how democracy works: the linkage between micro and macro political history

How Democracy Works: The Linkage between Micro and Macro Political HistoryAuthor(s): Richard JensenSource: Journal of Social History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring, 1983), pp. 27-34Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3786928 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 19:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal ofSocial History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 19:43:43 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3786928?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


HOW DEMOCRACY WORKS: THE LINKAGE BETWEEN MICRO AND MACRO

POLITICAL HISTORY

The political historian who deals with a democracy has to confront the question of how the popular will is linked to the state. The question is seldom posed directly. The answers emerge implicitly, with the structure of the answer dependent upon the conceptual framework the historian brings to the research. The purpose of this essay is not to explain how democracy works, or what I believe the linkages to be, but to explore the conceptual frameworks of the historians (and, to a lesser extent, the political scientists) who have concerned themselves with American politics.

Five broad paradigmatic approaches, or rather families of approaches, can be identified: Baconian, Idealist, Turnerian, Pluralist and Behavioral. These are ideal types of conceptualization. In actual practice, American historiography has been eclectic, and not given to epistemological debates, nor even to explicit awareness of method. As a consequence many contributors, especially figures of the stature of Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, Allan Nevins, V.O. Key, Richard Hofstadter and W. Dean Burnham, have artfully combined insights garnered from diverse conceptualizations. As a convenient labelling device, I have tagged some paradigms with well-known philosophical labels, while being aware that few of the political scholars have explicitly credited the inspirations for their epistemology.

The first approach is Baconian. The object of the scholar is to collect the facts, to ascertain their validity, and to compile authentic information on names, dates events and formal rules of the system For nearly a century the standards of historical scholarship in the United States have placed an aura around Baconianism-"original research in the primary sources" in the catch phrase. Remarkably few historians have built their reputations by interpreting and synthesizing the original research of other scholars-only Hofstadter comes to mind. Political scientists, by contrast, have a stronger sense of scholarship as a cumulative science. Standing in awe of the detective skills of the historian ransacking archives, they have readily-much too readily-relied upon history books for their information.

The problem with Baconianism is that the "facts" do not neatly arrange themselves and, furthermore, that the linkages among levels of politics, from the nation to the individual, must be discovered, or imposed by the scholar. The easiest conceptual order is that held at the time by the people who created the original documents-the newspaper editors, orators, platform writers, correspondents and autobiographers. Three important ideas spring from these sources: politics as the quest for office, parties as the mechanism for politics, and terms of office as the chronological structure. The thousands of books and articles in the Baconian style deal most frequently with individual politicians and with election campaigns. The "Presidential Synthesis," as Thomas Cochran called it, has been the usual organizing framework at the national level, a sort of "gubernatorial synthesis" prevails for state political history. The identification of politics with politicians remains the chief approach taken by journalists, and, indeed, by retired politicians writing their memoirs.



28 journal of social history One snare Baconians encountered was the intense moralistic tone of much of the original source material, especially in editorials, speeches and platforms. One party blessed by true wisdom, the other utterly corrupt and misinformed. Since politicians expressed themselves moralistically in public, though rarely in private intercourse, the historian could choose among three interpretations. The politicians were cynics, and all were inherently untrustworthy; the mush was for public consumption, so perhaps the simple-minded voters swallowed it whole thus accounting for their misguided behavior; or else, allowing for some buncombe, one party really was right and the other wrong. The cynicism of academics (inspired in part by the empty hufflng and pufElng of academic politics, together with the credo of objectivity), impelled Baconian historians to reject the third option, and allowed a combination of the first two explanations to mold their interpretations. But, if political rhetoric is hollow, could the substance of democracy be detected in political history? Probably not, and thus democracy in Baconian history carries an unreal air, devoid of inspiration, conducive to cynicism, and liable itself to meaninglessness.

The less useful aspect of personalization can be seen in the game of rating presidents, an exercise journalists Elnd entertaining when no real news is available, and which has cast an unfortunate lure even for some serious historians. Personalization quickly reduces to personalites, to biographies and to ever more frequent excursions into the boyhood experience or the love life of famous politicians. The biographers say much about the charm of politicians, or their skill at remembering names and doing little favors, but very seldom do they ask about the linkage with voters, or even with fellow politicians. Thuss it is quite rare in biographies to see any analysis of who voted for a particular politician, or how his image and base of support shifted over time, or in the case of legislators, to whom they distributed patronage and how they themselves voted. 1 Baconianism in political history thus presents us with dry-as-dust names and dates, of the sort that fill tedious textbooks, or else enlivened anecdotes, the more secret and private the better, that titilate audiences and reveal little about the nature of democracy. Baconianism in political science has tenaciously pursued two types of facts. Early in the discipline the emphasis was on compiling the ofElcial rules of politics? either constitutional or statutory, regardless of how the game really was played. Thus John W. Burgess explored at length the utterly remote hypothetical problem of a regency in the German Empire, while completely ignoring the issue of who was in power and who out of power.2 The obvious discrepancy between the formal and informal rules eventually discredited this style of Baconian political science though it survived for many decades in civics textbooks, chiefly because it was so thoroughly non-controversial. Political scientists did make much of the linkages between federal and state lines of authority, with the Civil War as an obvious centerpiece. It was Woodrow Wilson, and like minded young Turks at the turn of the century, who insisted that political science ought to deal with function rather than form. Baconianism revived in the 1 940s, as political scientists connected with nineteen state bureaus of governmental research began to compile election returns, by county, for long stretches of time. V.O. Key and his student W. Dean Burnham worked prodigiously to assemble data on a regional and national basis stretching back to 1832. Their efforts culminated in the vast computerized data archive at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.3 For years political scientists were unable to make any sense out of the mountain of facts they had assembled. They implicitly realized that the county data had to be important because it linked the national outcome with local behavior Key and



HOW DEMOCRACY WORKS 29

Burnham first tried to find the linkages by adopting Turnerian conceptions about the nature of political regions. Abandoning the approach, politlcal scientists turned to the sort of mathematical models revolving around the concept of

critical elections. Attempts to provide a linkage between individuals and the systemic correlations used proved unsuccessful. The emerging consensus is that critical election theory is internally inconsistent and incapable of solving the linkage problem.4

Baconianism is a sterile approach to both the linkage question and democracy generally. However useful it may be as a technique to train graduate students and fill journal pagess it cannot deal with fundamental historical issues like how pareicular political systems came about, and how they change. Chronologies of events, however accurate they nzay be, cannot explain why things happeneds or did not happen, nor how things changed. An alternative explanatory framework was already available in the nineteenth century-idealism, or more loosely Hegelianism. The inner logic of ideas could drive history, as George Bancroft and James Ford Rhodes illustrated in their histories of how the spirit of liberty controlled American politics. The Spencerian variant of idealism, whereby the inner logic of progress unfolds through the modernization of thought, technology and values, presented an attractive conceptualization in the late nineteenth century. Alexis de Tocqueville had already probed many of the implications of the idea of democracy for the American polity. The problem, as James Bryce, Moisei Ostrogorski, and native commentators in The Nation so forcefully explained, was that the high level of corruption in actual politics belied any deep belief in the inexorable march of civilization.

The solution to combining an idealism that would provide the necessary historical motive force with a recognition of the turmoil of actual events was posed by Frederick Jackson Turner in his frontier thesis. As wave after wave of settlers confronted new physical environmental challenges, Turner argued, they changed their personalities to adapt to new conditions. Successive generations, each geographically to the west of its predecessors, started with their immediate legacy and proceeded to modify it. They result was a new personality, the American, with the most distinctive forms furthest west. In the free flowing political structure of the nation, furthermore, the personality of the people was impressed on both the political system (hence broad suffrage laws) and, most important on the styles and values of both the politicians and the electorate.

Turner s stunning insight into the linkages among the experience of the people (especially ordinary folk), their psychology, and the style of government that resulted stands with Tocqueville s work as the most penetrating insights into the nature of American democracy. Turner, the most influential graduate history professor in the first quarter of the centurys did not however, encourage his students to explore the psychology of politics. His approach relied more upon cultural geography (or, more accurately, he invented the cultural geography of politics). Political psychology and values were rooted in physical environmental factors, so Turner taught generations of students how to analyze elections in terms of geographical subregions; statistical cartography was the main tool. Unfortunately, there are severe difficulties in creating and interpreting statistical maps. Turner and his students failed to adopt the new statistical tools that were available after 1900 (such as cross tabulation, correlation and multiple regression.) They did, however, map the political geography of America and compiled valuable files of election returns and accompanying maps.S

The Turnerian legacy eventually died out among historians. Some political scientists, following V.O. Key s adoption of the Turnerian approach, worked



30 journal of social history

along the same lines, though after 1970 even that tradition had petered out. The Turnerian spirit lives on in the work of journalists, and in the scholarship of Daniel Elazar and his disciples who link public policy with "individualistic1 "moralistic" and "traditionalistic' ethical cultures, which in turn are supposedly geographically concentrated.6 The fatal flaw in this approach is that modernization, although occurring at different rates in different regions, has largely homogenized the country. That is, the diversity of political behavior within subregions is almost as great as the diversity between subregions. Geography thus explains very little.

The problem with Spencerian idealism, except for Turner's rendition was that the motive force causing progress and modernity was both inevitable and mysterious. Something could be done about inevitability-perhaps explaining away the atavistic reactionary politics of the post-Reconstruction South as an aberration, or perhaps as a cover for severe class and racial tensions (Vide C. Vann Woodward). The mystery was the stumbling blocks especially after the success of the Pragmatic philosophers (William James John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead) in destroying the notion of invisible, ali-powerful forces. The only forces the American intellectual tradition allowed after 1920 were ones that could be specified7preciselys and which involved an explicit linkage between individuals and society.

Two interpretive frameworks have emerged to provide such a linkage, one pragmatic and the other idealistic. The pragmatic solution was first developed by Arthur Bentley, a journalist who saw Chicago politics firsthand and a philosopher who collaborated with Deweys and by the great historianXpolitical scientist Charles Beard. Bentley argued that interest groups control politics, and that they provide the basic linkage between the socio-economic structure and the government. Although Bentley's insights lay dormant for years, beginning in the late 1920s a series of books by such political scientists as Peter Odegard, Pendleton Herring and Elmer Schattschneider fleshed out the theory. Systematized by David Truman, and disseminated through numerous textbooksz especially V.O. Key's Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups (1942), the interest group interpretation became the accepted wisdom by the 1950s. Robert Dahl deepened the theory by arguing that democracy could be effective because competing interest groups had to bargain and negotiate with each other No one group dominated the pluralistic democracy that Dahl depicted.

The Beardian scheme ran a different intellectual course, exerting its influence through historiographical channels. In An Economic lnterpretation of the Constitution (1912) Beard detected the linkage between national policy and the broader society in the individual profit motivations of the key politicians. Charles and Mary Beard, in their magistral Rise of American Civilization (1929) abandoned the personalized approach in favor of a Hegelian dialectic of conflict between broadly based economic interest groups, -industry (regionalized in the Northeast), plantation agriculture (South), and yeoman farming (Midwest). An episode like the Civil War was, for the Beards, the logical and inevitable outcome of quite distinct economic interests. In the hands of C. Vann Woodward and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the clash of economic forces was rephrased in terms vf class conflict, with groups like the Southern Populists and the urban Jacksonians important because their leaders (Tom Watson Andrew Jackson) correctly captured the popular mood and class interests of their constituenciess and devised suitable state and national policies linking the needs of the people to the government directly.




The concept of pluralist democracy has fared poorly in the last decade. Radicals complain that a closed elite is really in charge, either through dominance of the interest groups themselves or through control over the public agenda, so that issues they do not wish to see debated are suppressed.8 Although journalists today usually report national politics in terms of interest group competition, citing the recent emergence of PACs as justification, political scientists have increasingly abandoned the conceptualization in favor of behavioral perspectives.

In historiography, interest group interpretations have been less popular than class conflict models. The "new political history" of the 1960s and 1970s challenged the conflict approach by showing that the evidence came from the rhetoric of the politicians, not from the behavior of the people. The linkage rarely involved class conflict, because entirely different factors (race, ethnicity and religion) could be shown to constitute much more important determinants of voting behavior than class or economic status. Although a new generation of Marxist labor and social historians has recently emerged, they have shied away from study of elections, fearing, probably, that false consciousness among the working class, plus elitist domination of the political system, have spoiled voting data as valid indicators of class conflict. The evidence over the past two centuries suggests that class occasionally was important in voting behavior, especially in the 1930s and 1940s.9

Intellectual history in the 1960s and 1970s uncovered another solution to the linkage problem: the delineation of pervasive political ideas or modes of thought that simultaneously were shared by both the rulers and the ruled. The best work has focused on the eighteenth century, however, with rare excursions past the early national period.l° The difficulty, common to all forms of intellectual historiography, is that while important politicians may have shared ideas with commanding intellectuals, there is precious little evidence that the average citizen shared such ideas, or acted upon them. Furthermore, the intellectual historians have been frustrated in their efforts to discover a method to reveal what the voters actually thought.l1

The behavioral revolution's new answer to the linkage question was so successful that it swept away pluralism to become the dominant paradigm in political science in the l9SOs and 1960s. Its key ideas were soon translated into historical contexts, providing the basic logic for the "new political history." Behavioralism relies upon an extreme individualism. The nation state hardly exists except as a forum for the aggregation of individual decisions through the vehicle of elections. The study of politics is the study of how individuals-all of them-decide how to cast their ballots. A "funnel of decision" is posited, into which enter a historically rooted party identification, opinions on the issues of the day, evaluations of the stances of the candidates and their parties, and an assessment of how well the individual has done and is likely to do in the future under the rule of one party or the other. The psychology of the individual is all important. Interest groups hardly appear, and even the sociological affiliations of individuals (by class, region, sex, age, religion, race, etc.) are of minor importance. Vast amounts of very high quality survey data are needed to validate such a theory, and they have been provided every two or four years by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. The seminal book was The American Voter (1960) by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes. It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that most American (and British) electoral studies for the past two decades have been glosses or extensions of this behavioral classic.



journal of social history 32

The history profession was ready to accept the behavioral approach because of the bankruptcy of traditional political history, and the emphasis on psychology that Hofstadter had introduced in the 1950s. He revived Turner's interest in personality, though abandoning regionalism in favor of status insecurity, especially of the sort that might generate pathological political expressions, such as anti-semitism, McCarthyism and anti-intellectualism. The style of political rhetoric, even more than the substance of policy, was the element in politics that reflected the psychology of the people, or at least the psychology of the most significant constituents of the politicians. Apart from an inadequate analysis of Populist and Progressive leaders, however, Hofstadter failed to produce or stimulate the research necessary to substantiate this analysis. Furthermore, as in other modes of intellectual history, the mood of the followers had tQ be gauged indirectly from the rhetoric of the leaders.

Two obstacles had to be overcome by the behavioral political historians. The new approach required scarce quantitative skills, and data resembling the elaborate Michigan surveys had to be discovered. Beginning in the late 1960s summer institutes in quantitative methods for historians held at Michigan, the Newberry Library and elsewhere provided statistical expertise. The data challenge proved more formidable. Some historians and political scientists began reanalyzing the surviving IBM cards from early Gallup polls; although comparability problems existed, enough evidence was available to begin to reestimate what happened during the New Deal.l2 The rediscovery of vast amounts of poll book and survey data for the nineteenth century provided the basis for other studies; one of them was modelled almost exactly, even to the title! upon The American Voter.l3

For the most part historians had to tease patterns of individual behavior from aggregate township or county returns. Two very similar procedures were used: homogeneous unit analysis and ecological regression. The advantages and problems of these estimating routines require mathematical discussions that are beyond the scope of this essay.l4 It is important to stress that, except for poll books, no technique reveals how individuals voted. It is possible, if conditions are ripe to identify how groups voted. To make a behavioral analysis, the new political historians had to discover individual attitudes and values from group behavior. The "ethnocultural school" solved the problem by positing a deep set of vaJues shared by individual members and spokesmen of groups that had a very high salience for the individuals. Religious and ethnic-racial communities apparently met the linkage conditions.lf Statistical analysis demonstrated sufElciently uniform behavior within ethnocultural groups to justify the linkage. Other groupings, including region and economic status, could be shown not to display internal homogeneity, thus finally destroying the Turnerian and interest group models.

The resemblances among behavioral political science, the new political history and the new social history are striking. In each the central problem is to explain how the individual (or family) adjusted behavior in order to cope with a particular social, economic and ideological environment. The new political history, dovetailed with behavioral political science, now provides a comprehensive overview of voting history for the last century and a half. Chronological and geographical gaps remain to be filled, but there are no indications on the horizon of any other approach that will both explain voting behavior and reveal exactly how policy formation at the state and national level was affected by the linkage.l6




Good answers exist for certain times and places,l7 but the general problem is high on the research agenda.l8

Universit of Illinois, Chicago Richard Jensen

FOOTNOTES

1. A welcome exception is John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbolfor an Age (NY, 1955), which poses the problem of what Americans saw in Jackson that they admired-or detested-so much. Unfortunately, political historians have not tried to replicate Ward's model study.

2. PoliticalscienceandConwarativeConstitutionalLaw(Boston, 1896), 2: 269-75. Burgesswas the founder of political science as an academic discipline, and wrote also on American political history.

3. See Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan and Nancy H. Zingale, eds., Analyzing Electoral History: A Guide to theStudy oSAmerican Voting Behavior (Beverly HIlls, 1981) .

4. Allan J. Lichtman, "The End of Realignment Theory? Toward a New Research Program for American Political History," Historical Methods 15 (1982) 170-880.

5. See Edgar Eugene Robinson, The Presidential Vote: 1886-1932 (Stanford, 1947); Richard Jensen, "American Election Analysis: A Case History of Methodological Innovation and Oiffusion," in S.M. Lipset, ed., Politics and theSocial Sciences (New York, 1969), 226-43.

6. See Daniel Elazar, Cities of the Prairie (NY, 1970); John Kincaid, ed., Political Culture, Public Policy and the American States (Philadelphia, 1982) .

7. Edward A. Purcell, The Crisis oSDemocratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, 1973).

8. For a historian's version of this critique, see Edward Pessen, "Social Structure and PoliticsinAmericanHistory,"AmericanHistoricalReview87 (1982), 1290-1325.

9. Paul Kleppner et al., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, Conn., 1981) is the most recent and broadest survey of voting history. On the question of differential class participation in voting see Paul Kleppner, Who Voted? The Dynamics of Electoral Turnout 1870-1980 (New York, 1982)

10. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1976) Gordon Wood, The Creation oSthe American Republic (New York, 1972); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975); Lance Banning, The Jeffiersonian Persuasion. Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, 1978); Robert E. Stallhope, "Republicanism and Early American Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982), 334-56.

11. Valiant attempts to provide a linkage to ordinary folk include Rowland Berthoff, iPeasants and Artisans, Puritans and Republicans: Personal Liberty and Communal Equality in American History," Journal of American History 69 (1982), 579-98; Joyce Appleby, "Commercial Farming and the 'Agrarian Myth' in the Early Republic," Ibid 68 (1982), 833-49.

12. See Everett Carll Ladd and Charles Hadley, Transformations of the American Party System: Political Coalitions Srom the New Deal to the 1970s (New York, 1978); Kristi



34 journal of social history

Anderson, The Creation of Democratic Majority (Chicago, 1979); Kleppner, Who Koted?; and

Richard Jensen, 'sThe Last Party System: Decay of Consensus, 1932-1980." in Kleppner et

al., Evolution oSElectoral Systems, 203-41.

13. Melvyn Hammarberg, The Indiana Voter (Chicago, 1979). For pollbook studies, see

Kenneth J. Winkle, "A Social Analysis of Voter Turnout in Ohio, 1850-1860," Journal °S

lnterdisciplinary History 13 (1983), 411-35; Paul F. Bourke and Donald A Debats,

"Identifiable Voting in Nineteenth Century America: Toward a Comparison of Britain and

the United States Before the Secret Ballot," Perspectives in American History ] 1 (1977-78)

259-88.

14. See William G. Shade, "'New Political History': Some Statistical Questions Raised,\'

Socia/ Science History 5 (1981), 17i-96; and Bourke and DeBatsl "Individuals and

Aggregates: A Note on Historical Data and Assumptions" Social Science History 4 (1980),

229-50. The most important studies using ecological regression include: J. Morgan Kousser,

The Shaping oSSouthern Politics (New Haven, 1974); Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral

System, 1853-1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Culture (Chapel Hill, 1979); and Allan J.

Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of l 928 (Chapel Hill, 1979) .

15. See Philip R. VanderMeer? "Religion, Society, and Politics: A Classification of

American Religious Groups," Social Science tfistory 5 (1981), 3-24. Robert Kelley, The

Cultural Pattern in Antrican Politics (New York, 1979) does not, however, belong to the

ethnocultural school. He presents an interest group model, in which ethnic groups form

interests, but lack the internal consensus on values required by the ethnocultural model.

16. Richard L. McCormick, "Ethno-Cultural Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century Voting

Behavior," PoliticalScienceQuarterly89 ( 1974), 351-77.

17. For example, Ballard Campbell, Representative Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern

Legislatures in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1980) .

18. For an intriguing approach derived from rational choice theory in economics-which

itself is close to the behavioral model-see J. Morgan Kousser, "Restoring Politics to

Political History," Journal of lnterdisciplinary History 14 (1982), 569-95.



how democracy works: the linkage between micro and macro political history

Documents