Political Alienation and Political Behavior

David C. Schwartz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351499262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do people adopt attitudes of political alienation--attitudes of estrangement from, or lack of identification with, the political system? Why do some politically alienated people react to their alienation by engaging in revolutionary behavior, while others similarly alienated--become reformers or ritualists, and still others simply drop out of political activity?In Political Alienation and Political Behavior, David C. Schwartz attempts to answer these questions, challenging accepted theories of social status and economic difficulties and developing a completely new, three variable psychological theories to explain alienation. Based on observations of threat from value conflict, perceived personal inefficacy, and perceived systemic inefficacy, the theory includes a process model for predicting political behavior.The book is organized into a definition and discussion of the concept of political alienation, including reviews and critiques of relevant scholarly and popular literature; a theoretical explanation of the causes and consequences of alienation; presentation of data; research reports testing the author's explanation of political alienation; tests of a process model explaining the consequences of alienation; and a summary of the major findings of the research, indicating some of the directions that future research might profitably take.Fascinating reading for social scientists, this well-written book will be important to teachers and students concerned with U.S. politics and more generally with the relationship of economic, social, and psychological forces manifested in political behavior.

1 A Theory of Political Alienation

The purpose of this book is to explain the causes and consequences of political alienation: to account for men's identification with, or estrangement from, political systems and to chart the behavioral consequences that flow from different levels of political identification. In this introductory chapter, I advance a theory of political alienation that builds upon some of our present understandings about the phenomenon but is at the same time radically different from much of what is now assumed to be true.

The need for a theory of political alienation is clear, for alienation has been shown to be a phenomenon of fundamental importance to political systems and their study. At the individual level of analysis, recent empirical research has found alienation to be significantly associated with a wide range of important political attitudes and behaviors, including revolutionary activities,¹ innovative reformism,² support for demagogues,³ rioting,⁴ nonvoting and protest voting,⁵ low or withdrawn political interest and participation,⁶ vicarious use of the mass media,⁷ participation in radical right-wing activities,⁸ political party identification⁹ and negative attitudes toward such political objects as metropolitan governmental organization and school desegregation.¹⁰ In several studies reported below, I will indicate that alienation is significantly related to such “new politics” phenomena as campus sit-ins and national anti-war protest demonstrations as well.

More generally, it is now widely accepted that identification and alienation are of basic importance to the functioning of political systems as a whole and to a broad range of public institutions and processes. For example, Easton regards “diffuse support,” which certainly includes the positive identification of individuals with the polity, as a prerequisite for the integration and persistence of political systems,¹¹ and Almond and Verba also suggest that a “long-run political stability may be . . . dependent on a more . . . diffuse sense of attachment or loyalty to the political system.”¹² In the study of political development, too, the idea that individual identification with a national polity is a precondition for development is now widespread.¹³

If alienation affects individual attitudes and behavior and impacts on the polity as a whole, it will certainly also be important to the institutions and processes of politics that constitute the locus of much contemporary research (for example, parties, Congress, etc.). Recently, large-scale national studies of American political parties,¹⁴ for example, have recognized that alienation from parties and from the polity is an important area of investigation. Such recognition seems bound to grow in a period like the present when national presidential election campaigns centrally include overt appeals to alienated populations, when meetings of alienated youth, organized in movements for a new Congress, attract a long list of candidates seeking endorsement and help,¹⁵ when foreign policy formation involves mass demonstrations, violence and death, and when public services that used to seem routine, such as fire control, education and law enforcement, are daily disrupted over political matters.

The need for a more comprehensive and more precise explanation of political alienation is intensified by the unpredicted increase in American alienation, which has raised fundamental questions about the models of man and paradigms of the polity that currently prevail in social science. In general, social scientists did not predict the political instability of the 1960s in America. “Not a single observer of the campus scene, as late as 1959, anticipated the emergence of the organized disaffection, protest and activism which was to take shape early in the 1960s.”¹⁶ As late as 1962 Kenneth Kenniston, one of the most respected observers of the campus scene, noted increases in alienation but said of American youth, “They will assure a highly stable political and social order, for few of them will be enough committed to politics to consider revolution, subversion or even radical change.”¹⁷ Seven years later a national government study found that 76 percent of the American colleges sampled and 75 percent of the high schools studied had experienced some form of unrest during 1968–1969 alone, 60 percent of this unrest involved police action.¹⁸ During the first five months of 1969, there were 260 civil disorders in American schools.¹⁹

The same decade in which prominent social scientists concluded that the potential for radical movements in America had all but disappeared²⁰ witnessed an unprecedented radicalization in the black community (and widespread white radicalization as well). This development resulted in hundreds of riots and riot-connected deaths, political injuries in the thousands, political arrests in the tens of thousands and property damage in the hundreds of millions of dollars.²¹ In an era of sniper attacks on police, of growing vigilante groups in urban ethnic communities, of widespread arms purchases in the suburbs, of dissident rifle clubs as well as of riots, violent protests and bombings—many of which were “unexpected in particular by social scientists who are professionals responsible for locating and understanding such phenomena’’²²—our understanding of American political motivations, behavior and processes has been called into question.

Understandably, perhaps, some social scientists have reacted to this situation with almost wholesale rejection of previous social science theories. One scholar concluded, for example, that “all of our fondest theories of economic development and political stability totter and collapse in the face of riots, guerrilla warfare, assassinations.”²³ Understandable, too, is a scholarly reaction that moves from thesis to antithesis, holding that just the opposite of what we previously believed must be true. So if Riesman argued in 1949 that in politics Americans tend to desire “not power but adjustment,”²⁴ Nieburg in 1969 contended that “in an important sense, all individuals, groups and nations desire to ‘rule the world’” and that “all individuals, groups or nations make a continuous effort to exploit any favorable opportunity to improve their roles or to impose a greater part of their own value structures upon a larger political system.”²⁵

In my view, neither a wholesale rejection nor outright reversal of social science theories seems warranted, but obviously our explanations at the individual level of political analysis and therefore our aggregation of individual behavior to make system-level statements, are in need of intensive scrutiny and very probably of considerable revision. If the need for a theory of political alienation derives from the importance of alienation to the behavior of individuals and of political systems, the need for a revised theory of political alienation derives from the limitations of existing theories.

Concept clarification

One of the major limitations of our present understanding of political alienation is the massive confusion surrounding the use of the term. Historically, some of the confusion derived from the fact that “alienation” had different but sometimes overlapping meanings in religious thought, law and Marxism and hence has had such diverse referents as religio-mystical ecstasy, spiritual death, sales of property and lack of relationship to the product of one's work or to the means of production.²⁶ There was also considerable confusion as to whether the term was to be used as a description of a social condition or as an evaluation of that condition.²⁷

More recently, the confusions tend to flow from the derivation of the concept of alienation from the sociological concept of anomie. Anomie, as originally described by Durkheim and adapted by Merton, referred to a condition of society—a state of normlessness or confusion of norms in the culture. Merton refers to man's responses to this social condition—reformism, ritualism, rebelliousness and conformity—as “adaptations to anomie”;²⁸ but he does not consistently distinguish between attitudinal and behavioral responses. Accordingly, one conceptual confusion concerns the use of alienation to mean both attitudes and behavior.

When Srole²⁹ and others sought to employ Merton's notions in empirical research, they employed the terms anomia, anomry and anomie in a social-psychological sense, referring to the psychological state of the individual. The same word is thus used often to refer both to a state of society and to a state of the individual.

In the empirical literature, alienation has come to be used almost exclusively in the social-psychological sense, but the ambiguities of the concept have not diminished. Although individuals rather than societies are now seen as alienated, the object from which the individual is alienated remains confused and so does the operational meaning of the term. Let us consider these problems in order.

People have been depicted as alienated from a great variety of things—from the society, culture, self, mankind, God and politics.³⁰ This has given rise to the assumption that if one is alienated from any of these referents one need be (or tends to be) alienated from all of them. For example, the best known and most widely used measure of social alienation, the Srole scale,³¹ includes references to politics, other people in general, the present state of man, the future state of self. The Nettler scale³² of cultural alienation also lumps references to politics together with attitudes toward cars, TV, spectator sports, media, etc. These scales have been used in several studies of political attitudes and behavior³³ under the apparent if generally implicit assumption that the scales either include or constitute political alienation. But the degree of relationship between political and sociocultural alienation is an empirical question of enormous significance; the existence of such a relationship must be demonstrated, not simply assumed. If social or cultural alienation is the same thing as or explains political alienation, then there is little reason for the separate modeling of political alienation. These conceptual problems have had a seriously deleterious effect on our substantive understanding. By confusing political with social and cultural alienation, scholars have tended to assume that there is a necessary or at least typically significant association between socio-cultural and political alienation—a proposition which we challenge below.

But even if we render clear who is alienated and from what he is alienated, even if we refer to the individual as alienated from the political system, the central question remains: What is alienation? What meaning or meanings can be given to the concept? Melvin Seeman's “On the Meaning of Alienation”³⁴ has been generally accepted as the classic clarification of the concept. Seeman's review of the literature revealed five analytically separable usages of the word: normlessness, meaninglessness, powerlessness, social isolation and self-estrangement. Some writers have argued that these five constitute a generally integrated network of negative attitudes toward society, that they tend to occur together. The empirical investigations of the subject show very mixed results,³⁵ however, and in general different scholars have concerned themselves with different dimensions.³⁰ Of course, this diversity of concerns has added to the ambiguity of the concept because each scholar tends to refer to his dependent variable simply as “alienation,” whatever his definitions.³⁷ The result is that alienation means powerlessness (to Seeman and those who use his measurements) ; it refers to a complex of isolation, despair and powerlessness (to Srole and those who utilize his scale); and it is defined as a cognition that politicians don’t care about people and cannot be trusted (by Thompson and Horton and by Aberbach).

Despite this great variety of meanings that have been attached to the concept of political alienation, I believe that it has a “core” meaning. This meaning may be referred to as ‘‘estrangement’’—a perception that one does not identify oneself with the political system. Interestingly, this meaning is often selected as the formal or general definition of alienation even by scholars who then go on to operationalize the concept to mean inefficacy, normlessness or some other dimension. Thus Olsen, who has used both the Srole scale and the Seeman inefficacy measure as indexes of alienation, writes: “Alienation might then be defined formally as an attitude of separation or estrangement between oneself and some salient aspect of the social environment.³⁸ Srole himself defined alienation as estrangement, as “a generalized, pervasive sense of self-to-pthers belongingness at one extreme compared with . . . self-to-others alienation at the other pole of the continuum.³⁹ Nettler refers to the alienated man as “one who has been estranged from his society.”⁴⁰ In addition, the “estrangement” meaning of alienation can be traced back to Durkheim through Maclver, who defined the concept as “a breakdown in the individual sense of attachment.”⁴¹

Of course, in defining alienation as estrangement, I am not arguing that there is some ineluctable essence to the concept of alienation that is uniquely captured by the concept of “estrangement,” or that definitions have an independent truth value, such that estrangement is a “truer” definition of alienation than is inefficacy or normlessness. Estrangement would appear to be a more summative or general orientation to politics than inefficacy or normlessness or meaninglessness and does seem more directly relevant to politics than estrangement from the self. In this sense, it may be argued that estrangement should provide a more useful definition for the term alienation.

Kon has argued that, to be useful in research or theoretical development, the concept of alienation needs to be made specific by answering three basic questions: (1) Who is alienated? (2) From what is he alienated? (3) How is this alienation manifested?⁴² For our purposes here, it is the individual who is alienated from the political system as a whole⁴³ as manifested in a set of attitudes of estrangement. Following Olsen, alienation is defined herein as an attitude of separation or estrangement⁴⁴ between the self and the polity. A variety of operational attitude measures of estrangement have been designed and employed in our studies.

Defining alienation as an attitude, moreover, permits us to avoid a conceptual confusion that has often seriously weakened our substantive understanding of politics: the confusion between attitudes and behaviors. This confusion has led to serious conceptual and empirical difficulties. Berger and Pullberg, for example, suggest that change-oriented behavior cannot be a consequence of the attitude of alienation because the typical result of alienation is ritualism (“social fetishism”).⁴⁵ We will show, however, that ritualism and reformism and radicalism are all associated with alienated attitudes. Similarly, Koeppen contends that alienation cannot b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• title
• copy
• dedication
• preface
• I Introduction
• 1 A Theory of Political Alienation
• II On the Limitations of Traditional Approaches to the Study of Political Alienation
• Introduction
• Contexts and Methods of Research: Notes on the Data Chapters of this Book
• 2 Socio-Cultural And Political Alienation
• 3 Social Background Factors and Political Alienation
• III On the Psycho-Political Process of Alienation
• 4 The Process of Political Alienation
• 5 Psycho-Political Correlates of Political Alienation in Four Urban Communities
• 6 On the Causes and Expression of Political Alienation among American University Students
• 7 Political Alienation among Political Scientists and Sociologists
• IV On the Consequences of Political Alienation
• 8 The Consequences of Alienation: A Theory of Alienated Political Behavior
• 9 Alienation and the Adoption of Basic Political Orientations in a University Community
• 10 Alienation and the Adoption of Basic Political Orientations in Black Communities
• 11 Alienation and Communication Behavior
• 12 From Political Alienation to Revolutionary Support
• 13 Get Involved! and Get Alienated? Political Involvement and Political Alienation in Urban Communities
• V Conclusion
• 14 From the lonely crowd to the Strident Society
• Notes
• Methods Appendix
• Index