmers as having “too little power.”

18 Turner, op. cit., p. 64.

19 See Johnson, John B. Jr., The Extent and Consistency of Party Voting in the United States Senate, Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1943. By applying the Rice Index-of-Likeness to Senate votes, Johnson finds the tariff to have been the most partisan issue before the Congress in the years 1880–1940.Google Scholar

20 Silverman, Corinne, “The Legislator's View of the Legislative Process,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 18 (1954–1955), p. 180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Turner, op. cit., p. 54.

22 Cf. Turner, op. cit., p. 56, in which he found differences on foreign policy difficult to assess in Congress, partly because of its tie with the executive branch; see also, Belknap, George and Campbell, Angus, “Political Party Identification and Attitudes toward Foreign Policy,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 15 (Winter, 1951–1952), pp. 608–619.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 The issue of defense spending has been kept separate from the other foreign policy issues because the magnitude of the scores for some of the leaders and all of the followers were obviously inflated by the launching of Sputnik I in November, 1957. The Sputnik incident occurred between the first and second wave of the leader survey and produced an increase in the number favoring defense spending of 40 per cent for the Democrats and 33 per cent for the Republicans. While this is a fascinating testimonial to the influence sometimes exercised by events on public opinion, its effect in this case was to distort scores in such a way as to make the leader and follower samples non-comparable. With proper caution, however, comparisons can be made between the Democratic and Republican leaders since both samples were affected in roughly the same way by Sputnik. For a similar reason we can also compare the Democratic followers with the Republican followers. Comparisons between leaders and followers on this issue cannot, however, be justified from our data.

24 Berelson, Bernard R., Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William N., Voting (Chicago, 1954), ch. 9.Google Scholar

25 For comparative data on party affiliation and issue outlooks among rank and file voters, see Angus Campbell, Phillip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (in press), especially chs. 8 and 9 dealing with issues and ideology. The text of this important report on the 1956 election study carried out by the Michigan Survey Research Center unfortunately reached us too late to be used to full advantage in the present analysis. The findings of the Michigan and the PAB studies, relative to the role of issues and ideology among the general population, corroborate and supplement each other to a very great degree.

26 Cf. Bailey, Stephen K., The Condition of Our National Parties (monograph), Fund for the Republic, 1959.Google Scholar

27 The data reported by the Elmira study of 1948 show the supporters of the two parties to be largely in agreement on issues. See Berelson, , et al., Voting, pp. 186, 190, 194, 211.Google Scholar The findings of the 1956 Michigan Survey suggest strongly that most voters, even at election time, do not know much about issues and are unable to link the parties with particular issues. Campbell and his associates conclude, for example, that “many people fail to appreciate that an issue exists; others are insufficiently involved to pay attention to recognized issues; and still others fail to make connections between issue positions and party policy.” The American Voter, ch. 8.

28 For an analysis of the connection between intellectuals and liberal politics, see Lipset, Seymour M., Political Man (New York, 1960), ch. 10Google Scholar; also Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Thielens, Wagner Jr., The Academic Mind (Glencoe, 1958), chs. 1 and 2.Google Scholar

29 Huntington, Samuel P., “A Revised Theory of American Party Politics,” this Review, Vol. 44 (1950), p. 676.Google Scholar

30 PAB data supporting this generalization will be presented in a future publication.

31 For the effects of education on issue familiarity, see Campbell et al., The American voter, ch. 8.

32 E. E. Schattschneider, op. cit.; Toward A More Responsible Two-Party System, passim.

33 See Schattschneider, E. E., Party Government, p. 192.Google Scholar

34 Almond, Gabriel, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton, 1954), pp. 5–6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ch. 3.

35 See the discussion bearing on this conclusion in Campbell et al., op. cit., chs. 8 and 9. Also, Leiserson, Avery, Parties and Politics, An Institutional and Behavioral Approach (New York, 1958), pp. 162–166.Google Scholar

36 For an interesting set of comparative data on the relation of internal party cohesion to issue outlook, see Davis, Morris and Verba, Sidney, “Party Affiliation and International Opinions in Britain and France, 1947–1956,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 1960–1961 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (forthcoming).

37 Weber, Max, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, 1948), ch. V.Google Scholar

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