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Explaining Peasant Conservatism: The Western European Case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Michael S. Lewis-Beck
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What is the political role of the peasantry? Is it a source of revolution or reaction? For the Third World nations, where this is an issue of special importance, the answer is by no means clear. In the advanced capitalist countries, however, the political impact of peasants has become less ambiguous. Although Lipset once argued that radical consciousness in the United States had shown itself primarily through agrarian struggles, farmers have now evolved into perhaps the most conservative occupational group in America. Harrington Moore, considering the historical place of peasants in the modernization of France, England and Germany, details their revolutionary contribution. But, concerning more recent times, Huggett indicates that, in general, the peasants of Western Europe have expressed themselves politically through the parties of the Right. The contemporary evidence presented here demonstrates that these strong right-wing sentiments on the part of the peasantry persist.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , October 1977 , pp. 447 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

1 See Huizer, Gerrit, Peasant Rebellion in Latin America (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1973)Google Scholar; Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Stavenhagen, R., Agrarian Problems and Peasant Movements in Latin America (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1970)Google Scholar; Wolf, Eric R., Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).Google Scholar

2 Lipset, Seymour M., Agrarian Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 17.Google Scholar

3 Lewis-Beck, Michael S., ‘Agrarian Political Behavior in the 1972 Election’ (mimeo, Department of Political Science, University of Iowa, 1976), pp. 31–8.Google Scholar

4 Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 453–83.Google Scholar

5 Huggett, Frank E., The Land Question and European Society since 1650 (New York:Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975), p. 141.Google Scholar

6 In this paper, evidence is drawn from the 1970 surveys, because they provide a more comprehensive treatment of the questions of concern here. However, the pattern of peasant conservatism is not unique to 1970; rather, it is repeated in the 1971 and 1973 data sets. As noted, the present analysis utilizes those respondents who have a head of household actively involved in the work force, i.e. peasant, worker, or middle class. This criterion yields the following sample size for each country: France = 1,571; West Germany = 1,628; Italy = 1,354; Belgium = 1,024; Netherlands = 1,174. The peasant sample for each is France = 224; West Germany = 179; Italy = 240; Belgium = 70; Netherlands = 75. The interviews were carried out in the respective countries in February and March of 1970 by Institut für Demoskopie (Allensbach); International Research Associates (Brussels), Institut français d'opinion publique(Paris), Instituto per le Ricerche Statistiche e l'Analisi dell' Opinione Pubblica (Milan), and Nederlands Instituut voor de Publieke Opinie (Amsterdam). The European Communities Studies data are available from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, Box 1248, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48106.

7 Inglehart, Ronald, ‘The Silent Generation in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies’, American Political Science Review, LXV (1971), 991–1017CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Inglehart, Ronald, ‘Industrial, Pre-Industrial, and Post-Industrial Political Cleavages in Western Europe and the United States’, paper delivered at the 1973Google Scholar annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, and appearing as Chap. 7 and 8 of Inglehart, Ronald, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

8 Huggett, , The Land Question and European Society Since 1650, pp. 141–3.Google Scholar

9 What follows is the percentage of respondents in each country who were excluded from analysis of this item because their response to this question (‘for which party would you vote?’) was (1) don't know, (2) no answer, (3) none, or (4) a party not included in the Left-Right dichotomy of Table 1: France = 37 per cent; West Germany = 28 per cent; Italy = 35 per cent; Belgium = 53 per cent; The Netherlands = 20 per cent.

10 Inglehart, , ‘Industrial, Pre-Industrial…’, pp. 14–25.Google Scholar

11 Inglehart, , ‘Industrial, Pre-Industrial…’, p. 22.Google Scholar

12 Marx, Karl, ‘The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850’Google Scholar, and ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, excerpts in Shanin, T., ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 230.Google Scholar

13 For a recent example, see Jackman, M. R. and Jackman, R. W., ‘An Interpretation of the Relation Between Objective and Subjective Social Status’, American Sociological Review, XXXVIII (1973), 569–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Alford, Robert, Party and Society: The Anglo-American Democracies (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963).Google Scholar

15 Fine, N., Labor and Farmer Parties in the United States (New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1928), p. 210Google Scholar, as quoted in Lipset, , Agrarian Socialism, p. 27.Google Scholar

16 Lipset, , Agrarian Socialism, pp. 26–32.Google Scholar

17 The percentages of those who have completed no more than primary school, for each country, are as follows (P = Peasant, W = Worker, MC = Middle Class): France, P = 64 per cent, W = 59 per cent, MC = 22 per cent; West Germany, P = 80 per cent, W = 80 per cent, MC = 38 per cent; Italy, P =81 per cent, W = 61 per cent, MC = 16 per cent; Belgium, P = 62 per cent, W = 54 per cent, MC = 17 per cent; Netherlands, P = 58 per cent, W = 52 per cent, MC = 17 per cent.

18 Inglehart, , ‘Industrial, Pre-Industrial…’, pp. 41–55, 90.Google Scholar

19 See especially Jennings, M. Kent and Niemi, Richard, ‘The Transmission of Political Values from Parent to Child’, American Political Science Review, LXII (1968), 160–85.Google Scholar

20 On interaction effects, see Blalock, Hubert M. Jr., ‘Theory Building and the Statistical Concept of Interaction’, American Sociological Review, XXX (1965), 374–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 According to these 1970 data, the percentage engaged in farming in each country is as follows: France = 11 per cent; West Germany = 9 per cent; Italy = 13 per cent; Belgium = 5 per cent; Netherlands = 5 per cent.

22 Rose, Richard and Urwin, D., ‘Social Cohesion, Political Parties, and Strains in Regimes’, Comparative Political Studies, 11 (1969), 7–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Inglehart, , ‘Industrial, Pre-Industrial…’, pp. 82–3.Google Scholar

24 In the Netherlands, 48 per cent of the peasants indicated a denominational preference of Liberal Calvinist, as compared to 30 per cent for workers and 33 per cent for the middle class.

25 Lipset, S. M. and Rokkan, S., ‘Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments’, in Lipset, S. M. and Rokkan, S., eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967).Google Scholar

26 Lewis-Beck, , ‘Agrarian Political Behavior’, pp. 31–5.Google Scholar

27 Inglehart, , ‘The Silent Generation’Google Scholar, and ‘Industrial, Pre-Industrial…’.

28 The Materialist/Post-Materialist variable is constructed from the respondent's comparison and subsequent ranking of four goals: maintain order, improve participation, fight rising prices, guarantee free speech; see Inglehart, ‘Industrial, Pre-Industrial…’, pp. 56, 77–8. Use of this index does not seem appropriate for purposes of examining peasant values because of the ambiguities contained in the ‘fighting rising prices’ item. Clearly, a farmer may place a lower priority on fighting rising prices because, given the way the survey item reads, ‘prices’ could refer to prices for farm produce. Of course, this possible source of bias contaminates the comparative ranking of all four goals. Unfortunately, all the other questions in the survey that consider the value of economic security, which this item is intended to tap, are also biased for farm respondents. For example, questions about the importance of ‘job security’ or ‘salary increases’ make little sense in the context of farm enterprise. Similar biases infect the value priority items dealing with participation.

29 The percentages of peasants (P) and workers (W) giving top priority to free speech are as follows: France, P = 45 per cent, W = 48 per cent; West Germany, P = 46 per cent, W = 45 per cent; Italy, P = 28 per cent, W = 37 per cent; Belgium, P = 63 per cent, W = 50 per cent; Netherlands, P = 35 per cent, W = 35 per cent.

30 Huggett, , The Land Question and European Society Since 1650, p. 140.Google Scholar

31 When a causal model meets recursive assumptions, ordinary least squares (OLS) is the preferred technique for estimating the path coefficients; see Wonnacott, R. J. and Wonnacott, T. H., Econometrics (New York: Wiley, 1970), pp. 193–4.Google Scholar Further, despite the dichotomous nature of the dependent variable of Left-Right voting (X 5), these OLS estimates remain unbiased; see Kmenta, J., Elements of Econometrics (New York: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 425–8.Google Scholar The path estimates in Fig. 2, then, are simply equal to regression coefficients, in this case unstandardized ones symbolized by ‘b’.

These unstandardized coefficients are generally to be favored over the standardized for purposes of comparison across nations, because they are less affected by shifts in variance. Specifically, suppose one is estimating the same equation in more than one nation; the standardized beta (β) are subject to change when the variance of either the independent variable(s) or the dependent variable changes from one nation to the next. The unstandardized ‘b’, in contrast, would be affected only by variance change in the dependent variable. Thus, the obvious risk in employing the standardized coefficients for comparison is that a change in a relationship across nations might be inferred when in fact the functional relationship, as indicated by the unstandardized ‘b’, remained the same for both nations; in this case, what actually happened was merely a change in variance in an independent variable from one nation to the other. (For an excellent explication of this point, see Blalock, H. M. Jr., Causal Inferences in Nonexperimental Research (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1964), pp. 114–26.Google Scholar For a later, but flawed, discussion, see his popular article, ‘Causal Inferences, Closed Populations and Measures of Association’, AmericanPoliticalScienceReview, LXI (1967), 130–6.)Google Scholar The difficulty with the unstandardized coefficients, of course, is that the relative importance of the independent variables within a given country cannot be easily determined, due to lack of a common measurement base.

32 Tarrow, Sidney G., Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

33 Wright, G., Rural Revolution in France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

34 For clarity of presentation, the age cohort categories were collapsed, and the country samples pooled. The basic pattern remains the same if the age cohorts are smaller, and each country is analyzed separately. Figure 3 also affords the opportunity to test a critical hypothesis of spuriousness. Specifically, one might contend that the greater conservatism of the peasantry merely reflects the effects of their greater age, which has come about as a result of the changing composition of the farm population. (The data do show that, with the exception of Belgium, the average farmer is slightly older than the average member of the general adult population.) Figure 3 does not support this hypothesis of spuriousness for it shows that, with age controlled, peasants nevertheless consistently demonstrate a substantially higher level of Right voting.

35 See fn. 21.