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Review Author(s): Hugh Whalen Review by: Hugh Whalen Source: The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne

d'Economique et de Science politique, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Aug., 1965), pp. 441-444Published by: on behalf of Wiley Canadian Economics AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/139750Accessed: 05-05-2015 23:31 UTC

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Reviews of Books / Comptes rendus 441 account of what they wrote. But this is a point about the men, and not about their theories. For an evaluation of their theories, we need to apply some standards (maybe not contemporary ones, I hasten to say) of good theory. Many theories, given their unexamined assumptions, are not unreasonable; but nor are they philosophically interesting, and this for just such reasons as that they have unexamined assumptions. This of course is not to say that they may not be historically interesting. It is possible for outrageously bad philoso- phy to be an important historical phenomenon, as this book may demonstrate, and Locke's Second Treatise certainly does. Greenleaf seems to me to con- fuse the philosophically with the historically interesting, in such a way that to justify the attention paid to the people he has investigated, he feels bound to say that they have some philosophical merit. He is probably no worse in this regard than the people he complains of, who take no interest in the likes of Sir Robert Filmer, just because they are such dreadful philosophers. I think we ought to be very glad that there are people like Greenleaf who (albeit for bad reasons) have such monumental patience with the third-rate thinker, because I am sure he is right in thinking that the "great hinterland of belief" which these people represent is historically very important; and quite apart from that it is fascinating.

J. F. N. HUNTER University College, Toronto

Political Parties: A Behavioral Analysis. By SAMUEL J. ELDERSVELD. Chicago: Rand McNally. 1964. Pp. viii, 613. $8.40.

The art of political understanding, like the art of living, is essentially that of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. In the case of political parties, those mysterious organisms of key importance in public life, our inherited stock of premises and generalizations is at once meagre and suspect. On the one hand, parties are held in suspicious, even cynical, regard; on the other hand, their political necessity cannot be denied. We recall Washington's warning about the baneful effects of "the spirit of party," and remember Jefferson having said that if he could not go to heaven but with a party, he would not go there at all. A traditional and widely shared view was well expressed by Pope: "Party," he said, "is the madness of the many for the gain of the few." Surveys in a number of countries confirm the existence of a perva- sive ambivalence.

As the author of this important book suggests, our ambivalence toward parties is reflected in political scholarship. For nearly a century there has been strong intellectual commitment to parties as the focal instruments of democ- racy. Yet there has always been serious doubt, given what were assumed to be internal party characteristics, that they could perform in accordance with democratic requirements, particularly during periods of stress and uncertainty. The greatest scholars of party have certainly supplied compelling criticism of the dysfunctional aspects of organized political life: its rigidity and authori- tarianism in the European systems; its amorphous, unrepresentative, and localist tendencies in the United States; and in general its quasi-bureaucratic and self-regarding modes. In a monumental study published more than a decade ago, for example, Duverger concluded that democracy was not

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threatened by the existence of parties as such, but rather by the prevalence of negative tendencies in their internal organization. Substantially the same posi- tion has been taken in the United States by Schattschneider, the American Political Science Association, and Bailey. Yet the author of this volume argues -and rightly so-that our understanding of the real nature of internal party phenomena is strangely deficient.

Notwithstanding the proliferation of descriptive and comparative studies, it cannot be claimed that there exists an accepted framework for the study of political parties. Duverger's work, for instance, has been severely criticized on methodological and conceptual grounds. Indeed, at the level of critical generalization, there has persisted a considerable dependence on the pioneering insights and originating hypotheses of Michels, Bryce, and Ostrogorski. For nearly half a century a number of stereotypes concerning the nature of internal party processes have circulated freely in the body of political discourse. The longevity of ideas such as Michels' "iron law of oligarchy" and his "accordion" theory of party recruitment has been the despair of an increasing number of analysts who have developed new methods for observing the minutiae of party phenomena and have postulated more realistic linkages between party and its social-cultural context.

In this reviewer's opinion, the book under examination, when viewed in the broad perspective of political party literature, constitutes a major revisionist thrust. Professor Eldersveld fairly acknowledges and makes excellent use of the traditional ideas and models. But his informing vision springs from another source: the empirically-oriented, non-normative tradition of Charles Merriam and Harold Lasswell; the behavioural mode of the old Chicago school trans- formed by social survey and data-processing technology, enriched by founda- tion funds and interdisciplinary talent, and institutionalized in Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Columbia's University Bureau of Applied Social Research, and Michigan's Survey Research Center. Like some other recent major behavioural studies, Eldersveld's Political Parties is an awesome performance. The book required nearly a decade to complete. It involved a massive co-operative enterprise: the author acknowledges, for example, the assistance of numerous academicians, graduate students, universi- ties and other organizations, and a large number of political leaders in the Detroit survey area. Unprecedented in the depth and complexity of its analysis, the book cannot be summarized adequately in a mere review. We must be content, therefore, with a few remarks concerning method and result.

The author postulates four structural conditions or properties of a political party. First, the "omnibus" tendency observed by Michels is assumed to be operative: the democratic political party has an open, informal, personalized, clientele-oriented structure. Second, the party is a structure of reciprocal exploitation seeking to capture power. ("It is joined by those who would use it; it mobilizes for the sake of power those who would join it.") Being a power- aspiring body, it must suffer in its midst groups (subcoalitions) whose demands are often in conflict. (". . . the party does not settle conflict; it defers the resolution of conflict.") Third, Eldersveld rejects Michels' oligarchic theory and posits instead a party hierarchy characterized by a proliferation of ruling persons and functions. ("Rather than centralized 'unity of command', or a

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Reviews of Books / Comptes rendus 443 general dilution of power throughout the structure, 'strata commands' exist which operate with a varying, but considerable degree of, independence.... (H)eterogeneity of membership, and the subcoalitional system, make centralized control not only difficult but unwise.") Following Lasswell, the author labels this decentralized hierarchical structure stratarchy. When thus formulated, party organization becomes a "reciprocal deference structure." Finally, the author hypothesizes a special type of career pattern within parties which rejects the notion of a single elite cadre. ("We see the party elite as consisting of pluralized sets of separable 'career classes' . . . with considerable differentiation in congruence [of ideological, role and other perspectives], communicative interchange and self-consciousness.") Traditional theory concerning elite circu- lation is rejected; the author uses a five-part typology of career categories which includes the following classes: formal organization mobiles, informal mobiles, non-mobile regulars, potential careerists, and non-careerists.

One significant feature of the generalized dynamic image of party which thus emerges is the coexistence of tensions within and among the various dimensions of structure. Ease of access to party membership and leadership roles, for instance, suggests difficulties from the standpoint of internal management control. Clientele orientation implies a continuing tension between the goal of power acquisition and obligations regarding the satisfaction of subcoalitional demands. Stratarchy and its decentralized modes may improve worker effi- ciency but it may equally frustrate leadership coherence and operational ingenuity. Finally, a loosely articulated career structure implies conflict between mobility and status demands. These multiple-vector relationships have never been so clearly conceptualized.

Having tested the basic propositions in the survey area, the author next undertook three separate analytic exercises. First, the effect of the four struc- tural conditions on the ideology, role perceptions, and motivations of party officials at different levels of the hierarchy was determined. Second, the in- fluence of these conditions on the party as task group, information network, and decision system was examined. Third, the party with its structural features, perspective patterns, and internal organizational relationships was evaluated as a functional unit in society.

Except for those disposed to consider behavioural analysis and survey method inherently suspect, this book will be regarded as a significant scholarly achievement. Eldersveld has successfully synthesized not only the best of the traditional theoretic inheritance but has incorporated as well the newer con- tributions of organization theory, electoral analysis, and the steadily accumu- lating data on micro-political patterns. His framework, like that of other behavioural models, will undoubtedly be criticized for its dependence on American institutions, experience, and norms. It will be said that the party universe he has abstracted looks too much like that of Wayne County, Michi- gan. But such criticism is valid only if the author insists that his macro-analytic model has ubiquitous validity. His claim, in fact, is more modest.

Parties gradually evolve characteristic modes or properties which tend to become accepted and tolerated in a given area and culture. But change can and does occur, and it is possible that at critical points in time party structures do develop reorienta- tions. Thus, although we are rather committed to accepting the basic theory outlined

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above, as having generalizable validity for modern-day parties in democratic societies, we accept the possibility that these, or their degree of manifestation at this point in time, are not fixed and unalterable. (p. 13) This is welcome modesty on the part of a social scientist. For we no longer have stomach for the all-embracing, the presumably definitive, the massively substantive theory. And, in any case, the task of testing the general relevance of Eldersveld's model for democratic political systems will surely yield much urgently needed comparative information on political parties.

HUGH WHALEN University of Toronto

Congress: The Sapless Branch. By SENATOR JOSEPH S. CLARK. New York: Harper and Row [Toronto: Longmans]. 1964. Pp. xx, 268. $5.50.

Unlike their Canadian counterparts, a surprisingly large number of United States senators have written books for commercial publication. About 20 per cent of the present membership of the Senate have volumes recently published or awaiting publication. Senators Fulbright, Humphrey, Keating, Javits, Prox- mire, and Young are only a few of those on the current publication lists.

Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania is one of the latest of this illustrious body to be infected with the ancient disease of cacoethes scribendi. He comes with all the susceptibilities. He is a graduate of Harvard and of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Like a number of his colleagues who hesitate to sport the KEY either on the floor or in the hustings, he is also a member of Phi Beta Kappa (this is roughly the top 1 per cent of the graduating class in selected American Universities). He is a wealthy man who lives well on Philadelphia's Main Line. But he has also had a long career as a reform candi- date and served at one time as mayor of Philadelphia (the first democratic mayor in 67 years). During the last War, he was on General Stratemeyer's staff in the ill-fated and explosive China-Burma-India theatre. In short, Senator Joseph Clark is no cartoon Klaghorn.

Congress: The Sapless Branch is an interesting book. It is articulate. It is well organized. It is tempered with a good sense of humour. And it is serious. On page 23, the Senator states his thesis: his "deep conviction that the legisla- tures of America, local, state and national, are presently the greatest menace in ouLr country to the successful operation of the democratic process." These are strong words. But Senator Clark, on the basis of his eight vears of experience in the Senate, gives his reasons: the actions of an entrenched congressional "establishment"; the presence of a continuing legislative-executive tug of war; the abuse of the committee system, of the filibuster, etc.; the demands of "mil- lions" of American citizens for private treatment (the Senator's office receives an average of 110,000 letters a year and 15,000 pieces of bulk mail), which the Senator calls the "major" business of Congress. None of these criticisms, of course, are new. It is not often, however, that a senator points them out.

Senator Clark does not ston wvith criticism. Almost one half of the book is concerned with suggested reforms for Congress. He divides this into what he calls "internal" reform and "external" reform. The first concerns what Congress

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Article Contentsp. 441p. 442p. 443p. 444

Issue Table of ContentsCanadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Aug., 1965), pp. 315-476The Limits of Behavioural Explanation in Politics [pp. 315-327]The Foreign Currency Business of Canadian Chartered Banks [pp. 328-357]La Transformation du Parti Liberal Quebecois [pp. 358-367]Trends in the Location of Industry in Ontario 1945-1959 [pp. 368-381]Protection and Imperial Preference in Britain: The Case of Wheat 1925-1960 [pp. 382-389]NotesDuality in International Trade: A Geometrical Note [pp. 390-393]The Terms of International Transactions [pp. 394-397]Joint Products and Basing Point Pricing: The Case of Caustic Soda and Liquid Chlorine [pp. 397-401]Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association 1965 [pp. 402-406]Le Rapport du Secretaire-Tresorier Pour L'Annee se Terminant le 30 avril 1965 [pp. 406-407]

Review ArticlesCanadian Economic Development and Planning, 1963-1970 [pp. 408-421]The Report of the Royal Commission on Banking and Finance [pp. 421-429]

Reviews of BooksReview: untitled [pp. 430-432]Review: untitled [pp. 432-434]Review: untitled [pp. 434-436]Review: untitled [pp. 436-437]Review: untitled [pp. 437-439]Review: untitled [pp. 440-441]Review: untitled [pp. 441-444]Review: untitled [pp. 444-445]Review: untitled [pp. 445-447]Review: untitled [pp. 447-448]Review: untitled [pp. 448-449]Review: untitled [pp. 449-451]Review: untitled [pp. 452-453]Review: untitled [pp. 454-455]Review: untitled [pp. 455-456]Review: untitled [pp. 456-458]Review: untitled [pp. 458-460]Review: untitled [pp. 460-461]Review: untitled [pp. 461-463]Review: untitled [pp. 463-464]Review: untitled [pp. 465-466]Review: untitled [pp. 466-467]Review: untitled [pp. 467-469]NoticeReview: untitled [p. 469]

Books Received [pp. 470-476]