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Ideology and Inconsistency: The “Cross-Pressured” Nigerian Worker1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Robert Melson
Robert Melson*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Extract

In the climate of ethnic insecurity present in Nigeria in 1964, workers tended to support ethnic over labor parties. A small fraction of workers who were cross-pressured between their ethnic and their labor loyalties however, tended to report that they supported both ethnic and labor parties. These are called the “incon-sistent.” Looking more closely at this group, it was possible to distinguish between those who were descriptively inconsistent (they would describe themselves as supporting an ethnic and a labor party at the same time); and those who were prescriptively inconsistent (they would prescribe support for a labor party while actually supporting an ethnic party). Though descriptive inconsistency varied inversely with political information, prescriptive inconsistency varied directly with it. The immediate political significance of the inconsistents lay in their confusing the predictions of labor leaders who were counting on their support. Beyond that, however, it may be suggested that the inconsistents added to the felt unpredictability of rapidly changing, plural societies such as Nigeria.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , March 1971 , pp. 161 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1971

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Footnotes

1

I have benefltted from suggestions made by Paul Abramson, Rufus Browning, Frederick W. Frey, Paul Hiniker, Willard Johnson, John Kramer, Norman Miller, Lucian Pye, Richard L. Sklar, and Howard Wolpe. As research assistants, Platon Rigos and Ronald Stockton were most helpful. I wish to acknowledge also the assistance of the Department of Political Science and the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. Data collection in Nigeria was financed by grants from the Carnegie and Ford Foundations.

References

2 For a discussion of Nigerian politics in the postindependence period, see the following studies: Coleman, James S., Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958)Google Scholar; Sklar, Richard L., Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Post, Kenneth W., The Nigerian Federal Election of 1959 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; and Mackintosh, John P., Nigerian Government and Politics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the problem of ethnic and class-based orientations in Africa, see Gluckman, Max, “Tribalism in Modern British Central Africa,” in Cahiers D'Etudes Africaines, 1 (01 1960), 55–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also, Epstein, A. L., Politics in an Urban African Community (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956)Google Scholar. For a recent application of the situational mode of analysis developed by the Rhodes-Livingstone group to the Nigerian scene, see Plotnicov, Leonard, Strangers to the City: Urban Man in Jos, Nigeria (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

3 “Cross Pressures” are “combinations of characteristics which in a given context would tend to lead the individual to vote on both sides of a contest.” Berelson, Bernard, Lazarsfeld, Paul F., et al., Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 283 Google Scholar.

4 In the literature on attitude change, two major types of inconsistency may be distinguished. These are the psychological inconsistency between two attitudes, and the psychological inconsistency between an attitude and an action. In each case, the subject of the inconsistency is presumed to be aware or cognizant of the two or more attitudes at variance. In this paper, I draw attention to two kinds of inconsistency, “descriptive” and ‘prescriptive,” in which the subject may, or may not be aware of maintaining two inconsistent attitudes at the same time. See Festinger, Leon, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1957)Google Scholar. Also see Daniel Lerner's discussion of transitional Turks. “They are persons marked by aspirations for a future which will be better than the past, but they have not yet acquired a comprehensive set of new values to replace the old. Hence they exhibit ambivalent feelings about the choices between old and new which must be made along the way …. Ambivalence also takes the form of selfcontradictory preferences … ambivalence often shows itself in incompleteness and inconsistency of attitudinal structures.” The Passing of Traditional Society (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1958), pp. 160–161 Google Scholar.

5 Zettenberg immediately qualifies this assertion by noting that “When using a biased sampling for a verification, we must have assurance that the relationship we want to prove is not introduced into our data by selective sampling …. Also, when using a biased sample for verification, we should realize that we have no knowledge of the population to which the result can be safely generalized”: Zettenberg, Hans L., On Theory and Verification in Sociology (The Bedminster Press, 1965), pp. 128–129 Google Scholar.

6 The 800,000 to one million figure is reported by the National Manpower Board, Manpower Situation in Nigeria, 1963 (Lagos, 1963)Google Scholar. According to the Annual Abstract of Statistics, 1963 (Lagos, 1964)Google ScholarPubMed, approximately four million Nigerians lived in towns of 20,000 or more inhabitants. Thus, one concludes that wageearners constituted at least one-fourth of the urban population, and that wage-earners plus their families constituted at least half of the urban population.

7 See Table 3.6 of the Annual Abstract of Statistics, 1964 (Lagos, 1965)Google Scholar.

8 See Melson, Robert, “Marxists in the Nigerian Labor Movement” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1967), p. 57 Google Scholar.

9 Berelson estimates that a “quarter to a third” of the American electorate is cross-pressured. See Berelson, et. al., op. cit., p. 320.

10 The data from which Tables 1 and 2 are derived are based on: 1) a nonprobabilistic survey of 58 trade unionists who attended a meeting sponsored by the University of Ibadan in July 1964; 2) a non-probabilistic survey of 29 workers who attended a training program for trade unionists, sponsored by the United Labour Congress (one of three central labor bodies of the time) in October 1964; and 3) a mail questionnaire whose response rate was 43 out of 300 possible responses. (The figure 300 is based on the estimated number of extant Nigerian trade unions which were listed by the Federal Ministry of Labour.) The mail questionnaire was sent out in October and the responses were analyzed in December 1964. In all three surveys, the questionnaires were self-administered. It should be noted that what is called the “October-December” column in Tables 1 and 2 is based on the aggregation of responses from the second and third surveys above (N = 72). In all three surveys, the characteristics of the respondents did not differ significantly from those listed under Table 3 below. In terms of validity, we might expect that our respondents overly represented the better educated leadership of the Southern Nigerian trade union movement, and by the same token, underrepresented the uneducated rank-and-file, especially of Northern origin. Since it is estimated that over 90 percent of the rank-and-file both in the South and North were of Southern ethnic origin, the small number of Northern respondents reflects the national makeup of the labor force at the time.

11 For discussion of the effects of cross-pressures, see Lane, Robert E., Political Life (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

12 As the Rudolphs note, “Compartmentalization not only physically separates … home and family from work place and colleagues, but also prevents the different norms of behavior and belief appropriate to modernity and tradition from colliding and causing conflict in the lives of those who live by both.” Lloyd, I. and Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 121–122 Google Scholar. Also see Wolpe, Howard, “Port Harcourt: Ibo Politics in Microcosm,” Journal of Modern African Studies, 7, 3, (September 1969), 469–494 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 The data on which Table 3 is based are derived from a non-probabilistic survey of trade unionists attending two national conferences in Lagos in April 1965. More information about the respondents' characteristics is available from the author on request.

14 The last set of data presented in this paper (see Tables 6, 7, and 9) is derived from a survey of 574 railway workers in the Lagos yard of the Nigerian Railway Corporation. The workers were interviewed in May 1965 by a team of twelve interviewers, including the author. Interviews were recorded in English only. The survey was conducted every working day for six days. For a composition of the sample, the reader is directed to Table 9.

15 In 1965, the time of the study, Nigerian labor was divided among four organizations: The United Labor Congress, the Nigerian Trades Union Congress, the Nigerian Workers Council, and the Labour Unity Front.

16 Questions were based on the “Dogmatism scale” of Milton Rokeach. See his The Open and Closed Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1960), pp. 71–80 Google ScholarPubMed.

17 See Berelson, et. al., op. cit., “The political conviction of the individual is closely bound to the political character of his personal relations—or at least his perception of their political complexion.” p. 98.

18 Dr.Otegbeye, Tunji, Ideological Conflicts in Nigerian Politics, (published by Socialist Workers and Fanners Party (SWAFP), Lagos, 1964), pp. 20–21 Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., p. 21.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., my italics.

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