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Overview
Originally published in 1979.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691611235 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1395 |
| Pages: | 318 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.30(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Aggressive Political Participation
By Edward N. Muller
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1979 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07605-8
CHAPTER 1
What Is To Be Explained and How
This book reports an effort to formulate and test a general multivariate theory of individual participation in acts of political aggression. Due to the infrequency of its occurrence, as well as difficulties of measurement, this kind of political behavior has rarely been subjected to rigorous scientific investigation at the micro level of analysis. Yet, despite the fact that aggressive political participation is an unusual event under normal circumstances in most countries, on occasion it can have dramatic consequences, contributing to major change in, or to the downfall of, established systems of government. Thus, it is worthwhile to try to understand the causes of aggressive political participation.
It is sometimes thought that the causes of aggressive political participation can be uncovered simply by studying characteristics of persons who actually have engaged in such action. Of course, this is a fallacy. To understand why some people engage in aggressive political action, one also must know why other persons do not take part. Causal analysis therefore requires a research design that captures variation in the phenomenon to be explained as well as in the putative causal agents.
The empirical base for this study consists of data gathered from structured interviews with representative samples of persons residing in selected rural, urban, and university milieus in the Federal Republic of Germany. The intent of the research design was to elicit variation in individual attitudes and behavior sufficient for reliable multivariate analysis, without at the same time unduly sacrificing representativeness according to basic social and economic variables such as education, income, age, sex, marital status, and place of residence.
Because of the focus on general theory, this book does not offer the richness of detail and colorful narrative that often characterize historical and journalistic accounts of political protest, violence, and revolution. But my emphasis here on formal models, mathematical reasoning and statistical evidence has the compensating feature that it affords, at least potentially, an understanding of aggressive political participation that is not limited to particular, historically unique cases. The intention is to develop an explanation of aggressive political participation per se, not just aggressive political participation in West Germany. Since the data come from a large and heterogenous sample of persons residing in various communities of West Germany, the findings should be generalizable to other nations having similar macro social, economic, and political characteristics: the subset of nations called "advanced industrialized democracies." Of course, it would be desirable to carry out replications in one or more of the other such democracies in order actually to determine this. In the meantime, West Germany serves as the first test case.
The dependent variable of this study, aggressive political participation, is a subset of collective political participation, where collective political participation may be defined as behavior intended to influence authorities, engaged in by groups of persons who do not themselves occupy positions of authority in a political system. Collective political participation occurs in a profusion of concrete manifestations. In societies with regularly scheduled, competitive elections, collective political participation is focused on the electoral process: groups of people proselytize for parties and candidates, attend meetings, rallies, and demonstrations, perform a variety of tasks to help a party or candidate during a campaign, become full-fledged members of political parties or clubs. This is politics as usual, "ordinary" political participation. But the domain of collective political participation is much broader than this. It includes many forms of extraordinary or unconventional behavior: participating in illegal strikes, seizing public buildings, battling with police or with other demonstrators, becoming involved with a group that wants to dislodge the government by violent means. To be sure, unless a rebellion is brewing or a society actually is undergoing a revolution, only a rather small minority of the population ever engages in unconventional political behavior. Yet, as recent history attests, unconventional action can ebb and flow dramatically even in polities such as polyarchies that supposedly are quite stable. To understand collective political participation in general, one must necessarily consider the unconventional as well as the conventional, extraordinary as well as ordinary forms of political participation.
There is another compelling reason for coming to grips with unconventional action. It is "strong" as opposed to "weak" political behavior in the sense that John Wahlke and Bertrand de Jouvenel have used these labels. "Strong" political behavior is action that, at least potentially, can have dangerous consequences for a regime, threatening its stability or persistence. The resort to unconventional action signifies that, to some extent, institutionalized channels of representation and conflict resolution may be inadequate or defective. Of course, in and of itself, "strong" political behavior is just a warning signal. But in the longer run the probability that a regime will stand, change, or fall certainly is linked to the incidence of unconventional action. Hence to get at the question of why political systems stand, change, or fall, one will want to have an understanding of what causes variation in the incidence of "strong" political behavior.
It should be emphasized that the labels "strong" and "weak" are not to be taken in any pejorative sense. "Strong" political behavior is neither better nor worse than "weak" behavior — indeed, from the perspective of those committed to a given regime, "weak" political behavior is always the preferred mode of interest representation and conflict resolution. Furthermore, what constitutes "strong" or "weak" behavior will vary with regime type. In inclusive hegemonies, to follow Robert Dahl's terminology,5 where the right to vote is widespread but electoral competition to contest the government is not allowed, many campaign activities that are ordinary in polyarchies become "strong" political behavior; by contrast, such campaign activities are "weak" behavior in polyarchies.
Let us turn now to a more precise definition of the kind of "strong" political behavior under scrutiny in this study. Drawing on Douglas Hibbs' definition of mass political violence, aggressive political participation will be defined as behavior that possesses these properties: (1) it must be anti-regime in the sense of deviating from legal or formal regime norms regarding political participation, that is, it must be political action that is illegal; (2) it must have political significance, that is, it must be an attempt to influence the government that inconveniences it or disrupts its normal functioning; (3) it must involve group activity on the part of non-elites. Aggressive political participation, by this definition, may or may not involve violence. If it does not involve violence, it will be called civil disobedience, as distinguished from political violence. Excluded by this definition are — in addition to conventional electoral politics — legal protest actions such as boycotts; ordinary labor strikes without political objectives; and individualistic actions such as refusal of military service and assassinations. Coups d'etat by dissident factions of the military are excluded because they involve intra-elite conflict. Also excluded is violence initiated by agents of the government to repress dissident groups, since, although collective in nature, this normally (though not always) is legally sanctioned aggressive action, and by definition is behavior engaged in by elites.
1.1 Research Design
What kinds of objective measurement procedures are feasible for the study of aggressive political participation at the micro level? Experimentation under controlled laboratory conditions raises ethical problems. This leaves non-experimental field research in natural settings. There are two ways objectively to measure participation in aggressive political action by means of field research, but only one would appear generally practical. One method maximizes objectivity by having a trained corps of research personnel closely monitor the behavior of individuals over a period of time. This method has been used, for example, to study aggressive behavior among adolescents attending a summer camp. However, to study aggressive political behavior among adults, this direct observation method would not only usually be impractical but, more importantly, would constitute an unconscionable invasion of privacy. The alternative is to rely on indirect evidence gathered from individuals' self-reports of their behavior, given through self-completion questionnaires or personal interviews.
The data used here come from personal interviews carried out with 2,662 adults in the Federal Republic of Germany during the fall of 1974 by Infratest, percent of whom were reinterviewed in the fall of 1976. The interview protocol, averaging slightly over 60 minutes to complete, represents the culmination of a research program begun in the United States in 1968. The attitude and behavior measures are instruments that have emerged from a process of trial-and-error testing. In the course of three separate studies, two done in the United States, one in the Federal Republic, various ways of operationalizing the attitudes and behavior of concern here were explored. On the basis of this research, and attention to the results from parallel studies conducted by others, those instruments which appeared to be the most promising were selected for inclusion in the interview protocol.
There were twelve sampling sites in all, four rural, two urban, and six university communities. Each was selected because, in the aggregate, opposition to the regime had been manifested there during the preceding five years at higher than average levels. In the rural and urban sites, opposition had taken the form of voting support for extreme left and extreme right political parties; in the universities it had taken the form of civil disobedience and political violence.
Two major considerations of the research design were (1) to elicit variation in individual attitudes and behavior sufficient for reliable multivariate analysis and (2) to investigate the effect of community context on relationships between attitudinal variables and behavior. An additional consideration was to avoid completely sacrificing representativeness at the altar of enhanced variation. While the communities chosen are by no means representative of West Germany as a whole, they do capture basic regional and community-size differences.
CHAPTER 2Explanations of Aggressive Political Participation
The study of aggressive domestic political conflict has a venerable tradition in political science and sociology, and has yielded an abundance of explanatory propositions. But these propositions have as yet borne little fruit in the form of reliable knowledge about what it is that motivates men to take part in aggressive political action. Fundamentally, this is a problem of research methodology. As Eckstein pointed out some years ago in a seminal article surveying problems and prospects of research in the area of political violence and rebellion, the methodological problem is that "most propositions about the causes of internal war have been developed in historical studies of particular cases (or very limited numbers of cases) rather than in broadly comparative, let alone genuinely social-scientific studies." And since the single case or handful of cases can prove nothing about behavior in general, these propositions have the status of untested hypotheses.
In the ensuing decade, a number of scholars sought to remedy the methodological weakness inherent in the historical, case-study approach. They collected data on various societal conditions and on rates of collective protest and violence for as many nations as possible, then carried out scientifically rigorous, quantitative analyses of the etiology of domestic civil strife. However, by the nature of their unit of analysis (the nation-state as a single entity), such macro level, cross-national studies have been limited to the testing of what Eckstein terms "structural" hypotheses: "A structural hypothesis singles out, so to speak, 'objective' social conditions as crucial for the occurrence of internal war: aspects of a society's 'setting,' such as economic conditions, social stratification and mobility, or geographic and demographic factors." And this unavoidable focus on structural variables entails a cost, namely, exclusion of individual motivational variables from playing a direct role in the explanation of aggressive political participation.
On what grounds would it be tenable to exclude individual motivational variables? Alternatively, why might this be regarded as a cost? To answer these questions, it is useful to consider the anatomy of a structural hypothesis, for there are really two parts to any such hypothesis invoked to account for aggressive political behavior among men. The first part states the objective social and economic conditions that function as antecedents of aggressive political participation. The second part identifies a rationale or causal mechanism for the objective conditions by assuming that the relevant objective conditions are connected closely to certain attitudes of individuals providing explicit motivation for the behavior. If there is an almost perfect correlation between structural variables and attitudes, of course there is no need to pay special attention to the attitudinal part of the schema, since knowledge about attitudinal variables would not markedly increase one's ability to predict the occurrence of aggressive political behavior. Under this assumption, it is tenable to exclude attitudes. Objective conditions serve as the bones and muscle of the explanation; attitudes merely flesh it out.
Exclusion of subjective variables from direct consideration becomes a cost as soon as one questions the assumption of a very high correlation between objective conditions and subjective reaction to such conditions. If objective conditions may often be uncorrelated and at best only imperfectly correlated with attitudes that motivate individual participation in political protest and violence, then it is likely to be rather difficult to establish general laws for prediction of the occurrence and magnitude of aggressive political participation on the basis of knowledge about objective social and economic conditions alone.
As an example, take the Rise and Drop or J-Curve hypothesis formulated by James Davies, widely regarded as one of the more intuitively plausible hypotheses about the causes of revolution in particular and of aggressive political participation in general. This hypothesis states that violent civil disturbances such as rebellion and revolution "are most likely to occur when a prolonged period of objective economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal." The causal mechanism of the Rise and Drop hypothesis is the assumption that an improvement trend produces a rise in subjective expectation of need satisfaction. When a sharp deterioration trend follows hard upon the heels of an improvement trend, expectation of need satisfaction will remain high while perception of actual need satisfaction will decline apace with deteriorating objective conditions. The end result is a sizable gap between subjective expectation of need satisfaction and subjective experience of need satisfaction, a gap postulated to be sufficiently intolerable or frustrating to motivate men to take aggressive political action.
Davies cites impressionistic historical evidence to support the Rise and Drop hypothesis — Dorr's rebellion in nineteenth-century America, the Russian revolution of 1917, the Egyptian revolution of 1952. But the relative calm of the industrialized nations in the mid-19 70's appears to fly in the face of the hypothesis. After World War II, these nations experienced steady improvement in economic and social conditions until the oil embargo instituted by OPEC in late 1973; then a sharp reversal began. Yet the highest rates of violent civil conflict coincided with the zenith of the improvement trend, reached during the late 1960's and early 1970's, while the deterioration trend has coincided with decreasing rates of violent civil conflict — exactly the opposite of what the hypothesis predicts. It could well be that an intolerable gap between subjective expectation and achievement is a motivational variable that generally disposes men to take aggressive political action, regardless of the particular time and place. But if this motivational variable were neither always nor closely correlated with objective improvement-followed-by-deterioration trends, then, as seems to be the case, the structural conditions referred to in the hypothesis would not be systematically related to aggressive political participation. Hence, one could not reliably predict the occurrence of aggressive political behavior on the basis of a Rise and Drop trend.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Aggressive Political Participation by Edward N. Muller. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Acknowledgments, pg. ix
- ONE. What Is To Be Explained and How, pg. 1
- TWO. Explanations of Aggressive Political Participation, pg. 11
- THREE. Measurement of Aggressive Political Participation, pg. 37
- FOUR. The Expectancy-Value- Norms Theory, pg. 69
- FIVE. Frustration- Aggression Theory, pg. 121
- SIX. Left-Out VariabIes, pg. 183
- SEVEN. Cross-Validity of the Expectancy-Value- Norms Model, pg. 236
- EIGHT. Uses and Limitations of the Expectancy-Value- Norms Model, pg. 244
- NINE. Macro-Micro Linkages, pg. 264
- APPENDIX A. Comparison of Political Trust-Distrust and Political Support-Alienation as Predictors of Aggressive Political Participation, pg. 280
- APPENDIX B. Summary Characteristics of the Variables, pg. 286
- APPENDIX C. German Text of the Variables, pg. 289
- INDEX, pg. 303