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Rational Participation: The Politics of Relative Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Robert Goodin  and
John Dryzek
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Extract

Survey researchers have been reporting, for two decades or more, that a citizen's decision to participate in politics is most strongly influenced by his subjective sense of efficacy. Those who feel able to make a great impact tend to participate vigorously, while those who feel impotent tend to withdraw. According to the conventional wisdom all this is mostly inside one's head, with few objective – much less rational – referents. For example, social psychologists, and political researchers under their spell, see subjective efficacy as a mere reflection of ‘ego strength’. The more sociologically-inclined see psycho-cultural values (such as ‘civic orientation’) producing a sense of efficacy which, once again, bears little relationship to one's real influence.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , July 1980 , pp. 273 - 292
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 Prewitt, Kenneth, ‘Political Efficacy’ in Sills, D. L., ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1968), Vol. 12, pp. 225–8.Google Scholar

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3 Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Verba, Sidney and Nie, Norman H., Participation in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972)Google Scholar; Verba, Sidney, Nie, Norman H. and Kim, Jae-On, Participation and Political Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).Google Scholar Psycho-cultural factors are increasingly played down throughout this sequence: they figured centrally and conspicuously in The Civic Culture; the ‘civic orientation’ remained the crucial intervening variable in Participation in America; but by the time of Participation and Political Equality most emphasis had shifted to socio-economic resource levels as determining participation rates. While dropping out of the presentation, however, psycho-cultural factors are still crucial to the logic of the explanation. Upper-class participation is, according to Participation and Political Equality, p. 11Google Scholar, a result of ‘issue-neutral’ motivations' such as ‘a belief in one's political efficacy, general interest or involvement in public affairs, and a sense of obligation to be a political activist. Each of these “civic attitudes” increases the likelihood of political activity.’ Verba, Nie and Kim tip their hand even more clearly with Table 4–4, which they regard as crucial, showing ‘psychological involvement’ to be linked to socio-economic resource levels even more tightly than is participation itself.

4 Perhaps the most clear-cut example of this thesis comes from development theory. Schuman, Howard, Economic Development and Individual Change, Occasional Papers in International Affairs No. 15 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Centre for International Affairs, 1967)Google Scholar reports that the Comilla project in East Pakistan promoted development by altering the social psychology of inhabitants, most especially by encouraging a belief in their own ‘efficacy’ to improve their situation. What the project actually did was to alter the objective power of the participants over their environment: it provided them with easy credit, tractors, advisors, training, etc., the combined effect of which was that participants were truly better able to control the environment after the project than before. Their perceptions of their efficacy changed as a wholly appropriate response to changes in their real efficacy – there was nothing psychological about it. Similar defences of the rationality of apparently irrational behaviour by underclasses are found in: Pizzorno, Alessandro, ‘Amoral Familism and Historical Marginality’, in Dogan, M. and Rose, R., eds., European Politics (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971)Google Scholar; Portes, Alessandro, ‘Rationality in the Slum: An Essay on Interpretive Sociology’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XIV (1972), 268–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

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7 The ‘voter's paradox’ is often (and we think wrongly) said to settle the rationality of participation: the chance of any one vote altering the outcome is very slight, so it is never rational to bear the costs of voting. To explain why people do in fact vote, rational choice analysts such as Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957)Google Scholar, Chap. 14, impute to voters an irrational belief in their power singlehandedly to save democratic institutions from atrophy, or impute to them a sense of ‘civic duty’ strong enough to get them to the polls. But, as Barry, Brian (Sociologists, Economists and Democracy (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1970), p. 16)Google Scholar, protests, that argument only pushes all the interesting questions back into social psychology – ‘why do some people have this kind of motivation more strongly than others?’ We shall try a different tack. The voter's paradox is predicated on the assumption that any one vote has little chance of altering the outcome, and that in turn depends on the assumption that every vote counts equally. We suggest instead that ‘one man, one vote’ is simply a legal fiction. Even as regards voting – and certainly as regards other modes of participation – some people count much more than others. Those who are, in effect, casting multiple ballots may well have a good enough chance of altering the outcome to outweigh the certain costs they will have to bear in voting. Frey, Bruno S., ‘Why Do High Income People Participate More in Politics?’ Public Choice, XI (1971), 101–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar employs a similar move in explaining why it is rational for rich people, whose time is objectively more valuable, to spend more of it on politics.

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13 Unless the goods are naturally scarce, production will rise to meet the higher demand, at least in the long term. But victims of the Bengal famine illustrate the truth of the Keynesian aphorism, ‘in the long term we are all dead’. Short-term deprivations inflicted by reason of power relativities might be severe, even if they are remedied in the long term.

14 Sen, Amartya, ‘Starvation and Exchange Entitlements: A General Approach and Its Application to the Great Bengal Famine’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, I (1977), 33–59, p. 51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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16 Boudon, Raymond, Education, Opportunity and Social Inequality (New York: Wiley, 1973)Google Scholar; Elster, Jon, ‘Boudon, Education and the Theory of Games’, Social Science Information, xv (1976), 633–40Google Scholar; Hirsch, Fred, Social Limits to Growth (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially Chap. 3. Among political analysts, Converse, , ‘Change in the American Electorate’Google Scholar and, following him, Huntington, Samuel and Nelson, Joan, No Easy Choice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, pause briefly to consider the comparative merits of models connecting ‘absolute educational attainment’ and ‘relative educational attainment’ respectively with ‘political efficacy’. They use a very different rationale in justifying the straw-man ‘relative’ model, however, supposing that ‘there is a natural pecking order in societies…which arises from a variety of individual traits and determines the ratio of wins and losses, including success at completing an education.’ (Converse, , p. 326.Google Scholar) Relatively high educational attainment does not cause a person to have higher political efficacy, as it would do on our model; rather, in their straw-man model the same underlying forces that help one complete an education also make one politically efficacious.

17 This argument contains crucial presuppositions about alternative opportunities available to both the poor and the rich. It presupposes that there are other arenas in which the relatively meagre resources of the poor will yield better returns. It also presupposes that politics is the most lucrative arena in which the rich might invest. Often neither is true, the poor having no other hope than politics and the rich finding much more rewarding outlets for their energies. This, Ulf Torgersen advises us, was the situation in Norway at the turn of the century.

18 Verba, and Nie, , Participation in AmericaGoogle Scholar; Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957), Chaps. 11–14, esp. Chap. 13.Google Scholar

19 Frohlich, Norman, Oppenheimer, Joe A., Smith, Jeffrey and Young, Oran R., ‘A Test of Downsian Voter Rationality: 1964 Presidential Voting’, American Political Science Review, LXXII (1978), 178–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Their implausible assumptions about the distribution of costs of voting mar an otherwise excellent re-analysis.

20 U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of the Population, Vol. I: Characteristics of the Populations (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973), Table 89.Google Scholar

21 Two of these questions concerned individual problems, and two concerned community problems. For the two (most important, second-most important) community problems, the respondent was asked about sources of aid both inside and outside the community. Hence the index can take values from 0 to 6, corresponding to the number of times that the source of aid for the problem should be some level of government.

22 Iterated principal factor analysis was used. Factor loadings were as follows: frequency of watching television news, ·136; number of magazines read regularly, 547; frequency of newspaper reading, ·532; number of officials named correctly, ·498.

23 See Verba, and Nie, , Participation in America, pp. 403–9Google Scholar for a justification of such procedures.

24 Lewis-Beck, Michael S. and Mohr, Lawrence B., ‘Evaluating Effects of Independent Variables’, Political Methodology, III (1976), 27–47.Google Scholar

25 See fn. 9.

26 Data on turnout and GNP per capita are from Russett, Bruce, World Handbook of Social and Political Indicators (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964)Google Scholar, Tables 24, 44. Gini indices of personal income inequality are reported by Paukert, Felix, ‘Income Distribution at Different Levels of Development: A Survey of Evidence’, International Labour Review, CVIII (1973), 97–125, Table 6.Google Scholar

27 Pizzorno, Alessandro, ‘An Introduction to the Theory of Political Participation’, Social Science Information, IX (1970), 29–61, p. 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huntington, and Nelson, , No Easy Choice.Google Scholar

28 Russett, Bruce M., ‘Inequality and Instability: The Relation of Land Tenure and Politics’, World Politics, XVI (1964), 442–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cutright, Phillips, ‘Inequality: A Cross-National Analysis’, American Sociological Review, XXXII (1967), 562–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rubinson, Richard and Quinlan, Dan, ‘Democracy and Social Equality’, American Sociological Review, XLII (1977), 611–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dye, Thomas R., ‘Income Inequality and American State Polities’, American Political Science Review, LXIII (1969), 157–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foley, John M. and Steedly, Homer R., ‘Trends and Determinants of Local Pluralism: An Econometric Examination of U.S. Communities’ (Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, mimeo).Google Scholar

29 Portes, , ‘Rationality in the Slum’Google Scholar; Cornelius, Wayne A., Politics and the Migrant Poor in Mexico City (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 97Google Scholar; Aberbach, Joel D., ‘Power Consciousness: A Comparative Analysis’, American Political Science Review, LXXI (1977), 1544–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Verba, and Nie, , Participation in AmericaGoogle Scholar, Chap. 10. In their larger cross-national sample, Participation and Political Equality, Verba, Nie and Kim find that ‘group consciousness/mobilization’ is an important intervening variable upsetting the ordinary correlation between socio-economic resources and participation.

30 Deutsch, Karl W., ‘Social Mobilization and Political Development’, American Political Science Review, LV (1961), 495–514.Google Scholar Even Verba, Nie and Kim, whose account of the ‘group-mobilization process’ is more issue-based than most, still cling to psychological language at the crucial step in the argument: ‘Mobilization comes from a preference for policies relevant to a social category of which one is a member. This implies consciousness of one's membership in such a social category and of the way government impinges on or could benefit the group.’ (Participation and Political Equality, pp. 11–12Google Scholar; emphasis added.)

31 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. Lawrence, G. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966)Google Scholar, Bk. 2, Chap, 1 and Bk. 1, Pt. I, Chap. 3; Huntington, and Nelson, , No Easy Choice.Google Scholar

32 Lipset, Seymour Martin, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960)Google Scholar, Chap. 6, and Milbrath, , Political Participation, pp. 119 ff.Google Scholar, report evidence that political participation is greater in homogeneous societies. There is nothing necessarily irrational about this effect of cross-pressures, as shown in Goodin, Robert, ‘Cross-Cutting Cleavages and Social Conflict’, British Journal of Political Science, v (1975), 516–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Furthermore, where people of different socio-economic status are segregated, either residentially or organizationally, the tendency for higher status people to participate more is reduced, as reported in Lipset, , Political ManGoogle Scholar, Chap. 6; Tingsten, , Political Behaviour, pp. 170–2Google Scholar, and Rokkan, Stein and Campbell, Angus, ‘Norway and the United States of America’Google Scholar in ‘Citizen Participation in Political Life’, in Part I of International Social Science Journal, XII (1960), 69–99, p. 85.Google Scholar Social psychologists have no good explanation for this, but in terms of relative power the explanation is simple: lower status people participate more fully where they are in less of a minority because there they have a better chance of influencing the outcome.

33 Scott, , Moral Economy of the PeasantGoogle Scholar points to another perfectly rational reason for mobilization: where the underclass is pushed below the subsistence level, then even if politicking is a poor investment they have no other hope and undertake it anyway.

34 Thus we should repudiate Verba and Nie's suggestion to limit participation to voting, on the grounds that the vote is the one resource which is roughly equally distributed. Far from being egalitarian in its effect, as they clearly hope, this reform would deprive the underclasses of the mechanisms most useful to them to overturn seriously inegalitarian arrangements.

Olson, Mancur Jr., The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar, Chap. 4 supposes that the ‘free rider’ problem prevents the proletariat from organizing however much it might be in their interest to do so. But in most revolutions there really are selective incentives: those without a good record of service to the revolutionary cause are purged, cut out of the rewards of a successful revolution at a minimum or, at worst, actually exterminated. Such participation is therefore better represented as what Sen, A. K. (On Economic Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 96–9)CrossRefGoogle Scholar calls an ‘Assurance Game’ than as a ‘Prisoner's Dilemma’. Everyone is willing to participate, provided only each can be assured that enough others will do likewise.

35 Data on participation are from Verba and Nie's survey and on the Gini index for Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas are from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of the Population, Vol. I: Characteristics of the Populations, Table 89. Collective modes of participation are omitted from this table on the grounds that the model of rational participation, just as social psychology, expects individuals to take the general characteristics of the community into account before opting for collective participation. If you are relatively badly off, you might look around for others similarly situated hoping to join together in a united front; but you would not actually try getting together a coalition of the disadvantaged unless you were sure there were enough people in that category to overcome the influence of the powerful. When taking this into account, the rational actor in effect internalizes community-wide inequality, so a rational model would expect no disjunction between individual-level and community-wide correlations where collective modes of participation are concerned.

36 Billington, Ray Allen, America's Frontier Heritage (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966)Google Scholar; Rokkan, Stein and Valen, Henry, ‘The Mobilization of the Periphery’, Acta Sociologica, VI ( 1962), 111–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kuhnle, Stein, Patterns of Social and Political Mobilization, Sage Professional Papers in Contemporary Political Sociology, 06–005 (London: Sage, 1975)Google Scholar; Alexander, Fred, Moving Frontiers: An American Theme and Its Application to Australian History (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1947).Google Scholar Our discussion conflates two categories – ‘frontiers’ and ‘peripheries’ – which, although usefully distinguished for other purposes, display identical properties so far as our model of rational participation is concerned. Since the issues here discussed are almost always raised under the heading of ‘frontier democracy’ we continue to use that heading, although strictly speaking ‘periphery’ is the more general of the two notions: all frontiers are peripheries; not all peripheries are frontiers.

37 Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920).Google Scholar

38 Shils, Edward, Center and Periphery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).Google Scholar

39 Galtung, Johan, ‘A Structural Theory of Imperialism’, Journal of Peace Research, VIII (1971), 81–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pizzorno, , ‘Amoral Familism and Historical Marginality’.Google Scholar

40 Rokkan, Stein and Valen, Henry, ‘Regional Contrasts in Norwegian Politics’, in Allardt, E. and Littunen, Y., eds., Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems (Helsinki: Transactions of the Westermarck Society, Vol. x, 1964), 162–238, pp. 174–83Google Scholar; Rokkan, , ‘Electoral Mobilization, Party Competition and National Integration’, in LaPalombara, J. and Weiner, M., eds., Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 241–65, p. 254.Google Scholar

41 Sharp, Paul F., ‘Three Frontiers: Some Comparative Studies of Canadian, American and Australian Settlement’, Pacific Historical Review, XXIV (1955), 369–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also the comments on the Wakefield system contained in Marx, Karl, ‘The Modern Theory of Colonization’, Capital, trans. Moore, S. and Aveline, E. (New York: International Publishers, 1967), Vol. 1, Chap. 33.Google Scholar

42 Curti, Merle, The Making of an American Community (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959).Google Scholar

43 Rubinson, Richard and Quinlan, Dan, ‘Democracy and Social Equality’, American Sociological Review, XLII (1977), 611–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 Billington, , America's Frontier Heritage, pp. 118–20.Google Scholar

45 Popkin, Samuel, Gorman, John W., Phillips, Charles and Smith, Jeffrey A., ‘What Have You Done For Me Lately? Toward an Investment Theory of Voting’, American Political Science Review, LXX (1976), 779–805.CrossRefGoogle Scholar