Edinger, Searing - 1967 - Social Background

7/30/2019 Edinger, Searing - 1967 - Social Background

1/19

Social Background in Elite Analysis: A Methodological Inquiry

Author(s): Lewis J. Edinger and Donald D. SearingReviewed work(s):Source: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Jun., 1967), pp. 428-445Published by: American Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1953255 .

Accessed: 17/03/2012 19:40

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 of

content 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].

American Political Science Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to

The American Political Science Review.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=apsahttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1953255?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1953255?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=apsa


2/19

SOCIAL BACKGROUND IN ELITE ANALYSIS: AMETHODOLOGICAL INQUIRY*LEWISJ. EDINGER AND DONALD D. SEARING

Washington University (St. Louis)I. INTRODUCTION

This paper attempts to comment empiricallyupon certain assumptions about the relation-ship between social background patterns andattitudinal patterns in elite analysis. All po-litical systems are more or less stratified andtheir elites constitute that minority of partici-pating actors which plays a strategic role inpublic policy making. As the incumbents ofsuch key positions they have a far greater in-fluence than the masses in structuring andgiving expression to political relationships andpolicy outputs at various levels of authoritativedecision making. They wield this influence byvirtue of their exceptional access to politicalinformation and positions and their conse-quently highly disproportionate control overpublic policy making and communicationprocesses which relate society to polity andgovernors to governed.Usually exceeding no more than about fivepercent of the members of a political com-munity, such elites not only know a good dealmore about the internal workings of the per-tinent system than do the rest of its members,but they can do a good deal more to give shapeand content to general input demands andsupports, as well as to formal governmentalrulings at the national or sub-national level.'Therefore, their behavior patterns represent

* Extensively revised version of a paper pre-sented at the annual meeting of the MidwestConference of Political Scientists in Chicago,Illinois, April 28-30, 1966. We are indebted to theYale University Political Science ResearchLibrary for the data used, to John D. Spragueand Robert H. Salisbury for comments on anearlier draft of this article, and to Theodore D.Sterling for making his Robot Data Screeningprogram available to us. Data processing wascarried out at the Washington University In-formation Processing Center with the aid of JohnWick. The research was supported by the Wash-ington University Faculty Research Fund, andby NIMH fellowship IFIMH33 32501.1 The concept is variously defined in the liter-ature according to the particular research focusof the scholar using it in his work. Thus Karl W.Deutsch associates elites with key communicationand command functions: The Nerves of Govern-ment (New York: The Free Press, 1963), 154-160, whereas Harold Lasswell defines as elites

a crucial dimension of behavior patterns in apolitical system, providing important clues tocharacteristics making it like or unlike othersystems.Quantitative data on aggregate elite behav-ior are not easy to come by, except in the caseof legislative roll call analysis and similar stud-ies, but data on elite attitudes have of late be-come more abundant. And while attitudinaland behavioral dimensions are not necessarilyidentical or equivalent-other variables, suchas situational factors may intervene-eliteattitudes undoubtedly represent an importantcomponent of elite behavior.2those who enjoy the greatest proportion ofvalues in a society: Politics: Who Gets What, When,How (New York: Meridian Books, 1960). Else-where elites have been defined as those who holdhigh position and perform the function of makingmajor social decisions in a society; see, for ex-ample, Raymond Aron, "Social Structure andthe Ruling Class," The British Journal of Sociol-ogy, 1 (March, 1950), at p. 9; Ralf Dahrendorf,Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959),303-307; C. Wright Mtills, The Power Elite (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1959), 3-5;S. F. Nadel, "The Concept of Social Elites," In-ternational Social Science Bulletin, 7 (1956), at p.414; and Harold Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and C.Easton Rothwell, The Comparative Study of Elites(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1952), p.6. Gaetano Mosca's broad category of "rulingclass" embodies all three criteria: The RulingClass (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), p. 50;while Suzanne Keller emphasizes the criterion ofwielding moral responsibility: Beyond the RulingClass; Strategic Elites in Modern Society (NewYork: Random House, 1963), p. 4. For a goodreview of the literature see, Carl Beck, James M.Malloy, and William R. Campbell, A Survey ofElite Studies (Special Operations Research Office,The American University, 1965).

2 We recognize that expressions of individualattitudes are usually distorted by coding proce-dures and that survey data-especially in thecase of elite samples that are usually relativelysmall-must be interpreted with caution. Wealso recognize that a distinction exists betweenunderlying attitude and expressed opinion,though, following common practice, we treat thetwo as synonymous in this article.

428


3/19

SOCIAL BACKGROUND IN ELITE ANALYSIS 429Though it would seem that the central con-cern of political science is competition for andthe exercise of leadership by various elites,quantitative elite analysis has on the whole

lagged behind advances in other areas, particu-larly mass voting and opinion studies. Thus,elite studies published in recent years havetended to rely heavily on social background orbehavior, rather than upon intervening atti-tudes which might provide a link between back-grounds and behavior. Also, particularly in theUnited States, elite analysis has tended tofocus on investigations of either national orlocal elites.3 These have for the most part beentreated as analytically exclusive categories,though they are empirically interrelated.4In part this has been due to the propensity ofinvestigators to deal with clearly distinct unitsof political analysis; in part, too, it has re-flected sensitivity to pitfalls involved in in-discriminately seeking to draw analogies be-tween American local and national "powerstructures" in the United States and else-where.Moreover, whereas empirical studies oflocal power structures in the United Stateshave lately produced a host of studies in the-oretical and explicitly methodological con-texts, investigations of national elites have been

I For an exception, see Wendell Bell, RichardJ. Hill, and Charles R. Wright, Public Leadership(San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company,1961).

4.Just as the national political system may beconceptualized as functioning in an environ-ment-the international system-so the local po-litical system can be seen to function in the en-vironment of the national system. While eachremains susceptible to description and analysis interms of a set of self-contained, integrated sys-temic roles, the central empirical fact of politicaldecision making in the American small communityis its permeation by state and federal structures.For the most part local political values are in ef-fect authoritatively allocated by superior govern-mental units in the United States as elsewhere.See, Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman, SmallTown in Mass Society (New York: AnchorBooks, 1960), and the abstracts by Rossi, Clel-land, Arensberg, Sjoberg, and Warren, in CharlesPress (ed.), Main Street Politics, Policy makingg atthe Local Level: A Survey of the Periodical Liter-ature Since 1950 (East Lansing, Michigan: In-stitute for Community Development, 1962). Agood deal of research on this subject is now in prog-ress and may yield significant findings on the in-terdependence and similarity of national and sub-national elite structures.

comparatively few in number and have oftenlacked the closeness to the data displayed bythe local studies.6 Here we seem to find lessrigorous approaches still quite adequate, per-haps because no better ones seem available,perhaps, too, because we have been inclined tomake a virtue of a necessity.6 Elite studiesbeyond the local level are not only more costlyand time consuming, but involve more difficultmethodological problems, particularly in iden-tifying leaders, gaining access to them, andascertaining their attitudes and styles of be-havior. Whatever the reasons, there has beenconsiderably less quantitative analysis and amuch greater bifurcation between empiricalinvestigations and theorizing than in the localcommunity studies.7 A particular problem forstudents of cross-national elite analysis hasbeen the fact that empirical studies of nationalleaders tend to be either restricted to secondarysocial background data or to largely non-com-parative attitudinal and behavioral data.8

6 See, for example, Vidich and Bensman, op.cit., Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1963); and Robert E.Agger et al., The Rulers and the Ruled (New York:Wiley, 1964). For convenient summaries of com-munity elite studies see, Press, op. cit.; and Bell,Hill, and Wright, op cit. An interesting synthesisof the stratification and pluralistic approaches hasrecently been attempted by Robert Presthus inMen at the Top; A Study in Community Power(New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

6 See Harold D. Lasswell, "Agenda for theStudy of Political Elites," in Dwaine Marvick(ed.), Political Decision-Makers (New York: TheFree Press, 1961), 264-389; T. B. Bottomore,Elites and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1964);and Keller op. cit.

7 Some recent exceptions are Wendell Bell,Jamaican Leaders: Political Attitudes in a NewNation (Berkeley: University of California Press,1964); Lucian W. Pye, Politics, Personality andNation Building (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1962), Ch. 5; Victor T. LeVine, The Conflictof Elite Generations in the Context of Independencein French Speaking Africa (Hoover Institution,forthcoming); Frederick W. Frey, The Turkish Po-litical Elite (Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press, 1965);and Joseph A. Schlesinger, Ambition and Politics(Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966).

8 For example, James N. Rosenau, NationalLeadership and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Prince-ton University Press, 1963); Donald R. Mat-thews, United States Senators and their World (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1960); Floyd Hunter, TopLeadership, U. S. A. (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1959); Frey, op. cit.; W. L.


4/19

430 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWThanks to the availability of "who's who"type of information, the compilation of socialbackground inventories has become one of themore feasible research strategies for national

elite analysis, and studies based on such datahave largely preempted the field. This ap-proach relies on descriptive material about theincumbents of elite positions from which themore comparative studies attempt some sortof configurative analysis of elite attitudes andbehavior. The stated or implicit underlyingassumption is that leadership, social back-ground and recruitment patterns will facilitateunderstanding of the political system becausewe can infer from them a good deal about thesystem's homogeneity and dominant values,about elite-elite relationships and about elite-mass relationships.9Where elite political behavior is associatedwith latent and manifest political attitudes,these are frequently assumed to be interveningvariables that are a function of socio-economicand psychological characteristics which inaggregate can be related to relevant back-ground data. The linkages are said to be thesocialization experiences through which leaders

Guttsman, The British Political Elite (New York:Basic Books, 1963); Karl W. Deutsch and LewisJ. Edinger, Germany Rejoins the Powers (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1959); Harold D.Lasswell and Daniel Lerner (eds.), World Revolu-tionary Elites (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1965); and W. L. Lloyd Warner, The AmericanFederal Executive (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1963).9 Deutsch, The Nerves of Government, 155-56. See also, Donald R. Matthews, The SocialBackground of Political Decision-Makers (GardenCity, N. Y.; Doubleday and Company, 1954);Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington,Political Power USA/USSR (New York: VikingPress, 1964); and Morris Janowitz, "The Syste-matic Analysis of Political Biography," WorldPolitics, 4 (April, 1954), 405-412. Although it hasbeen rightly objected that most studies dealingwith recruitment and elite composition are pri-marily descriptive and fail to explain why partic-ular elites were recruited and why they act theway they do, information about social backgroundcharacteristics may well be a prerequisite for thissort of explanatory analysis. See Lester G. Seligman,"The Study of Political Leadership," in HeinzEulau, Samuel J. Eldersveld, and Morris Jano-witz (eds.), Political Behavior; A Reader in Theoryand Research (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1956),p. 178.

are inducted into political process from child-hood onward.10 Social circles, to use Simmel'sconcept, whose members have had similarsocialization experiences, are presumed tohold similar attitudes. The analysis of socialbackground variables, in this sense, representsan attempt to classify the contexts of the ag-gregate socialization experiences in whichelite attitudes are formed in order to explainthe collective orientations of members of influ-ential social circles, or to forecast probabilitydistributions of these orientations amongthem."Undoubtedly the most impressive researchefforts built upon these foundations are theHoover Institute RADIR elite studies, mostof which were recently republished in a singlevolume.'2 This project was based on a con-textual approach similar to other schemes ofconfigurative analysis, except that it placed

10 For example, Harold D. Lasswell asserts,"Elite members who prepare to play active po-litical roles usually become differentiated at anearly age from their more passive contemporaries.Such differences of perspective affect motivationto acquire the base values appropriate to politics,notably the skills essential to leadership . .. ."See Harold D. Lasswell and Daniel Lerner (eds.),World Revolutionary Elites, 12-14, 21. See also,Henry Robert Glick, "Political Recruitment inSarawak: A Case Study of Leadership in a NewState," Journal of Politics, 28 (February, 1966),81-84. For more general recent treatments of po-litical socialization, see, inter alia, Robert E. Lane,Political Life (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959);Richard E. Dawson and Kenneth Prewitt, Po-litical Socialization (Boston: Little Brown, forth-coming); Gabriel A. Almond and G. BinghamPowell, Comparative Politics: A Developmental Ap-proach (Boston: Little Brown, 1966), Ch. 3; Her-bert Hyman, Political Socialization (Glencoe, Ill.:Free Press, 1959); and Fred I. Greenstein, Chil-dren and Politics (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1965).1 Thus, according to Lasswell and Lerner,

. . . elite perspectives can be accounted for byexploring the perspectives that were incorporatedon the road toward active power or at least to-ward an adult status.... Not only predisposi-tions but environments count": op. cit., p. 18. Theultimate step is the inference of elite behavior pat-terns from collective attitude patterns. But sincethat process goes beyond the socialization experi-ences which concern us here, it will not be con-sidered in this paper.

12 Lasswell and Lerner (eds.), World Revolution-ary Elites.


5/19

SOCIAL BACKGROUND IN ELITE ANALYSIS 431greater emphasis on a developmental process.13The location of an elite within a "developmen-tal context" involved a description of what wehave referred to as social background variableinventories, beginning in childhood and ex-tending through the elite's adult years.14Trend analysis and elite composition and cir-culation were studied in terms of the frequencydistribution of these life history character-istics among elite members at different pointsin time.These inaugural efforts in quantitativecross-national elite analysis were importantsteps and potentially very fecund, but theyhave failed to produce their potential fruit in asecond generation of studies which would ac-tually relate social background variables toelite attitudes. By and large, applications ofthe social background approach have left un-answered the question of how and to what ex-tent data of this nature actually can be used toforecast attitudinal distributions. Which socialbackground variables best predict which at-titudes under what conditions? Are all back-ground variables presently used equally goodattitudinal indicators? Might not some needto be refined, and should we not add others toour inventories?

Granted that it is plausible that social back-ground variables are related to elite attitudes,it seems equally plausible that, (1) some back-ground characteristics have more relevancethan others for elite attitudes in a particularnational political system, (2) some attitudesare more strongly related than others to back-ground characteristics in such a system, and(3) the relative importance of the associationbetween background and attitude varies fromone system to another. We hope to demonstratein this article that such is actually the caseamong elite members in two national politicalsystems, and, at the same time, suggest amethod for handling multivariate analysis ofthis type of data relatively easily.Social background categories are usuallychosen ad hoc and assumed to be prima faceoperational. But it seems to us that we mustface questions raised by the above propositions,if we are to justify their use for projecting elite

13 Gunnar Heckscher, in contrast, seeks to ap-proach social background in elite studies from amore problem-oriented, functional perspective.See his The Study of Comparative Government andPolitics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957), 108-120.

14 Harold D. Lasswell and Daniel Lerner (eds.),World Revolutionary Elites, 6-8.

attitudes.'5 Our argument is that the typicalresearch procedure in elite studies-flowing asit does from social background data into at-titudinal orientations-has not, and perhapscannot, by itself resolve the problems whichhave been raised. Attitudes are described andorganized in terms of social background vari-ables brought to the research from the outsideand not themselves evaluated within the con-text of the research project. Moreover, notonly does the relevance of the social back-ground variables as a set remain unques-tioned, but the relative strength of one back-ground variable vis-a-vis another is rarely de-termined. In other words, in the absence ofany evaluative criterion, each backgroundvariable is treated as if it were, in all cases, asimportant as any other. What we would liketo know, however, is whether we can predictwith a high degree of probability that particu-lar background variables are associated withparticular attitudes, whether conditionally orunconditionally. That is, can we expect that agiven elite background will also yield certainorientations, and to what extent? Before wecan seriously attempt such a task in compara-tive analysis, it will be necessary to explorebackground-attitudinal relationships exten-sively and intensively through cross-nationalresearch.Here the optimum strategy, in our opinion,is to follow the approach of the biologicalsciences and gather and prepare for analysislarge amounts of comparative elite attitudinalcum social background data from diverse po-litical systems. Such information has of latebecome more abundant and its availability islikely to increase in the future.'6 It will con-sequently become easier to begin analysis with

15 The search for attitudinal predictors does notnecessarily imply, of course, a commitment to adeterminism of the type underlying some socio-economic and psychological theories. (See WilbertE. Moore, "The Utility of Utopias," AmericanSociological Review, 31 (December, 1966), 765-773. While most men are creatures of habit andbelieve and behave in patterned ways, such pat-terns and their antecedents are admittedly com-plex and ephemeral. Ours, however, is not an argu-ment against the possibility of their study, butrather a plea for a probabilistic approach dictatedby the complexity of multivariate elite data.16 See, for example, John C. Wahlke, HeinzEulau, James Buchanan, and Leroy C. Ferguson,The Legislative System (New York: Wiley, 1962);Wendell Bell, Jamaican Leaders; Karl W.Deutsch, Lewis J. Edinger, Roy C. Macridis,


6/19

432 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWthe attitudinal data and proceed to locate thosebackground variables most, frequently asso-ciated with attitudes and attitudinal clustersin diverse milieus, both in particular politicalsystems over time and in different politicalsystems across space as well as time.Such a research strategy rests upon the de-velopment of adequate multivariate techniquesfor tracing social background-attitudinal re-lationships in large and complex elite data.The nature of such data suggests that thesetechniques should, ideally, satisfy three keycriteria: (1) we want a technique to deal withdiscrete rather than continuous data; (2) wewant a way to find the best multivariable (com-binations of background variables) predictorsof attitudes in the data; and (3) we need asimple procedure for examining many variablesrelatively quickly. Thus, if we had collecteddata for forty background variables andwanted to relate them to ten elite attitudes onthe basis of the best combination of three ofthese background variables (triplets), thenumber of possible combinations of backgroundvariables to be examined would be

10 (N(N -1)(N -2)3or 197,900 possible combinations. Obviously,we could not possibly examine the predicta-bility of each combination in a short time, ifat all.Fortunately a computer program has re-cently been developed by Theodore D. Sterlingand his associates which meets our three cri-teria, and we have employed it in the follow-ing analysis. The program's predictability mea-sure, which we have used throughout thisarticle, is a maximum likelihood estimatoreasily interpreted as the percent of correctclassifications of respondents which wouldhave been made on dependent attitude x, byusing independent background variable(s) Y.In other words, if background variable Y hasa predictability of .70 for attitude x, and wehad predicted the distribution of attitude xamong this elite group on the basis of back-ground variable Y/, we would heave been cor-rect in seventy cases out of a hundred. This

and Richard L. Merritt, France, Germany and theWestern Alliance (New York: Scribners, 1967);James N. Rosenau, National Leadership andForeign Policy; Lester G. Seligman, Leadership ina New Nation (New York: Atherton Press, 1964);and Frank Bonilla and Jose A. A1i1vMichelena(eds.), Studying the Venezuelan Polity (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming).

straightforwardness in interpretation seems tous a strong point favoring this procedure overcurrently employed statistical approaches tomultivariate analysis. Therefore when we usethe term "predict" in this paper, we are re-ferring to this measure of classificatory ac-curacy in the data we are examining."7II. DATA

During the summer of 1964 eight Americanuniversity professors conducted extended in-terviews with French and German nationalleaders in connection with a project directedby Karl .T. Deutsch under the auspices ofYale University.'8 The questions asked weredesigned to elicit the respondent's attitudesabout his political system and its domesticand foreign policies, with particular reference17 The program was designed for use on discrete

data and employs a "logical," as opposed to a"statistical" criterion for multivariate analysis, togroup data into deterministic models. This aloneappeared to make it preferable to factor analytictechniques, which are further limited by the ele-ment of arbitrariness introduced with axis rota-tion. Robot data screening performs a selectivesearch of the data in stepwise fashion, utilizing allpossible combinations of N-i variable predictorsat each new level of combinations, until no furthercombinations of independent variables are foundwhich would raise the predictability of the depen-dent variable. It allows for manipulation of thesignificance level and includes an entropy measureof uncertainty derived from information theory.See T. Sterling et al., "Robot Data Screening: ASolution to Multivariate Type Problems in theBiological and Social Sciences," Sciientific Appli-cations: Communications of the A.C.M., 9, 7,(July, 1966), 529-532; T. D. Sterling, et al.,"Robot Data Processing Techniques for Mul-tivariate Epidemiological Predictions Annals ofthe New York Academry of Sciences, 126 (August 6,1965), 779-794; and T. D. Sterling and S. V.Pollack, Computers and the Life Sciences (NewYork: Columbia Press, 1965).

18 Karl W. Deutsch, Lewis J. Edinger, Rloy C.Macridis, and Richard L. TMerritt, Arms Controland European Unity: Elite Attitudes and TheirBackground in France and the German Federal Re-public (New Haven: Yale Political Data Library,1966); and Karl W. Deutsch, Lewis J. Edinger,Roy C. Macridis, Richard L. Merritt, and HelgaVoss-Eckermann, French and German Elite Re-spouvses, 1964: Codebook and Data (New Haven:Yale Political Data Library, 1966). See also KarlWy. Deutsch, "Integration and Arms Control inthe European Political Environment: A Sum-mary Report," this RPEVIEW, 60 (June, 1966), 354-365.


7/19

SOCIAL BACKGROUND IN ELITE ANALYSIS 433to European integration and arms controlissues.After identifying seven elite groups believednearest to the national political decision-mak-ing process (military, political, civil service,and business leaders, other key interest groupelites, mass media leaders, and intellectuals inFrance, university professors in Germany),the names of individuals who were to be repre-sentative of their elite, as well as themselvespolitical influentials, were sought from a panelof recognized experts in the politics of contem-porary France and the German Federal Re-public. This reputationall" sample was, ineffect, largely based on "positional" criteriaand the sample was subsequently enlarged bythe addition of other incumbents of keyoffices.'9In response to letters requesting talks withthe individuals thus selected, 44 percent of theFrench and 74 percent of the German leaderscontacted agreed to be interviewed. This cri-terion of "self-selection" was further compli-cated by scheduling problems, but on thewhole efforts to fill stipulated quotas for eachof the six elite groups, and to contact the re-spondents believed to exercise the greatestinfluence fromn among those answering theinitial letter, were quite successful. All told,the respondents interviewed included 147French and 173 German leaders. However, itshould be kept in mind that the respondentswho provided the data on which our study isbased, represent an analogous rather than anexact sample of the elite groups in their re-spective countries. Since, "interview studies ofleaders are as rare as interview studies ofworkers are frequent in Europe,1"' the infor-mation which was collected provided data ex-tremely useful for our purposes.Three different instruments were employedin the project's data collection phase. Thefirst, a precoded Manifest Attitude Schedule,consisted of twenty major and seventy-eightsubsidiary questions, most of them "open-ended," on which the interviews were based.The second, a Biographical Data Schedule,coded information about the socio-economicbackground of each respondent. In part thesedata were ascertained in the course of the inter-

19 The combination of reputational and posi-tional approaches yielded an initial group of 441French and 650 German leaders which for opera-tional purposes was understood as representativeof elites in both political systems. Cf., Deutsch,Edinger, Macridis and Merritt, op cit., Ch. 1.

20 Ralf Dahrendorf, "Recent Changes in theClass Structures of European Societies,"Daedalus. 93 (Winter, 1964), at p. 24-2.

views, in part they came from standard refer-ence sources.2' Finally, the latent attitudinalorientations of each respondent were assessedby the interviewer according to the dimensionsof information, involvement and influence,and recorded in a Latent Attitude Schedule.Using these data, which were primarilycollected for purposes of assessing French andGerman elite opinion on arms control andEuropean integration, we have taken pre-liminary steps in the direction of a broader in-vestigation based on secondary analysis ofthese and similar materials.22 Toward this endwe are reexamining the Yale data in our in-vestigation; the questions we asked of themfor this article are different from those theywere originally meant to answer.23Our concernhere is more methodological than substantive.First, we hope to emphasize the need for adiscriminating use of background variables inelite analysis, and to explore the utility of aproposed strategy for enriching the socialbackground approach by discovering thosemultiple combinations of background variablesin a body of data which best predict particularattitudes. Secondly, we hope to suggest someof tihe payoffs in using this strategy by out-lining briefly some of our preliminary findings.

III. MANIFEST ATTITUDES ANDSOCIAL BACKGROUND

We asserted earlier that in practice thesocial background approach has tended toemploy all background variables as though21 Categories for this instrument were based

upon Lewis J. Edinger's previous studies of WestGerman elites. They included many of the mostfrequently employed background characteristicsin elite studies.22 As a first step in the secondary analysis ofsuch data recorded on punch cards, it is often

necessary to recode the information, rearrangingit in such fashion as might be more amenable tothe new questions that are to be asked. Since wesought to make considerably greater comparativeuse of the Yale data than was intended when itwas originally collected and coded, we had torecode most of it so as to develop commensurablecategories for both nations.

23 In addition to treating the French and WestGerman elites as separate populations (in whichcase one must invoke a caveat ernptor in so far asthe samples are analogous rather than exact) wehave sometimes treated the French and Germanrespondents as an analytic universe. Not as asample of all French and German elites, that is,but rather as an elite population within which wemay examine the relationships between socialbackground variables and attitudinal patterns.


8/19

434 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWthey were equally strong indicators for generalelite attitudes. More importantly, in the ab-sence of any assessment of the predictabilityof a specific attitude by particular backgroundvariables in the data, all background variableshave often been treated as equally good in-dicators of that specific attitude. We sought toshed some light on these assumptions by ex-amining the relationships between social back-ground variables and all manifest and latentattitudes of German and French elite respon-dents.24Finding: While most social background vari-ables showed some degree of association withmanifest elite attitudes in the German case, somebackgroundvariables were clearly betterpredictorsof manifest attitudes than others.Looking at Table 1 we see that 38 out of 40background variables are predictors of atleast one of the German elite's manifest atti-tudes. In order to compare the overall pre-dictability of one background variable withanother, we have employed two indices:scope, which simply refers to the number of allattitudes the background variable predicted;and strength, which refers to the mean of allthe background variable's attitudinal pre-dictions.

By the scope criterion we find that 38 out ofthe 40 background factors did, in fact, allowus to predict at least one manifest attitude.But some background factors predicted farmore such attitudes than others. The first two,both occupational categories, predicted elevento twelve attitudes, while 30 other categoriespredicted only four or fewer.25As to their relative strengths as predictors,some background factors clearly were more im-portant than others, the range extending from24 The number of latent attitudes (11) used wasthe same for both the French and German leaders.

However, with regard to manifest attitudes lessdata was available for the French (39 attitudes)than for the Germans (48 attitudes). With regardto the biographical or social background data,there was considerably less data available in theFrench case (11 variables), than for the German(40 variables). We felt that for theoretical reasonsit was worthwhile to utilize the greater body ofGerman data, which will explain differences in ourtables. Whenever the French and German re-spondents were compared, however, this was doneusing only the attitudes and background variablesfor which adequate data were on hand for both.

25 It is worth emphasizing that even the back-ground variable predicting the greatest numberof attitudes allowed us to do so for only twelve,that is, 25 percent, of all 48 attitudes.

.41 for the lowest to .84 for the highest. More-over, in almost all cases, background cate-gories were not steady predictors of thoseattitudes they did predict. The predictionrange in Table 1 shows that many variablespredicted some attitudes considerably betterthan others. To take an extreme example,principal occupation 1952-64, the backgroundvariable that predicted the greatest numberof attitudes, (i.e., had the widest scope) variedin its predictions between .39 and .85.In sum, while the predictive strength of 16background categories among the Germanelites was fairly high-.61 or better-the num-ber of attitudes they predicted was generallyvery small. Moreover, an examination of theentire prediction matrix-too large to re-produce here-indicated that in most cases itwould have been practically impossible tohave forecast which background categorywould have predicted what attitudes) of theGerman leaders.Note that the five background categorieswhich predicted the greatest number of Ger-man elite attitudes (i.e., scope)26 were all re-lated to adult socialization experiences duringthe preceding 14 years. On the other hand,level of education, a background variableoften highly associated with attitudes in massopinion surveys, was near the bottom of thescope scale. It predicted only one of the 48elite attitudes. Another point worth noting isthe type of attitudes that were most susceptibleto probabilistic prediction. The four attitudespredicted by eight to twelve backgroundcategories were all associated with particularlysalient political issues.27Next, let us look at the French elite dataand compare it with the German.Finding: Among French elites, as amongGerman, some social background factors wereconsiderably better predictors of manifest atti-

26 We use scope rather than strength as a sum-mary measure because for purposes of the presentdiscussion-demonstrating that some backgroundvariables have more relevance than others forelite attitudes in a national political system-thenumber of attitudes a background variable pre-dicts seems more to the point.

27 These were responses to the following inter-viewer questions: (1) What development in do-mestic policy are likely to bring about a change inGerman foreign policy? (2) Would the recogni-tion of East Germany ease international tension?(3) How would recognition of the Oder-Neisseline affect efforts toward German reunification?and, (4) What is the greatest threat to Germansecurity at the present time?


9/19

TABLE 1. GERMAN RESPONDENTS: RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SOCIAL BACKGROUND FACTORSAND SET OF 48 MANIFEST ATTITUDES BY SCOPE, STRENGTH, AND PREDICTION RANGE*

Relationship to Set of 48 Manifest AttitudesScope

Background Factor -Number of Percent of Strength PredictionAttitudes all Attitudes (by Mean) RangePredicted Predicted1. Principal Occupation, 1952-1964 12 25 .62 .39-.852. Present Occupation 11 23 .62 .40-.853. Political Party Leader, 1964 9 19 .65 .39-.864. Political Party Affiliation, 1956 9 19 .61 .38-.795. Political Persecution, 1933-1944 8 17 .51 .37-.656. Nazi Political Activity, 1933-1944 8 17 .61 .40-.837. Present Political Party Affiliation 6 13 .69 .48-.808. Membership in Two Voluntary Economic

Associations 5 10 .66 .50-.849. Religious Affiliation 5 10 .57 .46-.7710, Incumbent Governmental Office, 1956 5 10 .56 .41-.7811. Political Party Leader, 1956 4 8 .56 .37-.7812. Principal Occupation, 1945-1952 4 8 .61 .59-.6813. Region of Birth 4 8 .56 .39-.6214. Size of Town of Birth 4 8 .48 .37-.6315. Political Party Affiliation, 1933-1934 4 8 .59 .41-.7316. Membership in One Voluntary EconomicAssociation 3 6 .55 .41-.6717. Military Service 3 6 .60 .51-.7518. Level of Political Governmental Office, 1956 3 6 .50 .36-. 7119. Number of Years in Present Elite Position 3 6 .50 .41-.6420. Membership in One Voluntary Non-EconomicAssociation 3 6 .68 .65-.7121. Membership in Three Voluntary Non-Economic Associations 3 6 .52 .44-.6622. Principal Occupation, Pre-1933 3 6 .54 .38-.7623. Political Party Affiliation, 1946 3 6 .55 .41-.7424. Political Party Leader, 1946 3 6 .47 .42-.5625. Social Class Background 2 4 .59 .57-.G026. Highest Academic Degree Attained 2 4 .57 .47-.6627. Country of Birth 2 4 .49 .38-.6028. Principal Occupation, 1933-1945 2 4 .64 .63-.6429. Age 2 4 .59 .57-.6130. Positions in Two Voluntary EconomicAssociations 2 4 .58 .51-.6431. Level of Political Governmental Office, 1946 2 4 .55 .53-.5632. Membership in Three Voluntary EconomicAssociations 1 2 .78 -33. University Specialization 1 2 .7334. Level of Education 1 2 .4135. Political Party Leader, Pre-1933 1 2 .6836. Membership in Two Voluntary Non-Economic Associations 1 2 .4637. Highest Military Rank Attained 1 2 .6138. Position in Three Voluntary EconomicAssociations 1 2 .8439. Position in One Voluntary Economic Assn. 0 040. Political Party Affiliation, Pre-1933 0 0

* Scope is the number of manifest attitudes predicted at .05 level or better (48 possible attitudinal


10/19

436 THE AMERIC-N POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWTABLE; 2. FRENCH AND GERMAN RESPONDENTS: RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COMMON SOCIAL

BACKGROUND FACTORS AND MANIFEST ATTITUDES BY SCOPE, STRENGTH, ANDPREDICTION RANGE*

French Respondents German RespondentsPrediction of Manifest Attitudes Prediction of Manifest AttitudesScope Scope.Background Factor

Number Percent Strength Prediction Number Percent Strength Predictionof of (by Mean) Range of of (by Mean) RangeAttitudes Attitudes Attitudes AttitudesPredicted Predicted Predicted Predicted1. Present Political Party 9 23 .65 .53-.77 4 10 .68 .43-.75Affiliation2. Political Party Affilia- 9 23 .68 .50-.81 6 15 .60 .38-.75ation, France, 1958;

Germany, 19563. Present Occupation 6 15 .65 .49--.82 7 18 .63 .44-.854. Social Class Background 4 10 .75 .6i--. 80 2 5 .59 .57- .605. Size of Town of Birth 4 10 .64 .42-.86 1 3 .476. Principal Occupation, 3 8 .54 .48-.61 8 21 .66 .45-.85France, 19538-1964;

Germany, 1952-19647. University Specialization 3 8 .67 .60--.75 I 3 .73 --8. Level of Education 2 5 .71 .63-.79 0 - - -9. Age 1 3 .77 - 2 5 .64 .63-.6410. Region of Birth 0 0 - - 3 8 .53 .39-.6211. Principal Occupation, 0 0 - - 2 5 .60 .59-.60France, 1915-1958;

Germany 1945-1952* Scope is the number of manifest attitudes predicted at .05 level or better (39 possible attitudinal predictions). Strength is themean of the background factor's attitudinal predictions at the above level. Prediction Range specifies the lowest and highest atti-tudinal predictions made by the background factors at this level.Number of Respondents (N) =French, 147; German, 173.Number of Attitudes =39.

tudes than others, and some manifest attitudeswere again more frequently predicted by back-groutnd ategories than were others.While nine of the eleven French backgroundfactors predicted at least one French eliteattitude in the data, Table 2 shows the dif-ferences in their relative scopes. Two were re-lated to nine manifest attitudes, while six wererelated to only three or fewer attitudes. Inpredictive strength they varied between .64and .77 for particular attitudes and the pre-diction range indicates that the same back-ground categories were far from being steadypredictors for the set of attitudes they did pre-dict. As in the case of the German elites, how-ever, when the background variables pre-dicted attitudes, their strength was usuallyhigh, but their scopes, the number of attitudesthey did predict, were low. Here too, it wouldfor the most part have been difficult to haveforecast which background factors would pre-dict which attitudes.Observe that the background factors withthe widest scope (predicting in this case six tonine of all attitudes) were again associated par-ticularly with adult socialization experiences-

especially occupation and party affiliation.And again, level of education was a relativelypoor predictor of elite attitudes.In order to con trast these results with theGerman findings, let us look at those back-ground variables and attitudes for which com-parable results were available (see Table 2).WI'hile ge aud social class background had thehighest predictive strengths for the Frenchelites they were comparatively low in the Ger-man data. As we have already noted, partyaffiliation and occupation have relatively widescopes for both French and German elite atti-tudes. On the whole, however, the rank order-ings of all background variables by scope in theFrench and German social circles was highlydissimilar. The Spearman rs is .16 for the tworankings.But scope is a crude index, describing onlythe total number of attitudes a backgroundvariable predicted. It could be that -the samebackground factor, at least, predicts the sameattitudinal responses to identical questions forboth German and French elite respondents.In our analysis, this might have been the casefor 24 background-attitude combinations.


11/19

SOCIAL BACKGROUND IN ELITE ANALYSIS 437But it proved to apply to only four of these:the same background factors generally pre-dicted different attitudes in the French andGerman data.

Shifting our perspective from the back-ground categories to the attitudes predicted,we find, as in the German case, that some atti-tudes were predicted by more background vari-ables than were others: two attitudes were pre-dicted by four to five background factors, buttwenty of the remaining attitudes were not pre-dicted by any background factors.28 None ofthese attitudes were among those most fre-quently associated with the same backgroundvariables in the case of the German elites.They did however touch upon extremely sa-lient issues in French politics-just as the Ger-man attitudes most often predicted by Germanbackground variables were particularly salientissues in German politics.29 This suggests that,generally, elite socialization experiences as-sociated with social background factors maypossibly be more strongly related to orienta-tions toward highly salient issues than toorientations concerning issues of lower saliency.If this hypothesis should be sustained by fur-ther research, future analysis would requireconsiderable discrimination among attitudesconditioned by the differential saliency ofissues in various political systems and periodsof time.

28 Since only eleven French background cat-egories were examined, we prefer not to extendour interpretation to argue that because fewerFrench elite attitudes were related to backgroundfactors, background as such was less related toFrench attitudes than to German. However, thislimitation imposed upon the present analysis bythe nature of the data employed merely empha-sizes the need to expand and coordinate datacollection for more extensive cross-national com-parisons.

29 Those attitudes predicted by more back-ground variables (three to five) than other atti-tudes were responses to the following questionsput by the interviewers: (1) Are you content withthe present governmental system in France? (2)Are you satisfied with the government's foreignpolicy measures? (3) Which group or groups doyou feel have gained in political power over thelast few years? (4) Which features of Frenchforeign policy, if any, are likely to remain afterdeGaulle? (5) Do you expect an appreciablechange in the relations between France and thecountries of Eastern Europe during the next fewyears? and, (6) Is an independent nuclear deter-rent necessary for a nation's prestige in the world?

IV. NATIONALITY AND SOCIAL BACKGROUNDNationality is frequently believed to be animportant social background variable, withwidespread and powerful effects on elite atti-

tudes. However, its actual relationship toelite attitudes has infrequently been analyzedquantitatively and cross-nationally. Moststudies focus on elites of the same nationalityand do not include cross-national attitudinalresponses to identical questions which permitcomparison. But if all respondents are Ger-mans, for example, there is no way to assess therelative importance of their "Germanism" fordifferent attitudes.The Yale group, however, did ask the samequestions of French and German respondents,affording us an opportunity to compare therelationship between the nationality factor andmanifest attitudes to similar relationships be-tween other background variables and thesame attitudes. To explore this problemwe combined the French and German eliteresponses, and utilized nationality as a socialbackground predictor of differential attitudes.We then compared our findings with those ofother background factor predictions in theFrench and German groups treated separately.Finding: Nationality had a significantlygreaterscope (i.e., predicted more attitudes) thanany other background variable in either nationalgroup. However, its strength as a predictor wasabout the same as that of other elite backgroundvariables in Germany and below the average inFrance.In scope, nationality predicted 85 percent ofthe manifest attitudes in the combined groups.When they were examined separately, noother social background factor proved a pre-dictor for more than 25 percent of the same setof attitudes and most others predicted far lessthan that. But on the strength index, national-ity had only a mean predictability of .60 forthe combined groups; taken separately theaverage background variable for the Germanelites had practically the same mean pre-dictability (.59) and for the French it washigher (.67).The extremely wide scope of nationality as apredictor might lead us to inquire whether ornot this factor affects the attitudinal predic-tions of other background factors. In otherwords, we are now interested in the relativeimpact nationality had on the relationshipswe have already observed between other back-ground categories and manifest attitudesamong French and German elites considered bythemselves. The method for determining thisis a simple control. When we examined the re-


12/19

438 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWTABLE 3. FRENCH AND GERMAN RESPONDENTS: COMPARISON OF ATTITUDINAL PREDICTIONS BY

BACKGROUND FACTORS IN SEPARATE NATIONAL SAMPLES CONTROLLED FOR NATIONALITYWITH ATTITUDINAL PREDICTIONS AFFECTED BY NATIONALITY IN COMBINED GROUP*

French Respondents German RespondentsNumber of Attitu- Number of Attitu-Number of These . .. . Number of TheseBackground Factor dinal Predictions in . . dinal Predictions in Attitudinal Pre-Separate Sample Atiuia Pr- Separate Sampledictions Affected dictions AffectedControlled for Controlled for

Nationality by Nationality Naioalt by Nationalityationality Nationality1. Principal Occupation, France, 1958-1964;Germany, 1952-1964 3 3 8 52. Present Occupation 6 4 7 63. Political Party Affiliation, France, 1958;Germany, 1956 9 7 6 64. Present Political Party Affiliation 9 8 4 35. Principal Occupation, France, 1945-1958;

Germany, 1945-1952 0 0 2 26. Region of Birth 0 0 3 47. Size of Town of Birth 4 4 1 08. Social Class Background 4 4 2 19. Age 1 1 2 210. University Specialization 3 3 1 111. Level of Education 2 2 0 0Totals 41 36 36 30

Significance Level .05.Number of Respondents (N) =French, 147; German, 173.* The criteria for attributing a nationality effect to a background factor's attitudinal prediction are whether or not this predict-ability decreases or drops below the .05 level in the combined French-German group compared to its attitudinal prediction in theseparate sample controlled for nationality.

lationship between background variables andmanifest attitudes in each country separately,we were controlling for nationality. By com-bining the two groups we no longer do so. Thus,if another background factor's prediction of anattitude now decreases in predictability ordrops below the .05 significance level we havebeen using when compared to its predictabilityin the controlled samples, we can attribute thiseffect to nationality.30As shown in Table 3, nationality affectedover 80 percent (36 out of 41 for the Frenchand 30 out of 36 for the Germans) of the atti-tudinal predictions made by other backgroundvariables among the French and Germanelites. Those background factors less affectedby nationality in their attitudinal predictionsagain referred to contexts of adult socializationexperiences.30 By combining the French and German data

we are once again limited to examining only thosebackground variables (11) and those attitudes(39) for which we have comparable information.Moreover, we can observe a drop in predictabilityin the combined groups for only those backgroundpredictions that were already found to be sig-nificant when the two national elites were con-sidered separately.

V. LATENT ATTITUDES AND SOCIALBACKGROUND

The data provided through the Latent Atti-tude Instrument of the Yale Study present anopportunity to examine the social backgroundapproach from yet another perspective. Itenables us to consider-apart from manifestresponse patterns-eleven implicit attitudinalorientations, such as respondents' level of po-litical affect, sense of involvement, level ofinformation, resistance to new information(cloture), and alienation from the prevailingpolitical order.The Latent Attitude Instrument, it will beremembered, coded the interviewer's intuitivejudgements of response patterns. In that senseit provided ostensibly "softer" data than theactual responses coded in the Manifest Atti-tude Instrument and the social backgroundinformation included in the Biographical Dataschedule. In view of this we first sought tocheck its reliability as a source for data evaluat-ing the respondent's orientations. Includedin these latent ratings were questions request-ing the interviewer to categorize each respon-dent's degree of information along an ordinalscale. If accurate, the interviewer's judgementshould correspond roughly to the total numberof "don't know" answers the respondent gave


13/19

TABLE 4. GERMAN RESPONDENTS: RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SOCIAL BACKGROUND FACTORSAND SET OF 11 LATENT ATTITUDES BY SCOPE, STRENGTH, AND PREDICTION RANGE*

Relationship to Set of 11 Latent AttitudesBackground Factor Scope Strength Prediction

of Attitudes (by Mean) RangePredicted1. Military Service 6 .71 .55-.862. Principal Occupation, 1952-1964 4 .67 .58-.783. Present Occupation 3 .70 .62-.784. Political Party Leader, 1964 3 .70 .63-.795. Political Party Leader, 1956 3 .68 .62-.796. Membership in Two Voluntary Non-Economic

Associations 3 .60 .59-.627. Present Political Party Affiliation 3 .69 .60-.788. Political Party Leader, Pre-1933 2 .71 .64-.779. Political Party Leader, 1946 2 .68 .57-.78

10. Principal Occupation, 1933-1945 2 .78 .77-.7811. Membership in Three Voluntary Non-Economic

Associations 2 .67 .63-.7012. Political Party Affiliation, 1946 2 .70 .64-.7613. Age 2 .81 .77-.8414. Level of Political Governmental Office, 1946 2 .69 .59-.7815. Level of Political Governmental Office, 1956 2 .70 .62-.7816. Principal Occupation, 1945-1952 2 .69 .60- .7817. Nazi Political Activity, 1933-1934 1 .7718. Incumbent Governmental Office, 1956 1 .8419. Highest Military Rank Attained 1 .6220. Highest Academic Degree Attained 1 .5321. Membership in One Voluntary Economic

Association 1 .6122. Position in One Voluntary Economic Association 1 .7723. Membership in Two Voluntary Economic

Associations 1 .55 --24. Membership in Three Voluntary Economic

Associations 1 .7825. Position in Three Voluntary Economic Associations 1 .7826. Political Party Affiliation, 1933-1944 1 .7327. Political Party Affiliation, 1956 1 .7828. Number of Years in Present Elite Position 1 .7729. University Specialization 1 .7730. Religious Affiliation 031. Social Class Background 0 --32. Size of Town of Birth 033. Country of Birth 0 _ _34. Region of Birth 035. Level of Education 0 -I36. Position in Two Voluntary Economic Associations 037. Membership in One Voluntary Non-Economic

Association 038. Principal Occupation, Pre-1933 0 -39. Political Party Affiliation, Pre- 1933 040. Political Persecution, 1933-1944 0

* Scope is the number of latent attitudes predicted at .05 level or better (11 possible attitudinal pre-dictions). Strength is the mean of the background factor's attitudinal predictions at the above level.Prediction Range specifies the lowest and highest attitudinal predictions made by the background fac-tors at this level.

Number of Respondents (N) = 173.Number of Attitudes = 11.


14/19

440 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWto explicit questions in the Manifest schedule.3'While such a reliability measure is by no meansideal, it seemed a reasonable and feasible esti-xnate given the nature of the data.

We took the number of "Don't Know" an-swers given by each respondent as a percent ofthe total number of questions put to him fromthe Manifest Attitude Schedule. Respondentswere ranked from high to low according to thiscriterion, and the ranking was compared to asimilar ranking of the same respondents ac-cording to their degree of information as es-timated by the interviewer in the Latent Atti-tude Schedule. For the latent ratings of theGerman sample, we found seven ranking errors(4% error), and four ranking errors (3%0error)in the French sample. This low percentage oferror appeared to lend sufficient credence tothe Latent Attitude ratings to permit us toemploy this data in further exploration of thesocial background hypothesis.Finding: For both the German and Frenchelites there was considerable association betweensocial background factors and latent attitudes,though not as much as between background fac-tors and manifest attitudes.32Again, some back-ground variables proved betterpredictors of latentattitudes than others in the two sets of elites.As shown in Table 4, in scope twenty-nine ofthe forty German background variables pre-dicted at least one latent attitude, but onlyseven predicted more than two. Predictivestrength varied considerably among differentbackground factors (from .53 to .84), and alsowithin each one, as indicated by the predictionrange. The two background variables with thewidest scope proved to be military service andprincipal occupation 1952-1964, whereas for31 The expectation was that if the ratings were

accurate, a respondent rated low on degree of in-formation in the Latent Schedule should havegiven a high number of "D.K." answers in theManifest Schedule, and vice-versa. While ourcheck indicated a relatively low number of inter-viewer errors and appeared to justify an assump-tion of high accuracy for the "Latent" estimates,we should note that an estimate of this nature ispurely quantitative, while it is likely that qualita-tive judgments were to some measure a compo-nent of the original ratings.

32 We had expected the association to be greaterbecause the Latent Attitude Schedule listed muchmore diffuse orientations than the Manifest.However, the Latent Attitude data seems com-paratively weak and limited; it includes onlyabout one-quarter as many items as were coveredby the Manifest Schedule. We are presently ex-ploring this problem in greater depth.

the manifest attitudes, it was political partyfactors and present and past occupations thatwere the most frequent predictors. However,note that in both instances the highest pre-dictors relate particularly to adult socializa-tion experiences, while level of education is atthe bottom, and in the case of the latent atti-tudes does not even qualify as a predictor.Among the French elite respondents, eightof the eleven potential background predictorsfor which data was available were related toat least one latent attitude (see Table 5). Onceagain the background factors varied in scope:two predicted four to five latent attitudes,while three predicted none. As with the Ger-man elites, strength varied-though not asmuch-among different factors (from .58 and.72) and again certain background factorsgenerally predicted some attitudes better thanother attitudes. In France too, the factors withthe widest scope, present occupation and pres-ent political party affiliation, related to adultsocialization experiences. These two thusproved to be among the strongest predictors ofmanifest as well as latent elite attitudes inboth countries, while level of education, withequal consistency, was a very poor predictor.Note, however, that the comparison betweenthe predictive scopes of the same latent atti-tudes by all identical French and German back-ground factors in Table 5 shows their overallrank order to be quite dissimilar in the twocountries.As with the manifest attitudes, differences inthe comparative scope of a background factordoes not preclude that it might have predictedthe same latent orientations of both Germanand French elites. In our analysis this couldhave occurred eight times. In fact, however,only three such orientations-level of involve-ment, level of affect, and cloture of thinking-were predicted by the same factor in bothcountries, all three being predicted by a singleone, namely present occupation.To sum up, we found latent attitudes to showassociative patterns similar to those for mani-fest attitudes among French and Germanelites. When predictions were made by thebackground categories their strength was ac-ceptable and, in many cases, quite high. Pre-dictive scope, on the other hand, proved ratherlimited, and indicated wide differences in theassociative patterns in France and Germanyapart from the consistency with which occupa-tion and party affiliation turned out to be highpredictors of latent as well as manifest atti-tudes.Repeating our study of the nationality fac-tor with the latent attitudinal data, we found


15/19

SOCIAL BACKGROUND IN ELITE ANALYSIS 441TABLE 5. FRENCH AND GERMAN RESPONDENTS: RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COMMON SOCIAL

BACKGROUND FACTORS AND LATENT ATTITUDES BY SCOPE, STRENGTH, ANDPREDICTION RAN GE*

French Respondents German RespondentsPrediction of Latent Attitudes Prediction of Latent AttitudesBackground Factor Scope Scope(Number of Strength Prediction (Number of Strength PredictionAttitudes (by Mean) Range Attitudes (by Mean) RangePredicted) Predicted)

1. Present Occupation 5 .68 .63-.74 3 .70 .62-.782. Present Political Party Affiliation 4 .70 .66-.79 3 .69 .60-. 783. Political Party Affiliation, France, 1958; Germany,1956 3 .71 .65-.80 1 .78 -4. University Specialization 2 .59 .52-.65 1 .775. Social Class Background 2 .58 .50-.66 0 -6. Level of Education 1 .58 - 0 - -8. Age 1 .63 - 2 .819. Size of Town of Birth 0 - - 0 - -10. Principal Occupation, France, 1945-1958; Ger-many, 1945-1952 0 - - 2 .6911. Principal Occupation, France, 1958-1964; Ger-many, 1952-1964 0 - - 4 .67 .58-.78

* Scope is the number of latent attitudes predicted at .05 level or better (11 possible attitudinal predictions). Strength is the meanof the background factor's attitudinal predictions at the above level. Prediction Range specifies the lowest and highest attitudinalpredictionsmade by the backgroundfactor at this level.Number of Respondents (N) -French, 147; German, 173.Number of Attitudes -11.

nationality again to have an impressivelybroader scope than other background vari-ables. Nationality was related to 73 percent ofthe latent attitudes, while on the average otherFrench and German background factors wererespectively related to only 16 and 13 percentof those attitudes. However, its strength, ormean predictability, was .63, below the averagefor other background predictors for the French(.65) and the Germans (.72). Once more wecombined the French and German elites andcompared resulting attitudinal predictionswith those made by the same background vari-ables when nationality was held constant.Here we found that nationality affected theattitudinal predictions of more than three-quarters of the background variables in bothFrench and German cases, about the same pro-portion as with manifest attitudes.

VI. ATTITUDINAL COHESION AND SOCIALBACKGROUND WITHIN NATIONAL ELITES

As a further step in our cross-national analy-sis, we reduced the ninety-eight questions inthe Manifest Schedule to eight basic questionswhich could serve as a core for a comparison ofattitudinal consensus and disconsensus amongFrench and among German leaders. For pur-poses of identifying clear attitudinal dimen-sions on the basis of these eight questions, wenext dichotomized them into two distinct and

mutually exclusive sets of manifest orienta-tions, bearing in mind the purposes which un-derlay the original formulation and employ-ment of the questions in the Yale Project.Following this procedure, we constructed amatrix depicting the distribution of answers toeach of the eight questions across replies toeach of the remaining seven. A simple examina-tion of the cells for those cases where a propor-tion of the respondents reversed themselves-indicating a division of opinion across our twodimensions-allowed us to identify attitudinalorientations of relatively high agreement anddisagreement.Finding: German elites displayed an excep-tionally high attitudinal consensus, while Frenchelites showed considerable dissension.French leaders generally identified the posi-tive features of their regime with its effective"leadership" and the contents of "policy-mak-ing." While in their orientation toward internalor external problems relating to the purpose ofEuropean integration French respondents di-vided approximately 5:3 in favor of an internalorientation, this division did not show up as acleavage across any of the other dimensions.Not surprisingly, the most significant elitecleavages in the deGaulle Republic were foundto exist along the approbation/alienation, na-tionalist/supranationalist, and European/At-lantic dichotomous dimensions. Those who


16/19

442 THE AMN1ERTCAN OTITTCAL SCIENCE REVTEWTABLE 6. DEGREE OF ELITE CONSENSUS ANDINTEGRATION AS MEASURED BY AGREEMENT

ON MULTIPLE QUESTIONS

Elite RespondentsNumberof French GermanQuestions N % N %

1 106 72 161 932 74 50 143 833 61 41 99 574 36 24 69 405 19 13 47 276 11 0(7 30 177 06 04 11 068 0 0 06 03

evaluatively (i.e., instrumentally) and affec-tively (i.e., emotionally) approved of the pres-ent governmental system, also tended to takea ''nationalist" position on NATO strategy andto focus cognitively upon "European" as op-posed to common "Atlantic" interests. ThisGaullist position was opposed correspondinglyon the same dimensions by the anti-Gaullistswho were evaluatively and affectively more orless alienated from their political system.33 Inshort, while the French respondents manifestedhigh disagreement along the lines of Gaullist-anti-Gaullist questions, their agreement wasusually in areas where leadership and foreignpolicy issues were less salient.The German elites, in sharp contrast to theirFrench counterparts, appeared highly con-sensual and integrated. The contrast betweenthe two elite groups in terms of their integra-tion may be seen clearly in Table 6, whichsummarizes the proportion of individualswithin each sample who agreed with one an-other-that is, gave identical responses on oneor more of our eight questions.34

33 Moreover, these alienated elites are generallyoriented beyond the boundaries of France: notonly are they on the whole supra-nationalists, buttheir cognitive focus extends to a "larger Euro-pean" and "Atlantic" outlook, i.e., to a diffuseinternationalism.

34 Our procedure was as follows: starting withthe question on which responses by both Frenchand German elites showed the greatest consensus(i.e., where the greatest number of respondentsagreed on one or another position) we separatedout the groups of greatest agreement. We thenculled from these those who were in highest agree-ment on a second question as well and continued

Looking at Table 6, we find that on threequestions the German respondents demon-strate higher consensus than the French intaking a position by an average ratio of 4:3; onfour through six questions the Germans showabout twice the amount of agreement on aposition than do the French.When the German respondents were in dis-agreement it was along the trust/non-trustand European/Atlantic dichotomous dimen-sions. However, these two divisions did notshow up along any other dimensions; therewere no cleavages across multiple questions, asin the French sample. Also, in contrast to theFrench, the German elites, on the whole, sup-ported their political system and were stronglyoriented toward structural, regime featuresrather than leadership and policy features.They manifested internationalist orientationsin both NATO strategy and evaluative percep-tions of prospective European union partners.But they were concerned more with internal--primarily economic-European problems thanwith world bi-polarism in their evaluations ofthe purpose of European integration.In sum, whereas the German sample dem-onstrated a generally high degree of con-sensus along our eight dimensions, the Frenchrespondents seemed deeply divided on all ofthem. In France the most basic elite cleavagesappeared related to approbation vs. alienationtoward the political system, or, more specifi-cally, to lie along dimensions which can belabeled Gaullist and anti-Gaullist.In comparing the manifest attitudes overwhich there was high disconsensus amongthe French elites with those attitudes that werefound to have been frequently predicted bysocial background factors, we found that theywere not identical. This led us to hypothesizethat, though the strength of social backgroundpredictions of manifest attitudes for the Frenchgroup as a whole was relatively high, back-ground variables would not be as strongly re-lated to attitudes if we narrowed the focus fromthe entire national samples to intra-nationalgroups in high agreement and disagreement.To pursue this hypothesis, we divided ourrespective French and German leaders intotwo groups for each country-four altogether--which agreed internally and disagreed betweeneach other on three attitudinal dimensions.The members of each group had in commonthat they all took precisely the same positionon a number of questions, while the distinctionbetween the two groups was that their respec-this dichotomizing selection process through alleight questions.


17/19

SOCIAL BACKGROUND IN ELITE ANALYSIS 443FIGURE I

FRENCG NDGERMANESPONDENTS.DEGREE F ASSOCIATIONETWEENOCIALBACKGROUNDNDSELECTED ANIFEST TTITUDES F DICEOTOMOUSROUP EMBERSCKPAREDODEGREE F

ASSOCIATIONETWEENHE SAME OCIALBACKGROONDNDATTITUDE N ENTIREELITESAMPLES!l." of

.70

.60 \6k .SI AND /\ th~~~~~~~~~~~~~(isO1AN)I\5,MU7O

US..C/4R (yRqE) X/ AfirlEm /

.40// 8W7IRE EL/ST\SAANXLE (G6RMANNY)

.30 /

.20 GROUPS IENDNIL \(FRANLO) \ /

.1

Level of Age Size of TowE Social Clas U.iversit sentEDof Birth Background Specialization Occupation

*Me=sEre of Associatio = Pearson' Contingency CoefficiGentNote Grop. I and II ar in internal agreent bt dichotomous in attitude.

tive members took exactly opposite positionson these questions. Thus, respondents withineach agreed with each other but absolutely dis-agreed with all members of the other group. Ifall in Group I answered a question one way,then all members of Group II had answered itin the opposite direction.Now, if social background factors are indeedstrong indicators of elite attitudes they shouldclearly discriminate between groups within acountry that are internally homogeneous inattitudes but in absolute disagreement witheach other. As Groups I and II in each countryare distinguished by the opposite attitudes oftheir members, if social background is highlyrelated to attitudinal group membership, thetwo groups should have highly dissimilarbackgrounds because they have dissimilar at-titudes. Or at least, they should show greaterdissimilarity in their backgrounds than wouldbe found in the entire French and German elitesamples when there are no internal controls forattitudinal group membership. On the threeattitudes which define attitudinal group mem-bership, common background characteristicsshould be highly associated with these atti-tudes, or at least more highly associated than inthe entire elite samples.Finding: 1) In the German sample, back-ground characteristics were more highly asso-ciated with attitudes in dichotomous groups thanthey were for the German elites as a whole on the

three responses. 2) [n the French sa~ngplethe rela-tionships between background and attitude indichotomous groups was less highly associatedthan they were for the entire French sample on thesame three responses.35In Figure 1 the German background-atti-tude relationships are depicted by solid linesand the French by broken lines. It shows thatamong German elites background remained anadequate attitudinal indicator when they weredivided into groups which agreed internallyand disagreed with each other. Among theFrench exactly the opposite happened. Withthe exception of size of town of birth, signifi-cance of background decreased in relationshipto attitude in the case of the two groups belowwhat it was in the French entire elite sample.36

35 Our measure of association was Pearson'scontingency coefficient. If background charac-teristics were distributed indiscriminately, or inthe same way, in both Groups I and II which werein absolute disagreement on three attitudes, thenthey could not have been related to these attitudesand the coefficient would be zero. As the coefficientincreases, however, the background characteris-tic increasingly discriminates between the twogroups, and is therefore a more reliable indicatorin predicting attitudinal group membership.

36 Two control groups of the same size asGroups I and II were randomly selected fromeach of the entire French and German elite sam-


18/19

444 THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW

-+4 oo ~~~~~~~~~~~ Con, eq 00 00)

0 ~ 00 ~~~~0~~~~~~~~4~ ~ ~ ~ 0

.00 -0 z 0

CI 04) 004 t

p.4 -~~~~~.0 0

0~~~~~~~~~~ 0 "~~~~~~~~0~~~~0 w.4 0~~~~P4 es~~ 0 '-4 ~~~~~o0 00 ~~~~~P0H co co "0 40"o ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~9d c0

c-4 "Pi>0 00 0-w 0) *44- 04 4)

C 0 - 0

04 od~~~~~~0 p4 >UD H.HS 44 PZ t + 0 0Z 0~0""o "

-4) 4 0~ .~~~0 >0 >rn~~~~~~~~0 ~~~~14 d 04 0l c0~o 0~ 04 0~~~- 0 "~~~~~~~000 "00 0z H 0 0);>~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~);> ;QC0 .s

) 0 ) 0)04 ~~~~~~~~~0~~-4C 0).0 0)0..0-4

0~~~~~> 4U00 Ca~4

44 44 0 0~~~~~~~~;4 040) C4 00' e6"

Thus, social background became a stronger in-dicator for attitudinal group membership in theGerman sample, while its significance actuallydecreased in the French case.In terms of our thesis that social backgroundfactors vary inl their relationship to attitudes-and more particularly, that social backgroundis likely to be differentially related to attitudesamong various nations even within the same"Western" culture area-the above findingseem persuasive. It suggests that where back-ground data on elite members is collected forcomparative purposes on the assumption thatit is significantly related to elite attitudes, theresearcher should therefore proceed with cau-tion. With regard to elite attitudes, at any rate,

our analysis indicates to us that social back-ground categories do not necessarily have equalmeaning and significance in different politicalsystems.VII. CONCLUSION

This paper has attempted to make a modestcontribution to cross-national comparisons ofpolitical systems in general and to the study oftheir leaders in particular. Analysis of the rela-tionships between the social backgrounds ofelites on the one hand, and their orientationpatterns on the other, has obvious relevancefor the study of sub-national and national, aswell as supra-national political systems. Forexample, where nationality is a significantfactor relating to elite attitudes, it may tell us agood deal about the cohesiveness of old andnew national states and about the prospects forsupra-national political entities. Strong rela-tionships or, conversely, weak relationships,between attitudes and religious or age cohortsocialization experiences may similarly revealsignificant patterns of elite ties and cleavageswithin, between, and across political com-munities.The social background approach comes to uswith a long lineage and a history of diverseapplications. Its employment in elite analysis,however, has usually had rather specific pur-poses. Whether these have emphasized theprojection of trends in attitudinal distributionsin a policy science context, or stressed lesspolicy-oriented studies of elite socialization, theimplicit common goal has been to relate back-ground variables as contexts of elite socializa-tion experiences to elite attitudes.ples. They moved in the opposite direction fromGroups I and II for the Germans, and remainedabout the same as the French entire elite sampleor moved but slightly in the direction of theFrench Groups I and II.


19/19

SOCIAL BACKGROUND IN ELITE ANALYSIS 445At the present juncture, the backgrounddata that have been collected are often usedundiscriminatingly for lack of conclusive evi-dence on the actual relationships between par-

ticular background variables and particularattitudes in different cultural circumstances.Our analysis suggests the following qualifica-tions: (1) some background variables are con-siderably better predictors than are others ofattitudes within a single national political sys-tem;37 (2) some elite attitudes in a particularnational polity are more frequently related tobackground variables than are others; and (3)relationships between social background andattitude vary from one national political sys-tem to another even within the same supra-national culture area.38If the social background approach is to fulfillits purposes and justify its promises of makingbackground data a powerful predictive indexof attitudinal distributions, it seems to us thatit must first come to grips with the very com-plex problems of the relationship between th]two. This calls for data including many back-ground-attitude relationships under diversecultural and structural circumstances and theiranalysis in terms of comparative socializationtheories yet to be developed.39

In this article, we introduce a multivariate37 In the case of the data used here predictive

strength often proved acceptable, but the scopeof prediction was frequently lower than mighthave been expected and did not seem to conformto any obvious patterns beyond those we sug-gested rather tentatively. Moreover, the rele-vance of the diffuseness or specificity of the at-titudes in question remained to be resolved. De-spite our contrary findings in comparing latentwith manifest attitudes among French and Ger-man elites, we suspect that quantitative forecast-ing may be more successful with diffuse thanwith specific attitudinal responses.

38 This was underscored in our study of at-titudinal cohesion, while the pervasive effects ofnationality emphasized the theme from a differ-ent perspective.

39 Some indications of a possible approach weresuggested to us by our finding that adult sociali-zation experiences-particularly those isolated byoccupation and party affiliation categories-wereconsistently highest in relationship to attitude,and that those attitudes most frequently pre-dicted by the background data usually were re-lated to salient political issues. We realize, ofcourse, that the data base for these particular

technique which makes the necessary manip-ulation of large quantities of such complexdata at least feasible. The Robot Data Screen-ing program we employed permits the in-vestigator to examine readily all possible com-binations of variables in search for those whichhave the highest predictive scope and strengthin a given body of data. Moreover, it allows usto discover combinations of several "causal"variables which together have a greater pre-dictive power than any one of them alone.For example, in the case of our German datawe were confronted with the need to examinethe predictive strength of 40 background fac-tors for 48 elite attitudes. By running our datathrough the Robot Data Screening program-rather than undertaking to study more than amillion tables for possible combinations of upto three background predictors-we found that43 attitudes could be related to single back-ground factors. Going further, we learned thatin some instances the predictability of 40 atti-tudes was increased by a combination of back-ground factors. Table 7 illustrates this pro-cedure in the case of the eight key German eliteattitudes considered earlier.A technique, however, cannot substitute forinterpretation. It may be that even if sophis-ticated methods of ascertaining elite attitudespermit us to distinguish "real" attitudes fromexpressed attitudes, the data may still be in-adequate for our purpose. We may be unable toobtain sufficiently detailed information on thesocial background histories of elite group mem-bers to allow us to achieve satisfactory ex-planations and predictions. And we may notfind sufficient attitudinal consistency related tosocial background to do better than investi-gators employing less quantitative and moreintuitive approaches. If we are to do better,both requirements will have to be satisfied.In any event, our admittedly tentative find-ings and inferences based on a comparativeanalysis of two groups of national leaders seemto us to raise some doubts about several as-sumptions implicit in the standard social back-ground approach to elite studies. We believethey underscore the need to sharpen socialbackground studies through comparative re-search into empirical relationships betweenspecific social background variables and atti-tudes within the framework of socializationprocesses.findings was extremely limited and our conclusionscorrespondingly tentative.

Edinger, Searing - 1967 - Social Background

Documents

Transcript of Edinger, Searing - 1967 - Social Background