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A Theory of Political Ambition: Career Choices and the Role of Structural Incentives*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Gordon S. Black
Gordon S. Black*
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
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Abstract

Office-holders periodically face the problem of choosing among a set of career alternatives, and these alternatives customarily include the choice of dropping out of political life, or seeking reelection, or of choosing to seek higher office. This paper assumes that officeholders behave according to a rational calculus in making such choices, and that the main elements involved in the choice process include the probabilities and values attached by the candidate to his alternatives, and the investments required to obtain these alternatives. Political ambition, or the desire to seek higher office, is shown to develop as a product of the investments that politicians make in their political careers, and the investments are shown to be associated with the structural characteristics of community size and electoral competitiveness. The subjects of the research are 435 city councilmen from 89 cities of the San Francisco Bay Region, and the data include information derived from interviews with the councilmen and aggregate election data collected on each city.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 66 , Issue 1 , March 1972 , pp. 144 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1972

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Footnotes

*

The larger project of which this analysis is a part, the City Council Research, is sponsored by the Institute of Political Studies, Stanford University, and by the National Science Foundation under contract GS 496 and GS 1898. I am indebted to William H. Riker who gave his always helpful advice to an earlier version of this paper, to Douglas Rae who in reviewing this paper made many constructive suggestions, and to Heinz Eulau and Kenneth Prewitt both of whom contributed their counsel at the formative stages of this research. I would also like to acknowledge the support of a Ford Foundation Fellowship which permitted me the time to complete this paper.

References

1 One of the best examples of the “case study” approach of famous politicians is George, Alexander L. and George, Juliette C., Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York: Doubleday, 1956)Google Scholar. Studies of the social backgrounds of decision makers are quite common. See, for example, Matthews, Donald R., The Social Background of Political Decision Makers (New York: Doubleday, 1954 Google Scholar; and Bell, W., Hill, R. J., and Wright, C. R., Public Leadership (San Francisco: Chandler, 1961)Google Scholar.

2 Schlesinger, Joseph A., Ambition and Politics: Political Careers in the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966)Google Scholar. Several other exceptions to the general neglect of ambition include Eulau, Heinz et al., “Career Perspectives of American State Legislatures,” Political Decision-Makers: Recruitment and Performance, Marvick, Dwain, ed. (The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961)Google Scholar; Barber, James David, The Law-makers: Recruitment and Adaptation to Legislative Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; and Kim, Chong Lim, “Political Attitudes of Defeated Candidates in An American State Election,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 64 (09, 1970), pp. 879–887 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Schlesinger, pp. 6, 9.

4 Schlesinger finds considerable consistency in the career patterns that politicians follow from state to state. He finds that some offices are substantially more likely to promote political advancement than other offices, and he characterizes these differences as the “opportunity structure” of the political system. Although one cannot prove it with these data, I suspect that the ambitions of individuals are strongly shaped by the availability of opportunities, and that this effect is manifested in the probability estimates that politicians assign to various alternatives.

5 While Schlesinger can chart recruitment patterns, his data do not permit an examination of ambition directly. The study of political ambition is the study of the motivations of politicians and hence requires data on individuals.

6 Such background factors are obviously important, but it remains to be seen whether their cumulative effect on a politician is very great. They are probably outweighed by more immediate concerns, particularly those related to the choices that are available at the time a potential candidate must make his decision.

7 These data include open and closed items on the interview, census data, and election statistics gathered from each city. This research is, in several important respects, parallel with some findings reported earlier by this author; “A Theory of Professionalization in Politics,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 64 (09, 1970), pp. 865–878 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. That article also employed a utility model, but the point of the article was to show that politicians tend to adopt attitudes that facilitate their ambitions, what we termed instrumental attitudes. The logic behind this phenomenon was similar to that reported here: some attitudes increase the probability of success in a career sequence, thus increasing the rate of return that an individual can expect from that sequence. In this article, however, our interest is the phenomenon of ambition itself, and our goal is to show how the political structure in a community can affect the level of ambition expressed by officeholders in the unit.

8 For a detailed explanation of the approach, see Luce, R. D. and Raiffa, Howard, Games and Decisions (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1957)Google Scholar.

9 The term “utile” refers to the abstract metric used in utility theory; and its value is specified in terms of the other abstract components of a theory, not in terms of some specific empirical measure such as dollars.

10 The form of this function is a simplified version of what is a much more complex set of calculations. One simplification is that we are treating the calculus as if (P) and (C) are independent variables, which they most certainly are not. On the whole, the more a candidate spends on his elections, the more likely he is to win, that is, it might be rational for a candidate to increase his investment because it increases his probability of success at the polls. For our purposes, however, the interdependence between these two factors is less important because the analysis here is primarily concerned with the structural conditions that affect the value of (C) so as to establish some minimal value point below which (PB) cannot fall. The rather severe limitations in the type of data we have do not permit the more sophisticated and complicated analysis that would be required if we treated (P) and (C) as if they were interdependent.

11 There are other structural characteristics which might similarly affect the recruitment of officeholders; nonpartisanship is one such characteristic, but it is not relevant here because all of the respondents were elected under nonpartisan forms of election. If some of the cities had had partisan elections, we would have had to take that factor into consideration.

12 The purpose of this table and the next is to establish that a strong relationship exists between the costs of running for office and the two structural variables. We have employed simple dichotomies and trichotomies because a more detailed analysis of this relationship is unfeasible for our purposes. There are two reasons for this. The more important of the two is that we cannot aggregate “costs” into a single index because they are not convertible into a common unit. In addition, it seems unwise to overestimate the accuracy of this kind of recall data.

13 In order to test this proposition we divided the cities into two categories, those above 30,000 in population and those below that number of people. The selection of 30,000 as a cutting point was an arbitrary decision: the only real concern was to choose a point that seemed large enough to separate out the cities in which the costs of running for office were significant, but small enough so that we had sufficient councilmen in the large cities for the analysis. The measure of competitiveness for the city was the closeness of the vote among the various candidates for office. This measure was obtained by calculating the mean deviation of the vote among all the candidates who received more than 15 per cent of the vote. The mean deviation (or absolute deviation as it is sometimes called) is computed by determining the sum of the absolute deviations from the mean number of votes per candidate and then dividing that sum by the number of deviations. The mean deviation is a measure of dispersion around the mean, but it differs from the standard deviation in that it weights every deviation the same, rather than weighting extreme scores more heavily. In almost all cases, the measure of the closeness of the vote, the mean deviation, was determined from five elections in each community, and the average was taken and is used here.

These mean deviation scores for five elections in each city were averaged to obtain a measure of the closeness of the vote for the city during a ten-year period. The Councilmen were then classified according to whether the city in which they were elected was “high” or “low” on the measure of the closeness of the vote. Virtually all of the cities are, in effect, multiple member districts. There were, on the average, more than two candidates for every office, and there were almost always more than two councilmanic positions at stake.

The dividing point between the “high” and the “low” competitive was the average mean deviation of 13 per cent. The range for the cities was between a low of 8 per cent on the variable and a high of 18 per cent. This cutting point was selected because it stood at the midpoint of the range.

14 Campaigning can be costly in a wide variety of ways. If a campaign is bitterly contested, the animosity, hostility, and rudeness of the campaign are all costs that the candidate and his family have to bear. It is difficult, however, to think of a way to aggregate costs such as these into a serious calculus of the “cost” of a campaign.

15 Schlesinger, , Ambition and Politics, p. 10 Google Scholar.

16 The size of a city is also related to the degree of competition in city elections. Elections in the larger cities, on the whole, tend to be more closely contested than those in the smaller communities. For this reasoncity size must be controlled for when electoral competitiveness is employed an as independent variable. For empirical evidence of this relationship, see Black, Gordon S., The Arena of Political Competition (Bobbs-Merrill, forthcoming.)Google Scholar

17 Some candidates undoubtedly do run for office, not because they expect to win but because it will benefit them in other ways. Local lawyers, for example, sometimes use office-seeking as a way of advertising, since advertising is normally forbidden under state law. The logic for such individuals is that they should attempt to minimize their total expenditures because they will benefit from all of the free publicity they derive from the election.

18 Few of the councilmen had to “risk” another office to run for the council, and the ones that did resigned from relatively minor offices.

19 Schlesinger, employs similar terms in his analysis, Ambition and Politics, pp. 10–11 Google Scholar.

20 I have employed the average closeness of vote because it gives a better measure of the general competitiveness of the community. Candidates probably form their expectations of what to expect in an election on the basis of what generally transpires in their city.

21 The concept of rate of return as employed here includes the individual's estimate of the probabilities of succeeding at the various alternatives. We will not attempt to explore, however, the complex problem of the portion of their resources that councilmen will invest in politics because we lack data on the councilman's nonpolitical alternatives. This has no effect on the logic of the argument discussed next.

22 By introducing the concept of “transferability,” we are opening up a relatively uncharted set of questions for analysis. Investments in public office, unlike those in stocks, are not readily translated into a common denominator such as money. The investments in politics involve rather amorphous quantities such as experience, knowledge, prestige, etc., and we know next to nothing about the general process through which such factors are aggregated by the individual. At the same time, however, the existence of an investment process (with some element of transferability) seems quite plausible and perhaps intuitively obvious. The data here seem to substantiate the existence of these phenomena, but we have only made a small and preliminary step toward delineating the full dimensions of the process.

23 Throughout this paper we have conducted our analysis entirely with subjective probabilities, and we continue to do so here. Utility theory rests not on the real likelihood of a given outcome, but on the individual's estimate of what those probabilities are. An intriguing question, however, is the extent to which subjective estimates correspond to the objective events faced by candidates. I suspect, although this is simply conjecture, that candidates tend systematically to over estimate their electoral chances.

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