"Democracy: Government by the people..." (Webster)

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Elmer Flynn
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Does America's traditionally classless society ensure a politics devoid of class bias? "Not necessarily so," says a multinational study of political participation.

1 Does America's traditionally classless society ensure a politics devoid of class bias? "Not necessarily so," says a multinational study of political participation. "Democracy: Government by the people...." (Webster) Participation is the key to effective democracy. But if participation by the people at all levels is the gauge of democracy's success, not only do most democracies fall short of the idea of the New England town meeting; so did the New England town meeting. In democracies there have always been barriers to participation in the political process. In the cradle of democracy, Greece, slaves and foreigners were excluded. Our own democratic beginnings have been somewhat distorted by popular myth; such qualifications as property are often played down or ignored in the history primers on which we cut our ideological teeth. In New England, for instance, where the town meeting became

a symbol of participatory American democracy, recent historical studies have shown that 90 percent of the selectmen came from among the third of the landowners with the largest holdings.

2 a symbol of participatory American democracy, recent historical studies have shown that 90 percent of the selectmen came from among the third of the landowners with the largest holdings. In the United States (and other democracies) it is common knowledge that only a minority participates in the political process on a continuing basis, that is, other than voting in elections. Furthermore, it is still the more affluent and better educated segments of society that are dominant among this active minority of participants; they have the leisure and the skills, and are conditioned to the value of such political activity as working in campaigns, contacting a political representative about a grievance, or organizing groups to achieve some common goal. Nevertheless, despite the large body of knowledge about who participates, political scientists still know relatively little about the consequences for the democratic process of selective participation. Some political theorists find it comforting that the better educated, and presumably better informed, dominate political activity. Others feel, with Aristotle and John Stuart Mill, that only those who share in the privileges of rule are participating as citizens in the fullest sense. Much of the current debate about the health of democracies centers on the question of participation, of bringing "outside" groups into the system. For it is not only the question of making political leaders aware of a broader range of the needs of society that is at stake, but there is the danger of allowing too many to feel alienated, a phenomenon reportedly felt in America, and not only among the less affluent. Thus, not only who participates, but why, may be important psychologically to the preservation of democracy, quite apart from the net impact of selective participation on public policy choices. Until recently, most research on political participation has focused on the identification of participants; very little has focused in a systematic way on the impact the influence of the phenomenon on public policy. Some new light on the consequences of selective participation in American democracy is shed by cross-national research now being conducted, with National Science Foundation support, by Sidney Verba of Harvard University, Norman Nie of the University of Chicago, and Jae-On Kim of the University of Iowa. "Our overall goal," the investigators state, "is to explain variations from nation to nation in terms of what messages are sent from citizens to governmental leaders, variations in which social groups are most effective in sending such messages, as well as variations across nations in the groups to which leaders respond." Yugoslavia was included, for instance, despite limitations on political party choices, because of the presence of a large number of other channels for participation, such as workers' councils. The research offers, perhaps, the largest single body of quantitative evidence not only that the well-off predominate among political activists here and abroad, but that their activity does influence disproportionately the choices made by political leaders. It further suggests that the traditional institutions of political mobilization in the United States, such as political parties and voluntary organizations, tend to limit the participatory opportunities of the less affluent, more so even than in some other, ostensibly less representative societies. A key conclusion The research compares political participation in the United States and six other countries: India, Japan, Nigeria, Austria, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia, and is based on interviews with MOSAIC September / October

3 1,800 to 3,000 citizens and 500 local political leaders in each. The body of data is large; in terms of separate computer card images, it is larger than any of the previous studies on file at either the University of Michigan's Inter-University Consortium for Political Research or the Roper Public Opinion Research Center, and is being widely used in other research institutions. From preliminary analysis, a key conclusion that emerges is that the socalled "classless" basis of the American political system contributes to rather than diminishes the dominance of political participation and influence by a more affluent, better educated elite. In fact, participation in American democracy may be less heterogeneous than is the case in other democratic societies, though participation does differ in kind from democracy to democracy. This conclusion is based upon findings comparing participation rates of different groups in a variety of activities, beyond voting, that influence priorities for action of elected leaders. These include activities between elections, broadly classified as campaign activity (contributing money, organizing, etc.); communal activity (organizing groups or contacting leaders to influence policy on broad social issues); and particularized contacting (contacts by the individual to a governmental official). As might be expected, the amount of each type of activity varies greatly from nation to nation, but in the United States some of the between-elections activity becomes more significant than in other countries; the United States ranks significantly lower, for instance, than Austria and Japan, in voting in both national and local elections (63 percent compared to 85 and 93 percent, respectively). Yet working with an informal group in the community on a common problem ranks near the top of non-voting activity in the United States and at the bottom in Austria; 30 percent of American citizens engage in this activity compared to three percent of Austrians. The differential rates of participation by type of political activity are significant; in countries such as Japan and Austria, where political parties are organized more closely along class interest or group lines, voting carries more of a policy content message to leaders. In the United States, as Verba notes, "if a group of people is active only in voting, it doesn't give the elected official a very precise view of what it is that the people who voted for him wanted."... where political parties are organized more closely along class interest or group lines, votlng carries more of a policy content message to leaders. Thus, with broadly based parties and elections which tend to blur ideological distinctions, the other-than-voting activity of Americans is an important means of communicating preferences. And, as the data from the cross-national surveys show, socioeconomic status correlates more closely to the rate of non-voting participation in the United States than it does in other countries; participation rates tend to rise more in the United States as one moves up in the economic scale at a faster rate than is the case elsewhere. All the nations surveyed, however, show the same pattern of greater participation by the affluent those in the top third of the economic scale. The imbalance ranges from 40 percent in Japan to 62 percent in India, with the United States in between at 55 percent. The study goes beyond this finding, however, to try to determine the factors that diminish the relative influence of socioeconomic status on participation rates in the other countries surveyed; it seeks to delineate the forces present in these countries which tend to diminish the general advantage which higher socioeconomic status confers for those who choose the more complex, otherthan-voting routes of political participation. Looking at a country like Austria, where people more readily identify themselves with social or economic classes, the authors find that farmers, public sector workers, and blue collar workers, for example, are particular objects of attention by political parties. Thus, the mobilizing effect which parties play on these less advantaged groups is found to be a major factor in diminishing the influence of socioeconomic status on overall participation rates. In the United States, however, because there is no equivalent of a major class-oriented party, Verba explains, "there is nothing that interferes, in a sense, with the individual propensities to be politically active.... It is just because of the absence of political ideology that class, as a basis for political activity, in fact, plays such a major role." Who represents whom? But even assuming the Verba-Nie-Kim conclusion is correct, does the overrepresentation of the "haves" and the underrepresentation of the "have-nots" make any difference in the allocation of benefits by government? To study this question, the authors sought to determine whether, at the level of local issues, the priorities for government action, as viewed by the more active citizens, coincided with those of the elected officials and whether these priorities were representative of those held by the inactive population, the so-called silent majority. In other words: How representative are the activists of the views of the general population? In some areas the activists' priorities are echoed by the general population on the issue of crime, for instance. "But on most other issues," Verba and Nie state in their book Participation in America (Harper and Row, 1972), "[based on U.S. data which are incorporated in the current crossnational research] the political leader who thought he was learning about the attitudes of the public by observing the preference of those activists around him, or the preferences of citizens who come forward to contact him, or of the citizens who write letters to the press, would be receiving an inaccurate impression of the population as a whole." This finding is particularly true for basic economic issues. On the question, for instance, of whether the government has an obligation to help the poor or the poor should be obliged to help themselves, 51 percent of the most active group believe the poor should help themselves in contrast to 26 percent of the 12 MOSAIC September/October 1975

4 least active group. Similarly, the politically active population is less likely to have personal economic welfare problems than the inactive group; the concerns of the inactive then remain unexpressed. Similar contrasts are found on such questions as whether the government should be responsible for housing, employment, care of the aged, and medical care. In general, Verba and Nie find the activist population "more in favor of individualistic solutions and somewhat less in favor of government intervention in welfare matters than is the population as a whole." For other nations, the analysis of policy preferences of actives and inactives is not as complete as that for the United States. Based on preliminary data, however (on India, Japan, and Nigeria), the researchers find some evidence that the American participant minorities are less concerned with majority needs than is the case in Japan, for instance, and give less emphasis to basic subsistence economic problems such as food, clothing, and shelter.... votng is only a crude indicator of policy preferences In the United States. The final link in the participatory theory chain is the effect participation has on the beliefs and actions of the political leader. As noted earlier, voting is only a crude indicator of policy preferences in the United States, so the research focuses on the direct policy messages coming to leaders through participants. Although the actual messages and outcomes could not be studied on so large a scale, the researchers chose an indirect measure: the degree of concurrence between ordinary citizens and community leaders in identification of priorities for government action on the community level. Using a "concurrence score" based on the match between the priority lists of citizens and leaders, the researchers find support for the view that participation makes a significant difference. As one moves, for instance, from the least active to the most active citizens in America, the average concurrence score doubles. And this trend holds true, even when the data are manipulated to account for the fact that some leaders have backgrounds similar to the activists, and therefore could be expected to hold similar views of problem priorities. To close the link between participation and government reaction a bit further, the researchers also asked the leaders to report the problems they spent most time on and found a close correlation with the problems they listed as priorities. But the general rule that leaders pay more attention to the more active participants does not always hold. Among the most active, for instance, for the relatively small numbers of activists who come from the lower third of the socioeconomic scale, the concurrence score is only one-sixth of that for the top third. This disparity between participation and effectiveness on the part of those participants who are poor leads Verba and Nie to conclude that even when some of the have-nots become active, "their preferences are not communicated to leaders as adequately as are those of upperstatus activists, because they are such a small minority of the activist population." Taken alone, the analysis of participation and its effects on political leaders would seem to indicate a "no-win" situation for the have-nots. That is, lacking the individual resources required for participation, and in light of the traditional rejection here of political organization along class lines, the less affluent are outweighed by the more affluent activists who get the ear of the politician. Furthermore, when the less affluent do participate, their voice seems to carry less weight; they may even depress the overall responsiveness of leaders by becoming more vocal. Non-traditional participation But it is not all no-win. Verba and Nie acknowledge that their study does not take into account many other inputs to the process of government policy formulation than those arising from the four forms of participation covered by their research. There is, for instance, such nontraditional participation as protests, marches, and civil disobedience, which at the time the surveys for the Verba-Nie work were being conducted were prominent on the American political scene. Asking themselves how their conclusions square with the obvious signs of radicalization taking place in America then, the authors suggest that the demonstrators and others expressing views outside the traditional forms of participation may have been a highly visible minority counterpoised against larger groups active in less dramatic ways. In querying their American sample (totaling 1,495) about their activity in connection with views on the Vietnam war, for instance, the authors identified eight who said they took part in warrelated demonstrations. Of these eight, six took dovish positions; one was middle-of-the-road; one was hawkish. While acknowledging this is too small a number for reliable analysis, they encountered some suggestive contrasts. There was, for instance, a predominance of doves among the demonstrators. Yet doves were only 20 percent of the total sample. Furthermore, among those who wrote letters about the war to a newspaper or Government official (2.5 percent of the sample compared to the one-half of one percent who were demonstrators), there were nearly twice as many hawks (30 percent) as there were doves (17 percent) and the majority (53 percent) were middle-of-the-road. Applying the half of one percent ratio of demonstrators to the adult population of the United States in 1967, one obtains more than a half-million, a figure approximating the estimated size of some of the larger anti-war demonstrations. This, the authors note, can be a highly visible number if concentrated in one place, in the Nation's capital, for instance. And the message, understandably, of most demonstrations was dovish. But as Verba and Nie note, the considerably larger group which wrote letters rather than demonstrated were more hawkish. Whose message got through? Which data then represent the reality of public opinion? Verba and Nie insist that it is a composite of the passive hawkish; MOSAIC September / October

14 MOSAIC September/October 1975 the articulate and slightly hawkish letter writers; and the small proportion of intensely visible anti-war demonstrators.

5 14 MOSAIC September/October 1975 the articulate and slightly hawkish letter writers; and the small proportion of intensely visible anti-war demonstrators. And even if that composite ends up representing a national consensus, it is a skewed consensus representing the views of the typically activist strata. Frustration with traditional particlpating mechanisms hasledto other forms of participation in America.., Frustration with traditional participating mechanisms has led to other forms of participation in America (not directly surveyed by Verba and Nie) that allow more expression of the interests of minorities. Some of the black movements that arose in the middle and late 1950's brought about "a tremendous change in the political activity rates of American blacks so that by the middle of the 1960's, black and white participation rates for campaigning and voting were roughly the same/' Verba observes. Group consciousness, he explains, can also work to overcome the socioeconomic deterrent to participation. "Common Cause and Nader-type groups also represent a significant change in the participation input" because they bring "technical and legal skills on behalf of the interests of consumers" in influencing national Government policy, an activity that has been largely the province of very well-financed and organized lobbies based on "producer" roles. Role of political parties Whatever the new developments for participation by minorities outside the political party system, the research conducted by Verba et al strongly suggests that in other nations political parties are a powerful mechanism for mobilizing disadvantaged groups and overcoming the biases that seem to be built into the party structure in the United States. What effect then, if any, are the two main parties in the United States having on the breadth of political participation? Participation rates among Americans with strong party identification are clearly higher than those with weak or no party identification. But party identification in the United States appears to reduce the "class" bias of participation only insofar as the act of voting is concerned. For the more complicated acts of participation, partisan identity tends to increase the representation of upper status citizens rather than, as might be expected, to uniformly boost participation across the socioeconomic scale. This "accelerating" effect of strong party identification on the upper class bias of participation is also found in Austrian and Indian data, although it is much weaker in Austria. Much has been written about the dangers of the decline of political parties in America. The Verba-Nie-Kim studies reveal, however, that it is not a unique phenomenon. Analysis of the crossnational research data seems to confirm that similar loss of allegiance has occurred elsewhere where the traditional issues with which the parties have been associated no longer appeal to the young. Whether or not this means more segments of the population will be excluded from participation, however, is still an open question. Ben Wattenberg, an analyst of the American political scene, says for instance, that there is no question that the major political parties have lost influence as participation mechanisms. "But," he added, "the idea that people can get their grievances heard is as functioning today as ever." He sees America moving toward a "politically oriented media culture" in which messages are sent to leaders by "massaging the media." David Cohen, President of Common Cause, from another viewpoint, sees the rise of "issue politics" in which "people become active around an issue rather than a candidate or party." While he does not find this all good, he does not think that citizen energy for participation or the quality of representation has declined but that the parties must emphasize issues rather than dampening conflicts if they wish to increase participation. Although spokesmen at the research departments of both the Republican and Democratic National Committees have not made use of the cross-national research data file, they say their parties are concerned about the extent to which their activists are representative. The Republican National Committee, for instance, recently conducted a series of surveys covering 2,300 respondents, trying to determine who is active and why. The results are being used at leadership training conferences and seminars. The Democratic National Committee blames budget constraints for the fact that it has conducted no recent broad surveys on participation. But it is not ignoring the question. It has focused on what kinds of people are or are not working in campaigns, contributing money, and voting. And State party leaders are being asked to try to determine the kinds of people who can be mobilized to work and which kinds of incentives can be created to attract recruits from new reservoirs. The implications for citizens and politicians For Verba, the implications of the cross-national research on participation is twofold: First, "those who participate seem to obtain more of the benefits," and second, the messages sent to political leaders from those who participate "do not necessarily represent the distribution of preferences of their constituents." Because participation is voluntary in a democracy, not much can be done by governments to increase activity by the non-participants. But for those frustrated with the system, Verba says the research results demonstrate the "staying power" of traditional forms of participation compared to demonstrations and other nontraditional forms. Those engaging in the latter would be advised to couple it with traditional participatory acts. For the elected official, deciding which voices to listen to the letter writers, the polls, the street demonstrators is becoming increasingly difficult, Verba concedes. "Politicians have to have a fantastic level of tolerance and patience," he observes. Looking ahead, he sees many trends that are unfavorable to democracy, such as the breaking down of party allegiance and sense of community which the research identifies as fortifiers of participation. On the other hand, he also sees "a more well educated and articulate population that should enforce some kind of democratic accountability." #

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