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A Theory of Professionalization in Politics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Gordon S. Black
Gordon S. Black*
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
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Extract

Professionalization, in customary usage, refers to the assimilation of the standards and values prevalent in a given profession. Every profession, including politics, tends to have some set or sets of values that are widely held and which define what it means to be a “professional” within that field. These values are important because they affect the likelihood that the individual will achieve success in his profession. If the values are widely held, those that deviate from them are likely to be sanctioned by their colleagues, and people who fail to maintain the minimal standards of their profession are not likely to obtain professional advancement. Those who do behave according to the dominant values of their profession, however, are likely to be accorded the status of “professional” in the eyes of their colleagues, and that designation will contribute to the success of their careers.

In the profession of politics, as in other professions, there is seldom one set of standards and values that prevails in all places at all times. These normative elements are likely to vary from political system to political system, to vary within a political system, and to vary within the profession of politics over time. In a highly centralized local political organization, for example, the achievement and maintenance of a position is likely to depend upon such values as deference and loyalty to the leaders of the political hierarchy.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , September 1970 , pp. 865 - 878
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1970

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Footnotes

*

The larger project of which this analysis is a part, the City Council Research Project, is sponsored by the Institute of Political Studies, Stanford University, and is supported by the National Science Foundation under grants GS 496 and GS 1898.

References

1 Dahl, Robert A. and Lindblom, Charles E., Politics, Economics, and Welfare (New York: Harper and Row, 1953), p. 304 Google Scholar.

2 For a more detailed analysis of the attitudes and orientations of “citizen-politicians,” see Prewitt, Kenneth, The Recruitment of Political Leaders: A Study of Citizen-Politicians (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970)Google Scholar. This study and the Prewitt study utilize data from the same source; the City Council Research Project, directed by Heinz Eulau.

3 Dahl and Lindblom, op. cit., 333–334. Mitchell, William C., “The Ambivalent Social Status of the American Politician,” Western Political Quarterly, 12 (June, 1959), 683–698 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Stokes, Donald E., “Popular Evaluations of Government: An Empirical Assessment,” in Cleveland, Harlan and Lasswell, Harold D. (eds.), Ethics and Bigness (New York: Harper and Row, 1962)Google Scholar.

4 The ideology of the “municipal reform movement” is an important component in local politics. The thrust of the arguments was for “good government,” the “public interest,” and a kind of Burkean politician who could stand above the conflict and who would reach the “right solution” to a problem rather than pandering to “selfish interests.” These reforms were to come about through the adoption of such institutional changes as at-large elections, city manager plans, and nonpartisanship. The importance here is that the ideology of the municipal reform movement specifically rejected the “pluralist” view of the decisional process; and this point of view has been extremely popular in California where this study was conducted. This is reflected in the fact that all of the cities in this study operate under nonpartisanship, nearly all have at-large elections, and most have either city managers or city administrators. For a review of the history of the municipal reform movement, see Hays, Samuel P., “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, LV (October, 1964), 157–169 Google Scholar. On the Progressive Movement in California, see Mowry, George E., The California Progressives (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951), pp. 86–104 Google Scholar.

5 One classic study of political motivation is Max Weber's “Politics as a Vocation.” He distinguishes between the men who are involved in politics on a marginal basis, as an avocation, and the men who either “live for” or “live off” politics, those whose politics are a vocation or a “calling.” From Max Weher: Essays in Sociology, Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright, trans, and eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 77–128 Google Scholar. In addition to Weber's work, this study relies reavily on three recent studies of political motivation: Barber, James D., The Lawmakers: Recruitment and Adaptation to Legislative Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Schlesinger, Joseph A., Ambition and Politics: Political Careers in the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966)Google Scholar; and Wilson, James Q., The Amateur Democrat: Club Politics in Three Cities (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

6 Schlesinger, ibid., 6. Wilson distinguishes between “amateurs” and “professionals” with the same factor of ambition; the office goals of the individual. He argues that: “The professional, for whom politics primarily has extrinsic rewards, is preoccupied with maintaining his position in party and elective offices. Winning is essentia], although sometimes electoral victory must be subordinated to maintaining the organization.” Ibid., 17.

7 The larger project of which this analysis is a part, the City Council Research Project, is sponsored by the Institute of Political Studies, Stanford University, and is supported by the National Science Foundation under contract GS 496 and GS 1898.

8 Schlesinger makes a similar distinction between static and progressive goals in his ambition theory of recruitment. Op. cit., 10.

9 Both the size of the city and the closeness of the vote in elections are related to the cost of running for office, the amount of time and effort the councilman puts into his campaign, and some of the psychic costs of electoral contesting. Both relationships are positive and strong; and these results can be seen in Black, Gordon S., The Arena of Political Competition (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Google Scholar, forthcoming).

10 Although there are a large number of studies that explore the attitudes and values of politicians of various kinds and a large number of studies that explore the attitudes and values of the general public, only a few studies actually compare the attitudes of politicians with the attitudes of the general public, and these restrict themselves to attitudes on public policy. See Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., “Constituency Influence in Congress,” this Review, 57 (March, 1963), 45–56 Google Scholar; Cnudde, Charles F. and McCrone, Donald J., “The Linkage Between Constituency Attitudes and Congressional Voting Behavior: A Causal Model,” this Review, 60 (March, 1966), 66–72 Google Scholar.

11 Robert K. Merton suggests that the occupant of a given status, in this case the councilmanic position, has a role-set that is the “… complement of role relationships which persons have by virtue of occupying a particular social status.” For the councilman, the public is a “significant other” with which he interacts, and what we are examining here is the councilman's perception of how the public defines his role in the position he occupies of councilman. Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1957), pp. 368–370 Google ScholarPubMed.

12 The selection of 30,000 as a cutting point was an arbitrary decision on my part. I do not suggest that this particular cutting point has any special virtue that sets it above other cutting points in the same general range of cities. My only real concern was to choose a point that seemed large enough to separate out the cities in which the costs of running for office were significant, but small enough that I had sufficient councilmen in the large cities for the analysis.

13 These cities are all, in effect, multiple member districts. There were, on the average, more than two candidates for every office, and there were always more than two councilmanic positions at stake. The Mean Deviation (or Absolute Deviation as it is sometimes called) is computed by determining the sum of the absolute deviations from the mean number of votes per candidate and then dividing that sum by the number of deviations. The Mean Deviation is a measure of dispersion around the mean, but it differs from the standard deviation in that it weighs every deviation the same, rather than weighing extreme scores more heavily. In almost all cases, the measure of the closeness of the vote, the Mean Deviation, was determined from five elections in each community, and the average was taken and is used here.

14 The cutting point was a score of 13% for the average of the Mean Deviations. The range of the variable was from 8% to about 18%, but there were four cities that never had contested elections. This cutting point was chosen because it stood at the middle of the range.

15 The question for this variable was: “Which of the following would you say comes closest to your conception of the requirements of the job of City Councilman? The councilman then chooses between four statements; the first indicated that the job was a “tough political job” that required the councilman to be a “real politician,” the second suggested that the job required “some political skills,” the third indicated that the job required the “ability to get along with people,” but was not political, and the fourth statement suggested that a City Councilman was a “public servant.” In dividing the Councilmen, the Councilmen who chose the first two statements were grouped together and the Councilmen who selected the second two statements were grouped together.

16 This question was: “In your opinion which of the following best describes the way the people in your community view the job of being a City Councilman?” The responses were “a real politician,” a “public servant,” or “as just another citizen and by no means a politician.”

17 Positional commitment was measured with a scale item that asked the Councilman to estimate his “desire and efforts to be elected to the Council during (his) last campaign.” Progressive commitment was determined by asking the Councilman whether there were “any other political or governmental positions—local, state, or federal—which you would like to seek?” Councilmen who indicated any interest in such positions were grouped together.

18 See “Jobs and Occupations: A Popular Evaluation,” Opinion News, 9 (September 1, 1949), 3–19 Google Scholar; Smith, Mapheus, “An Empirical Scale of Prestige Status of Occupations,” American Sociological Review, 8 (1943), 185–192 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Cantril, Hadley and Strunk, Mildred, Public Opinion 1935–46 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 584 Google Scholar; Mitchell, op. cit., 683–698; National Opinion Research Center, The Public Looks at Politics and Politicians, Report No. 20, March, 1944 Google Scholar.

20 Dahl and Lindblom, op. cit., p. 334.

21 See, for example, Adrian, Charles R., “A Typology for Nonpartisan Elections,” Western Political Quarterly, XII (June, 1959), 452–457 Google Scholar; Hagensick, A. Clarke, “Influences of Partisanship and Incumbency on a Nonpartisan Election System,” Western Political Quarterly, XVII (March, 1964), 112–119 Google Scholar; and Williams, Oliver P. and Adrian, Charles R., “The Insulation of Local Politics under the Nonpartisan Ballot,” this Review, 53 (December, 1959), 1056–1066 Google Scholar.

22 Although we have no data with which to compare these councilmen to councilmen elected under a partisan system of elections, these councilmen are quite antagonistic toward partisan politics at the local level. Over 90% believe that the community would be worse off with partisan elections, and nearly 90% believe that “better people” are elected under nonpartisan elections.

23 Tests of significance and measures of association have not been presented with the data for two reasons. All of the tables with the exception of this one show associations that are significant at the .05 level with the Chi-square test of significance. For that reason, the presentations of significance levels is redundant. Also, the argument reste on a set of relationships, rather than a single relationship, and the test of significance for all of the tables is significant at less than .0001 level. Measures of relationship such as the tau-beta or tau-c would be misleading because we only have a limited range of the independent variables of commitment. Obviously, political commitment extends down to people who have little or no interest in politics and upward to people who make politics their exclusive career. Restriction of the range of the independent variable, as in this case, would naturally lower the measures of relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variables in the study.

24 See, for empirical evidence, Hadden, Jeffrey K. and Borgatta, Edgar F., American Cities: Their Social Characteristics (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965)Google Scholar. They show correlative evidence that size is strongly related to the social, demographic and ecological diversity within a community.

25 The cost factors in electoral politics cannot be cumulated because it would involve making interpersonal comparisons of utility. The variables of social pluralism cannot be aggregated because we know of no theoretical method of integrating the characteristics of social pluralism. For these reasons, the factor of size, which is roughly related to both risk and social pluralism, is employed as a surrogate measure that approximates the variables.

26 Gerth and Mills, op. cit., pp. 83, 87.

27 Barber divides his respondents into four groups on the basis of two variables; the legislator's willingness to return three or more times to the legislature and his activity as a legislator. Both of these variables are similar in character to those of this study in that both variables reflect the willingness to invest in politics, and the findings of his study are similar to the findings in this study. For example, among the most committed of his subjects, those willing to return to the legislature and who have a high activity level (Law-makers), 55% identify themselves as “politicians” and 82% have engaged in major negotiations. Among the least committed group, those not willing to return three times and low on legislative activity (reluctants), only 33% identify themselves as “politicians” and only 47% have engaged in major negotiations. Op. cit., pp. 25–26, and 166–167.

28 Wilson, op. cit., pp. 1–31.

29 Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 2.

30 Running for office is a form of political participation. For an analysis of voting behavior using utility analysis, see Riker, William H. and Ordeshook, Peter C., “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting,” American Political Science Review, 62 (March, 1968), 25–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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