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Participant Citizenship in Six Developing Countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Alex Inkeles
Alex Inkeles*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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In this paper I will endeavor to do the following: (1) test how far certain concepts dealing with individual orientations to politics, previously used in studies of relatively advanced European societies, are appropriate to populations in developing countries; (2) ascertain how far these separate dimensions of individual political orientation cohere as a syndrome, indicating the existence of a general underlying dimension of “participant citizenship;” (3) identify elements among common orientations to politics which cannot be incorporated in this general syndrome; and (4) assess the importance of certain social experiences or forces in inculcating the qualities of participant citizenship in individuals exposed to these influences.

These objectives will be better understood if they are seen in the context of the larger research program of which this report is a part, namely the Harvard Project on the Social and Cultural Aspects of Economic Development. The project is an investigation of the forms and sources of modernization in individuals. Its focus is on the person rather than the society or the institution, and its emphasis is socio-psychological rather than purely sociological or structural. Six countries are represented: Argentina and Chile, East Pakistan and India, Nigeria and Israel. This report will not, however, emphasize national differences, but rather treat each sample as another replication of the basic design. We assume that if something holds true for six such different countries, it must be a powerful connection indeed.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 1969 , pp. 1120 - 1141
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1969

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References

1 My chief collaborators from the early days of the project were Howard Schuman and Edward Ryan, who served respectively as field directors for Pakistan and Nigeria, and David H. Smith who was my assistant in Chile and later was assistant director of the project in Cambridge. The field work and later analysis were greatly facilitated by the work of our local collaborators in all six of the countries. We owe particular debt to Juan Cesar and Carlotta Garcia. Perla Gibaja, and Amar Singh who were field directors for Chile, Argentina, and India, respectively, and to Olatunde Oloko who was assistant field director in Nigeria. In its different aspects, stages, and settings the research has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Mental Health. The Cultural Affairs Division of the Department of State provided local currencies to support our field work in India, Israel and Pakistan, and the Office of Scientific Research of the U. S. Air Force supported technical exploration in problems of translation and computer analysis undertaken in Cambridge. All of these organizations gave their support through the Center for International Affairs of Harvard University, which is the sponsor and institutional home of our project.

2 A brief description of this model appears in Inkeles, Alex, “The Modernization of Man,” in Weiner, M. (ed.), Modernization (New York: Basic Books, 1966)Google Scholar. A full account is contained in Inkeles, Alex, “A Model of the Modern Man,” in Faunce, Wm. A. and Garfinkel, H. (eds.), Cross-Cultural Research in Developing Areas (East Lansing, and New York: Social Science Research Bureau and Free Press, (forthcoming)Google Scholar.

3 A preliminary report of these findings may be found in Smith, David H. and Inkeles, A. “The OM Scale, A Comparative Socio-Psychological Measure of Individual Modernity,” Sociometry, 29 (1966), 353–377 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

4 See Inkeles, “A Model of the Modern Man,” loc. cit.

5 We do not mean to ignore the substantial body of writing in which it has been argued that Russia, Germany, and Japan, while important examples of a modernizing tendency, have indeed not yet attained a “true” condition of modernity. To engage in that particular dialogue would take us far afield from our main task here. For further discussion see Ward, Robert E. and Rustow, Dankwart A. (eds.), Political Modernization in Turkey and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bellah, Robert (ed.), Religion and Progress in Modern Asia (New York: Free Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

6 See Marshall, T. H., Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1964)Google Scholar.

7 In this description we have condensed, and blended, elements of what Almond and Verba term the “parochial” and “subject” political cultures: Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), ch. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Pye, Lucian, Politics, Personality and Nation Building (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962)Google Scholar, identifies this problem of developing identification with and allegiance to the national state as the highest priority task of the developing nations.

9 We are not unaware that pull and influence, family connections and bribery, are common enough in modern states, including and perhaps even especially, in the more democratic ones. But we believe it correct to assert that expectation, and the formal system of values, in the modern polity run very much counter to such behavior. Whether or not corruption is in fact less common in modern polities, which we believe it to be, would be difficult to establish beyond peradven-ture.

10 See Inkeles, Alex, “National Character and Modern Political Systems” in Hsu, Francis L. K. (ed.), Psychological Anthropology: Approaches to Culture and Personality (Homewood, Illinois: Dorsey Press, 1961)Google Scholar.

11 McCIosky, H. and Schaar, J., “Psychological Dimensions of Anomie,” American Sociological Review, 30 (1965), 14–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCIosky, H., “Personality and Attitude Correlates of Foreign Policy Orientation,” in Rosenau, J. N. (ed.), Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy (New York: Free Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

12 We borrow here from the essay of Scheler, Max, Ressentiment (New York: Free Press, 1961)Google Scholar, in which he describes a psycho-political syndrome having the characteristics we have sketched above.

13 The core set initially contained 39 questions, but local circumstances dictated the omission of certain items in some countries—3 in Pakistan, 2 in Argentina, and 1 in Israel. In Chile, Argentina, and Israel, in which time-pressure was less severe and the field directors felt greater freedom to touch on sensitive political issues, these 39 core questions were supplimented by others of local interest, up to a total of 54. Those additional questions are not considered in this report.

14 Along with a number, all items in our questionnaire bore letters which were codes designating the content or topic of the question. Those coded ID dealt with national identification; AC with “action in politics”; CI with citizenship; PA with “particularism,” and so on.

16 The individual's score on each sub-scale ranged from a minimum of 1 to a maximum of 2. This followed from the fact that each item was dichotomized as closely as possible to the median in each country, with a score of 2 assigned to the “modern” answer, 1 to the “traditional.” Averaging by the number of items in the scale kept the range of the several scale scores uniform regardless of the number of items in the scale. To simplify reading the score results, we adopted the convention of treating scores of 1.00 as equal to 0 and 2.00 as equal to 100, enabling us to express individual scores on the common scale of 0–100.

16 Seeman, Melvin, “On the Meaning of Alienation,” American Sociological Review, 24 (1959), 783–791 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For discussion of findings, see H. McClosky and J. Schaar, op. cit.; Neal, Arthur G. and Rettig, S., “Dimensions of Alienation Among Manual and Non-Manual Workers,” American Sociological Review, 28 (1963), 599–608 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Fallers, Lloyd, “Equality, Modernity, and Democracy in the New States,” in Geertz, Clifford (ed.), Old Societies and New Slates: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (New York: Free Press, 1963), pp. 204–205 Google Scholar.

18 Almond and Verba, op. cit., Ch. 15, esp. pp. 497–505.

19 This refers only to the questions tapping general orientations towards political participation. Questions about which party they favored, or which candidate they supported, or what specific changes should be made in the government, were considered so delicate that we decided against even asking them in Pakistan. When they were asked in other countries, such questions did sometimes lead to refusal to answer and in other ways lessened rapport with the interviewee.

20 Tastes and standards will, of course, vary, as to what strength of relationship between the items is required before one will accept a set of items as constituting a scale. We adopted as a rule of thumb that the average item-to-item correlations should be significant at least at the .05 level in at least four of the six countries. The most widely accepted standard of the quality of a scale is the measure of its reliability. Using the Spearman-Brown formula for the eight scales in six countries, we obtained a range of reliabilities from .600 to .906, with a mean of .707 and a median of .698.

21 A second alternative would be to construct a summary scale based directly on the items making up the several sub-scales. This has been done, with results reported in footnote 25 below. A third alternative would be factor analysis of either the sub-scales or the original questions. This has not yet been done.

22 The statistical tests of significance used in Table 1 and at later points in this paper assume a random sample. Ours are in fact cluster samples selected according to the dictates of our research design. Within those limits we sometimes have not so much a sample as the entire eligible population. In other cases we have taken our subjects as we found them, and in yet other instances drew them at random from a defined population. Given the nature of our “samples” we consider the test of significance based on the assumption of random sampling to be a conservative one, although this might be challenged in some instances. In any event, no single statistic presented here should be considered as having major or minor weight on the sole basis of the test of significance attached to it. We have used the tests of significance in order to have some general standard which could be applied as an aid in interpreting the statistics presented. The tests of significance given should not be interpreted too literally. They should rather be taken as a rough criterion which permits only a very proximate estimate of the confidence limits of the statistics presented. Most weight should be given to the pattern of results across a variety of measures and across the set of six countries.

23 The individual's score on this summary scale was the mean of his score on each of the five sub-scales. From this it follows that in the summary scale each sub-scale carries the same weight, i.e., one-fifth, regardless of the number of questions on which the sub-scale is based. But the fact that only five units are included in computing the summary score also contributes to the high correlations shown in Table 1 between the citizenship and each of the sub-scales. Those correlations are each, in part, auto-correlations. The correlations of each sub-scale to the summary scale constructed to exclude the given sub-scale would be substantially lower.

24 Using the Spearman-Brown formula, the summary scale yielded the following reliabilities: Argentina .690; Chile .722; India .746; Israel .724; Nigeria .721; Pakistan .724.

25 The reliabilities thus obtained ranged from .760 to .794 when computed by the Spearman-Brown formula. Using the Kuder-Richardson formula the reliabilities ranged from .693 to .735. These reliabilities are in the same range as are those for scales of comparable length dealing with political attitudes in the United States. Thurstone's Patriotism Scale, for example, yielded reliabilities ranging from .69 to .83. Some others have done better, but generally only with college student populations who are more consistent than our less well educated respondents can be expected to be. See Shaw, Marvin and Wright, Jack, Scales for the Measurement of Attitudes, New York: McGraw-Hill, Co., 1967, esp. pp. 193–229, 301–329 Google Scholar.

26 As indicated above, the evidence from a factor analysis is not yet available. However, it seems reasonably apparent from the pattern of inter-correlations in Table 1 that a factor analysis would confirm the existence of the basic underlying syndrome of participant citizenship.

27 This inconsistency is not maintained when we consider only the relation of the evaluative scales to one another. In all six countries the scales of anomie, alienation, and negativism toward government effectiveness correlate quite significantly, and appear to form a coherent “resentment” syndrome. The relation of this syndrome to the scale of participant citizenship is, however, again different in India and Nigeria from other countries, and throughout the relationship is weak.

28 We will, later, see that some things which most everyone assumes to be obviously powerful causes of individual modernization nevertheless prove to be embarrassingly ineffective.

29 In a separate set of reports on our research, we will explore these national differences in detail.

30 Since, as noted above, the five sub-scales had each been scored from 0 to 100, the theoretical range on the summary scales was also 0 to 100. The range of the actual scores was as follows: Argentina 0–87; Chile 0–95; India 0–88; Israel 0–100; Nigeria 0–100; Pakistan 7–93. The scoring system for the sub-scales insured that each of them would produce a distribution very near the normal curve. In combining these five normal distributions, however, we could well have come out with a new distribution very far from the normal. In fact, the distribution of summary scores in each country was very close to normal. This could only have come about if the scores individuals received on any one sub-scale were in fact very similar to the scores they received on the other four scales, which further justifies our combining these five in one summary scale.

31 We must acknowledge that not all these tests were truly independent. For example, the measures of total years in school, of performance on our literacy test, and the score on a vocabulary (“opposites”) test were all highly inter-correlated and might be considered merely alternate, rather than independent, measures of intellectual capacity. Nevertheless, we feel our conclusion stands.

32 The Civic Culture, p. 379.

33 We realize, of course, that in itself a correlation coefficient is not proof of cause, but only of co-variation. Yet it also is evident that a man's current political attitudes could not have caused his educational level (except, of course, by affecting his recall of how much education he had had). The same case, although admittedly more vulnerable to challenge, may be made for other “objective” indices such as years of factory experience. It does not seem likely that most men enter and remain in factories because of their political attitudes.

34 This theme is further pursued, with some surprising results, later in this paper.

35 See Kerr, Clark, et al., Industrialism and Induslrial Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Lipset, S. M., Political Man (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1960), esp. pp. 248–252 Google Scholar.

36 Neither do numerous other studies, particularly those undertaken in the United States and Europe, which consistently show those less advantaged also to participate less in politics. See, for example, Almond and Verba, op. cit., p. 176.

37 This point should be understood as applying to active citizenship as defined in this study, and not as necesarily applying to the evaluation of the government's performance, nor to the degree of individual commitment to the existing political system.

38 The correlation of scores on the participant citizenship scale with radicalism was .269 in Argentina and .251 in Chile. The per cent scoring “high” on the radicalism scale in Argentina rose from 7 among those with 1–3 years of schooling to 39 for those with 8 years or more. In Chile among those with less than 6 months of factory experience only 29 per cent scored high on radicalism, whereas among those who had spent 10 years or more in factories the figure rose to 46 per cent. Expressed as correlations, the association of radicalism and exposure to modernizing institutions in Argentina was, for education .247, factory experience .167, mass media .187. In Chile the correlations were, respectively, .163, .113, .181. All were significant at the .01 level or beyond.

39 We also lose, however, because the matching process leaves us with very small numbers in the groups compared, and often selects a subset not truly representative of the larger group from which it is drawn. An alternative method would be multivariate regression analysis. This method, of course, presents still other peculiar difficulties. Nevertheless, we plan in a later publication to report the results of such an analysis.

40 This fear is, however, hypothetical rather than real. We have carefully matched cultivators with men of the same villages who had recently migrated but had not yet been much exposed to industrial life. The evidence is clear-cut that, at least in our six countries, the men who migrate are not self-selected on the basis of being more modern in attitude and spirit than those who remain behind.

41 The education match might, for example, place in the “low” group men with 0–3 years and in the “high” group those with 8–10 years of schooling, resulting in a substantial gap of 5 years. Few of the high and low education group would then overlap in attitude, and a high correlation would result. If the factory work match succeeded in placing men in the “high” and “low” experience categories with only a two year gap, the overlap would be great and a lower correlation might be expected. Under such circumstances this lower correlation would not be correctly interpreted as showing that factory experience is a “weaker” variable than education.

42 For example, in the educational match in Argentina the highly educated set had, on the average, six years more schooling than the low-educated. Their mean scores on the citizenship scale were 60 and 38, respectively. The mean difference of 22 points on the scale, divided by 7 for the year's difference in education, yields a point gain of 3.6 per year.

43 For Argentina we have available a correlation of years of urban with years of factory experience for a sub-sample of factory workers only. The figure is very high: .78. Presumably the situation is much the same in the other countries.

44 This conclusion is supported by an unpublished independent multi-variate analysis done by David Smith using the Overall Modernity Scale as dependent variable. He concludes: “The weakest of the six independent variable clusters we have been examining is urbanity. This is a very great surprise indeed. For all six countries the average regression weight of urbanity is .01; factory experience averages .05, objective skill level .07.”

45 For example, in Nigeria, among men of rural origin and low education, 18 per cent of both the UNI and the mid-experienced industrial workers scored “high” on citizenship. In Israel among the low educated, both occupational groups had about 21 per cent “high.”

46 See Alex Inkeles, “The Modernization of Man,” op. cit. Almond and Verba, op. cit., p. 502, also believed that “the occupational changes that accompany industrialization … may increase the channels of (political) socialization.” They did not, however, gather any evidence from their research to bear on the question.

47 Only some of which have been presented in this report.

48 The issues will be dealt with in a detailed chapter on urbanism in the general report on our project by Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith to be titled Becoming Modern (in preparation).

49 We scored individuals as “high” on the scale of active citizenship if they fell in the upper third of the distribution of scale scores in their country. It is thus a highly relative designation. In less relative terme, a man had to select an alternative at the modern end of the continuum in somewhat more than half of the questions in the battery in order to score in the upper third of the distribution.

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