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Attitude Consensus and Conflict in an Interest Group: An Assessment of Cohesion*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Norman R. Luttbeg  and
Harmon Zeigler
Norman R. Luttbeg
Affiliation:
Southern Illinois University
Harmon Zeigler
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
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Extract

In America, interest groups operate within the democratic frame of reference. Like all political organizations, they are accorded more legitimacy when they can show that they are representative of the attitudes and values of a particular segment of the population. Consequently, the leaders of interest groups frequently spend a great deal of time explaining just how democratic their organizations are. If one examines the testimony of interest group leaders at state and national legislative hearings, he is likely to find that much of it is begun with an introductory statement explaining that the leadership of the testifying group is merely the voice of the membership. The personal values of the interest group leader are played down, and his function as representative (as distinguished from delegate) is exaggerated.

On the other hand, relatively few political interest groups have systematic and formalized means of ascertaining the desires of members. We know that most of the devices used to solicit member opinion are not very effective. Truman has shown that the affairs of most interest groups are run on a day-to-day basis by a fraction of the total membership. The mass of the membership takes a relatively passive role with regard to the formation of public policies by the organization.

Communication between leaders and followers is spasmodic and cannot provide efficient guidelines for the actions of leaders. Whether or not leadership of an organization seeks to become a manifestation of Michel's iron law of oligarchy, the realities of communication within an organization suggest that most of the communication undertaken by leaders will be with other members of the leadership clique rather than with the larger body of followers in the group.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , September 1966 , pp. 655 - 666
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1966

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Footnotes

*

The research reported here was made possible by a grant from the Center for the Advanced Study of Educational Administration, University of Oregon.

References

1 Truman, David B., The Governmental Process (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1951), pp. 129–139Google Scholar.

2 Haythorn, William, et. al., “The Effects of Varying Combinations of Authoritarian and Equalitarian Leaders and Followers,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 53 (09, 1956), 210–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Truman, op. cit., pp. 167–187.

4 Simon, Herbert, Administrative Behavior (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1957), pp. 110–122Google Scholar.

5 Attitudes were assessed by personal interviews. There were 91 teachers in the original sample with whom interviews were not completed.

6 Our data justify the use of ordinal measures of association, but there are several characteristics of our data and properties of various measures of association which complicate the choice of such a measure. First, on some of the items only two responses are possible while others are sevenpoint Likert scales. Thus any measure which is sensitive to the shape of the contingency table from which it is computed will decrease the comparability of the data across items. A measure which reached unity when only one cell is zero is also undesirable, as instances in which the leaders are in perfect agreement while the followers differ are common in our data. Such measures would be insensitive to the degree of followers' disagreement with the leaders. The final difficulty is that some measures are sensitive to the marginals of the contingency table. No measure was discovered which did not have at least one of the characteristics. See Blalock, Hubert, Social Statistics (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1960), p. 323Google Scholar; and Goodman, Leo A. and Kruskal, William H., “Measures of Association for Cross Classifications,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 49 (12, 1954), p. 750Google Scholar.

7 Gold, David, “Some Problems in Generalizing Aggregate Associations,” American Behavioral Scientist, 8 (12, 1964), p. 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The terms “delegate” and “representative” are borrowed from the literature on the legislative process, where they are applied to the role perceptions of legislators. Heinz Eulau presents three legislative role orientations in Wahlke, John C., Eulau, Heinz, Buchanan, William, and Ferguson, LeRoy C., The Legislative System (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1962), pp. 267–286Google Scholar. The “trustee” of Eulau's scheme has traditionally been described as a “delegate” while the “delegate” corresponds to “representative.” These roles are the extremes, with “politico” falling somewhere between them.

9 Cf. Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1965), pp. 250–251Google Scholar.

10 Krech, David and Crutchfield, Richard, Theory and Problems of Social Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1948), p. 251CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See Campbell, Angus, et al., The American Voter (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), pp. 194–198Google Scholar. V. O. Key gives the items used in this scale. See Key, V. O. Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 561Google Scholar.

12 McClosky, Herbert, “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics,” this Review, 58 (06, 1964), 361–382Google Scholar.

13 It is true, however, that there is more interaction between leaders and small town teachers; these teachers are considerably more conservative and restrained than their big city counterparts.

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