¹ See, for example, Seligman, Lester, “Recruitment in Politics,” PROD (1958), 14–17Google Scholar; and “Political Recuritment and Party Structure: A Case Study,” Review, 55 (1961), 77–86Google Scholar; Wahlke, John, et al., The Legislative System (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1962)Google Scholar; Sorauf, Frank J., Party and Representation (New York: Atherton Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Matthews, Donald R., The Social Background of Political Decision-Makers (New York: Random House, 1954)Google Scholar, and U. S. Senators and Their World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Jacob, Herbert, “Initial Recruitment of Elected Officials in the U. S.—A Model,” Journal of Politics, 24 (1962), 703–716CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Several recent research efforts have added to our knowledge of local party activists. See: Eldersveld, Samuel J., Political Parties: A Behavioral Analysis (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co., 1964)Google Scholar; Hirschfield, R. S., Swanson, B. E., and Blank, B. D., “A Profile of Political Activists in Manhattan,” Western Political Quarterly, 15 (1962), 489–506CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rossi, Peter H. and Cutright, Phillips, “The Impact of Party Organization in an Industrial Setting,” in Sanowitz, Morris (ed.), Community Political Systems (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), pp. 81–116Google Scholar; Cutright, Phillips and Rossi, Peter H., “Grass Roots Politicians and the Vote,” American Sociological Review, 23 (1958), 171–179CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Patterson, Samuel C., “Characteristics of Party Leaders,” Western Political Quarterly, 16 (06, 1963), pp. 332–352CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Althoff, Phillip and Patterson, Samuel C., “Political Activism in a Rural County;” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 10 (02, 1966), 39–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

The following research also provides helpful insights about party officials and/or leaders at other organizational levels or through different research approaches than that reported in our study. For more about the activities of county party chairmen, see: Epstein, Leon D., Politics in Wisconsin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), especially, pp. 77–97Google Scholar; Lee, Eugene C., The Politics of Nonpartisanship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 97–119Google Scholar. For information about volunteer party workers, see: Marvick, Dwaine and Nixon, Charles R., “Recruitment Contracts in Rival Campaign Groups,” in Marvick, Dwaine (ed.), Political Decision-Makers: Recruitment and Performance (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), pp. 138–192Google Scholar.

³ The organizational arrangement is such in the Massachusetts communities that two officials in each ward had to be designated in order to inflate the universe ot practical size. This means that for the purposes of this study “local party official” has been defined as the Republican and Democratic precinct chairmen in the North Carolina communities and as the two highest ranking Republican and Democratic ward officials in the Massachusetts communities. In some cases these are not exactly comparable because of the wide variations in the legal arrangements of the party systems of the states: nevertheless, these are the “grassroots” party officials in both systems and are comparable in that important respect. They represent roughly comparable functional and organizational levels.

⁴ Apparently, a low response rate, while never desirable, must be faced as a usual problem when interviewing “grassroots politicians.” See the problems encountered by Hirschfield and his associates, op. cit., p. 490, and by Eldersveld, pp. 103–104.

⁵ Two strands of the literature of political science are relevant to the theoretical model used for this study. The studies of the recruitment of party and public officials provide hypotheses for investigation. For citations to this literature generally, see: supra, p. 1, note 1. We found Herbert Jacob's review of this literature particularly helpful. The recent work of Samuel Eldersveld, op. cit., also furnishes important theoretical insights and empirical comparisons.

The literature on the more general questions of political participation also offers suggestive hypotheses. See especially: Campbell, Angus, et al., The American Voter (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960)Google Scholar, Chapters 2 and 5; Lane, Robert, Political Life (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1959)Google Scholar; and Milbrath, Lester W., Political Participation (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co., 1965)Google Scholar.

⁶ See Milbrath, ibid., pp. 5–38, for a general discussion of the problems in conceptualizing political participation.

⁷ These are roughly equivalent to the “peripheral voters” described by Angus Campbell. See “Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 24 (1960), 397–418CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ The high occupational status of the fathers of public officials has been amply documented by Donald R. Matthews. See his two books, op. cit.

⁹ See Wahlke, et al., op. cit., p. 83.

¹⁰ For a summary of this work, see Milbrath, op. cit., pp. 72–89. In the main, the various scales relating to trait psychology, rather than psychoanalytic techniques, have been utilized in an effort to operationalize investigation of this factor.

¹¹ Op. cit., p. 243.

¹² Op. cit., p. 710. He says: “Occupation is the crucial social variable in our model. But counter to the assumptions of elite theories, political officials in the U.S. emerge from all levels of the social structure. Occupational role rather than status alone is the important factor. Certain occupations frequently place their practitioners into a bargaining role where they deal with outsiders (non-subordinates) and try to reach a mutually satisfying agreement. The lawyer is the classic example ….”

¹³ See Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Ch. 7.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 169.

¹⁵ Campbell, et al., op. cit., p. 106.

¹⁶ See Key, V. O. Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961)Google Scholar, Ch. 13.

¹⁷ Campbell, et al., op. cit., p. 97.

¹⁸ Boynton, George Robert, Southern Republican Voting in the 1980 Election, (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1963), p. 21Google Scholarx.

¹⁹ Campbell, et al. op. cit., p. 103.

²⁰ Jacob, op. cit., p. 711.

²¹ Milbrath, op. cit., pp. 20–21.

²² The slightly larger difference in the North Carolina communities probably reflect the relatively greater opportunity for increased white collar employment for the current generation there as compared to the Massachusetts communities.

²³ Eldersveld found less occupational status differential between precinct leaders and their fathers than we have found. See op. cit., p. 52, Table 3.1.

²⁴ We found a higher portion of local party officials to have at least a college level education than Eldersveld found to be the case in Wayne County, Michigan (see ibid.). One plausible explanation is that political parties recruit among “safe groups” more in the five community locales of our study than in the metropolitan area of Detroit. See Eldersveld's discussion of the emphasis on groups who have “deviant potential” rather than emphasizing recruitment among “traditional safe groups” (op. cit., p. 71).

This interpretation is supported by the findings of Marvick and Nixon. (See op. cit., p. 203, Table 6.) They found approximately one third of the party campaign workers to be college graduates but they did not find the party officials making efforts to accumulate helpers among the “deviant potentials” in the fashion Eldersveld describes.

²⁵ Op. cit., pp. 709–710.

²⁶ Of course, other questions could be asked. For example: How are these variations associated with efficacy at party tasks? How are these variations associated with policy orientations? Etc. However, our data are not adequate to speak to these questions. We are convinced that further investigations into these and similar questions are desirable.

²⁷ The four basic role definitions are: campaignrelated; party organizational; ideological; and nominations. These were assigned on the basis of the local party officials answers to this question: “How would you describe the job of being (current party office)—what are the most important things you do?”

For a longer discussion of the derivation and of the application of these role definitions, see “Activities and Role Definitions of Grassroots Party Officials,” by Bowman, Lewis and Boynton, G. R., The Journal of Politics, 28 (02, 1966), 121–143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ This suggests that the idea of “marginality” has not been adequately explored as an explanatory factor in analyzing recruitment to political leadership. See the work of Davies, James C., Human Nature in Politics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1963), especially pp. 85–94, 287–288, 345–348Google Scholar, for an interesting discussion of extreme examples of marginality as a factor in leadership recruitment.

²⁹ It should be reported that our data generally support the contention that the dominant party attracts the “best people” (in socio-economic terms). The variations are not very large, however. For support for this hypothesis, see Patterson, op. cit., p. 337ff.

³⁰ In view of the recent work of Heinz Eulau and John D. Sprague, this is less surprising than one might have thought earlier. They found no significant differences between lawyers (the prime brokerage occupation) and non-lawyers in politics: see their book, Lawyers in Politics (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964)Google Scholar. They pointed out, “Preoccupation with real or alleged dysfunctional consequences of the lawyer's ubiquity in politics has had the effect of orienting research toward analysis of differences rather than of similarities in the behavior of the politician who is a lawyer and the politician who is not” ibid., p. 123.

³¹ One must be careful in interpreting this kind of data because it requires the respondent to recall circumstances of earlier periods in his life. Nevertheless, this is almost the only way to collect this important data in a systematic fashion. But it must be kept in mind that these are the “recollections” of the local party officials rather than their feelings at the time they were first interested in active political participation. (See the warning about the use of this kind of data in Jacob, op. cit., p. 713.)

³² See his paper, “Career Patterns of Local Elected Officials,” delivered at the American Political Science Association meeting in Chicago, 1964.

³³ Op. cit., p. 127, Table 6.2. (Our categories include comparable items as outlined by Edersveld in this table.)