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Political Ethos Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

James Q. Wilson  and
Edward C. Banfield
James Q. Wilson
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Edward C. Banfield
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Abstract

An effort to test the existence and correlates of the “unitarist” and “individualist” political ethos (first discussed in City Politics under the labels “middle-class Anglo-Saxon ethos” and “immigrant ethos”) in a sample of 1,059 mostly male Boston homeowners reveals that about one fifth of the respondents have one or the other ethos when defined by two sets of attitudes and about one eighth have one or the other when defined by three sets of attitudes. In general, the respondents displaying each attitude or two or more attitudes in the predicted combinations have the predicted ethnic, religious, income, and educational attributes. Jewish voters, however, are less likely than predicted to have the good government attitude, whereas Irish and Polish respondents are more likely to have it. Upper-income Yankees were strongly unitarist as defined by all three attitudes.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , December 1971 , pp. 1048 - 1062
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1971

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References

1 Wilson, James Q. and Banfield, Edward C., City Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), esp. chaps. 3,16Google Scholar.

Some scholars have drawn from our initial statement of the ethos theory the inference that, if true, there should be discernible in cities a correlation between the proportion of persons with the census attributes associated with having a certain ethos and the presence of institutional forms and urban policies that conform to that ethos. We have argued that such an inference, and hence such a test, is improper because it fails to take into account either the temporal sequence by which electoral attitudes at one period of time are converted into institutional forms that endure in later periods or the numerous political, legal, and institutional variables that intervene between the distribution of attitudes in a population and the choice of local policies or forms of government.

Wolfinger, Raymond E. and Field, John Osgood (“Political Ethos and the Structure of City Government,” American Political Science Review, 60 [June, 1966], 306–326CrossRefGoogle Scholar) find a relationship between the proportion of persons of foreign stock in 1960 in cities and the existence of “unreformed” political structures (ward elections, mayor-council government, etc.), but that the relationship disappears when region is controlled. Lineberry, Robert L. and Fowler, Edmund P. (“Reformism and Public Policies in American Cities,” American Political Science Review, 61 [September, 1967], 701–716CrossRefGoogle Scholar) argue that region is a statistically ambiguous control variable, that the influence of an attitude cannot be inferred from the number of persons presumed to hold it, and that 1960 measures of ethnicity are irrelevant to decisions on governmental form made (usually) many decades earlier. They find that in a sample of cities of over 50,000 population in 1960, there are few socioeconomic and only modest ethnic differences between those with “reformed” and “unreformed” institutions.

Alford, Robert R. and Scoble, Harry M. (“Political and Socioeconomic Characteristic of American Cities,” The Municipal Yearbook, 1965 [Chicago: International City Managers' Association, 1965], pp. 82–97Google Scholar) studying all cities over 25,000 population found a stronger relationship between socioeconomic variables and governmental form than did Lineberry and Fowler, perhaps indicating that the impact of demography on institutional structure is greater in the smaller communities.

Gordon, Daniel N. (“Immigrants and Urban Governmental Form in American Cities, 1933–60,” American Journal of Sociology, 74 [September, 1968], 158–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar) discovered a strong relationship between the percentage of foreign born in a city's population and the incidence of “unreformed” institutions for all cities with a 1930 population of 30,000 or more, and noted that the relationship was not attenuated by controls for region, economic base, or population size. The relationship was especially strong in 1930 and 1940, when the foreign-born percentage of urban populations was at its peak.

In this paper we take no position on the issue of the demographic correlates of local political form, though we think it possible in principle, using appropriate historical data and considering the influence of intervening variables, to use the ethos theory as a partial explanation of choices of form.

2 Wilson, James Q. and Banfield, Edward C., “Public-Regardingness as a Value Premise in Voting Behavior,” American Political Science Review, 58 (December, 1964), 876–887CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Wilson, and Banfield, , City Politics, p. 42Google Scholar.

4 These terms were originally developed in the “Note on Conceptual Scheme” in Martin Meyerson and Banfield, Edward C., Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest (New York: Free Press, 1955), pp. 303–329Google Scholar.

5 The survey was supported by grant GS-1836 from the National Science Foundation and by funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard. None of these organizations, of course, is responsible for our findings and arguments. The authors wish to acknowledge especially the invaluable assistance of Mrs. Susan Michaelson and Mrs. Suzanne Weaver.

6 For the area sample, one out of every three census tracts in Boston was chosen at random; from within the tracts, every seventh city block was chosen at random. All addresses on these blocks were listed and compared to property tax records kept by the Boston city assessor. All addresses at which more than three families resided or at which the owner did not reside were deleted. From the remaining list was drawn a random sample of 878 owner-occupants of whom 551 were interviewed.

7 Respondents in the quota sample were chosen by first selecting those census tracts with the highest proportion of a given ethnic group and then, from these tracts, those blocks with the highest proportion of homeowners. All addresses within those blocks were listed and compared to property ownership records. Respondents were then chosen at random from among homeowners, omiting those who did not fit (where appropriate) particular ethnic criteria (Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Jewish or Polish last names). Yankees were selected only from the three census tracts on and around Beacon Hill with the highest average home value; Italians from four areas (North End, East Boston, West Roxbury, and Hyde Park); Poles from each of three areas in South Boston, the South End, and Dorchester; Negroes from three census tracts in Roxbury; and Jews from those areas with the largest proportion of persons listed as having been born in or having one or both parents born in the USSR. Where ethnic neighborhoods varied by socioeconomic status, three or more areas of differing income levels were used as the sampling frame, with equal numbers of respondents chosen from each.

The criteria for assigning an ethnic identification were as follows: Negroes: respondent appeared to be a Negro and described himself as a Negro. Jews: respondent gave his religious preference as Jewish. Italians, Irish, and Poles: respondent was born in Italy, Ireland, or Poland; or, if American-born, either both his parents or three out of four of his grandparents were born in Italy, Ireland, or Poland, and his religious preference was not Jewish. Yankees: respondent described himself as a Protestant, was born in the United States with both of his parents and at least three out of four of his grandparents born in the United States, had an Anglo-Saxon last name, lived in the Beacon Hill area of Boston, and earned more than $10,000 a year.

8 Of the 1059 respondents, 78 per cent were male. For every ethnic group other than Irish and Negroes, the percentage of female respondents did not exceed 24. For the Irish, females were 32 per cent and for Negroes, 35 per cent.

9 This index, like the one referring to “good government” versus “benefits” discussed in Section III, is made up of items with high loadings on an. orthogonally rotated factor (varimax criterion). Forty attitudinal variables were used in the factor analysis; six factors emerged on rotation, the total communality of which was 15. Some items, thought a priori to be related to “holism” versus “localism,” were part of the questionnaire but are omitted from the index because of low factor loadings. The loadings of the items used here ranged from +.519 to +.630.

10 Some readers may feel that spending money on facilities to handle juvenile delinquents is “people-helping” as much as “community-serving.” In a sense that is true and, as Table 3 shows, the motives for supporting it contain elements of both. The distinguishing feature for classificatory purposes is that (unlike the bonus and welfare payments) it does not give the beneficiaries what they themselves want—e.g., money. Two expenditure items—the schools and the city hospital—are unclassifiable in that they serve both the community (educating citizens and checking disease) and individual recipients (acquiring earning power and receiving medical care); these two items were omitted from the two marketbaskets and, as we shall see, voters of both types seemed to support the schools and hospital in about equal proportions.

11 The factor loadings of the three items used to construct this index ranged from +.664 to +.771.

12 Wilson, and Banfield, , City Politics, p. 235Google Scholar.

13 See, for example, Sears, David O., “Political Behavior,” in Lindzey, Gardner and Aronson, Elliot, eds., The Handbook of Social Psychology (2nd ed.; Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1969), Vol. V, p. 330Google Scholar; Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960), pp. 216–265Google Scholar; Converse, Philip E., “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Apter, David E., ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 218, 225, 255Google Scholar; and Key, V. O. Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1961), pp. 154–172Google Scholar.

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