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Stability, Transformation, and Regime Interests
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
Extract
Nordlinger and Zeitlin have each used survey research techniques to make insightful and important contributions to the analysis of political transformation and regime stability. Yet Nord-linger's book on British working-class Tory voters and Zeitlin's study of the revolutionary Cuban working class differ as widely in approach as do the two political systems they study. Zeitlin makes a central assumption “that the social pressures arising out of the work situation are fundamental to the workers' political outlook” (p. 221), and he concentrates on concepts such as alienation and exploitation, which Nordlinger never explicitly considers. But he pays less attention to the distinctive elements of Cuba's political tradition that contributed to the one successful socialist revolution in the Western hemisphere. By contrast, Nordlinger explicitly seeks to connect the exceptional stability of British democracy with such apparently undemocratic, but characteristically English, attitudes as social deference and acquiescence toward authority. Despite the weight of some of his own data, he only briefly considers an interpretation of working-class Labour supporters as acting rationally on the basis of their class interests.
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References
1 Nordlinger infers that “highly partisan attitudes are largely a result of a predetermined set of emotional dislikes … the data imply that strong partisans unthinkingly accept the black-and-white view of the two parties painted by the propagandists of their own party” (p. 145). Yet the same data indicate that an association between high partisanship and low awareness, an indication of nonrational voting, is much stronger among working-class Tory voters than among working-class Labour voters—suggesting that Labour voters conform to a rationalist class-interest model. (See also table 33.)
2 Greenstone, J. David and Peterson, Paul, Poverty and Participation (New YorkGoogle Scholar, forthcoming).
3 Dahrendorf, Ralf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford 1959Google Scholar).
4 Despite their economic and social deprivation, however, the black respondents were not appreciably more friendly than white workers to the Communist party before the revolution. But the Communists were substantially more popular among employed black workers than among either employed whites or unemployed blacks. Zeitlin suggests that gaining employment may have been a threshold-phenomenon that helped black workers think about their economic rather than their racial status. See p. 82. Zeitlin cites John Leggett's comparable findings on Detroit black workers. Leggett, John, “Economic Security and Working-Class Consciousness,” American Sociological Review, xxix (April 1964Google Scholar), 2. See also Leggett, John, Class, Race, and Labor: Wording- Class Consciousness in Detroit (New York 1968Google Scholar). Zeitlin also reports that large plant size, interacting with a low ratio of administrative to production employees, encouraged pro-communism. But the argument is weakened by his having to exclude from consideration the workers in the two largest plants in his sample. These workers were particularly conservative, a fact he explains on ad hoc grounds.
5 Responses to this question form part of a five-item Guttman scale with a coefficient of reproducibility of 0.95, which Zeitlin used to determine favorable attitudes toward the revolution (p. 44).
6 Unfortunately, Zeitlin did not report the civil-liberties attitudes of workers hostile to the regime.
7 Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Maying of the Modern World (Boston 1966Google Scholar), chap. 8.
8 Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton 1963CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
9 Nordlinger's data also indicate that the manifestness of a particular regime interest varies with a variety of social political and psychological attributes. Tory workers often cite their low social status in voluntarily excluding themselves from key positions of leadership in Conservative organizations, an act of self-denial very possibly associated with certain personality traits (pp. 36-38). Again, Nordlinger observes that Conservative Party leaders have in fact been much more concerned with maintaining traditional authority patterns than with defending all upper-class social and economic interests. The Tories have shunned any campaign stress on their candidates’ humble social origins-an ancient and often successful tactic of American conservatives-but have accepted a welfare state far more extensive than any even proposed by either major party in the United States.
10 Beer, Samuel H., “The Comparative Method and the Study of British Politics,” Comparative Politics, i (October 1968), 36Google Scholar.