What Lipset Writes
Political Man. By Seymour Martin Lipset. (Heineniann, 30s.) OF all the areas of human behaviour, political behaviour, is one of the most amenable to the poweiful empirical techniques which sociologists and statisticians have developed in the present
• century. Mainly, this is because the most mean-
.ingful act performed by political man is also a countable one—the vote. And not only is voting behaviour suitable for refined statistical analysis, but when such analysis is combined with survey methods it also becomes possible to describe and even partly to explain the antics of horn° pol it icits to an extent literally inconceivable to the old- time patriarchs of political theory. Nowadays we can draw on literally thousands of factual studies ranging in time from the late 1930s and in place from Canada to Japan. The result is that the rational voter is as dead a fiction as the social contract; and a priorism has lost out, as usual.
Out of this welter of international information, Professor Lipset has put together a collection of essays which is (unusually) both a good introduc- tion to political sociology in general and also a lively anthology of some recent research. The pub- lishers recommend it to anyone with 'more than an amateur interest in the realities of politics,' and this time the blurbist is right. But why not go further? Political Man should be read by anyone who wonders what it iS that sociologists can tell us that other people can't; and it should be coat- i pulsorily read by anyone who thinks that Ameri- can sociology is something written by Vance • Packard. What Vance Packard writes, if you like, is sociology; but on this argument Time maga7 tine is history. Professor Lipset offers sonic cogent and jargon-free discussion of such ques- tions as these. . . . Why do certain occupations, irrespective of nationality, have a higher rate of Leftist voting than others which may be less well paid? What is the relation between the degree of radicalism of Left-wing parties in a given country and its rate of economic development?
(The answer, Oddly enough. is the faster the Lefter).Do authoritarian attitudes correlate signi-
ficantly with social and economic status, and if so which way? And in general. what are the social and economic conditions which most seem to favour the development and persistence of a stable democratic system?
All these, you will notice, are questions about political behaviour to which the answers are verifiable and for which the evidence will be empirical. Professor Lipset isn't trying to justify anything to us, or to persuade us what to do, or to teach us a lot of new words for what we know already, or even to pretend he has all the answers to the questions 'he asks. All he wants, in fact, is to help us understand how we actually behave in our roles as political animals. Not that he is absolutely immune from the occupational diseases of the sociologist : there is the occasional lapse into the big, big generalisation ('Religious freedom emerged in the Western world only be- cause . . .') or the circular explanation ('Tradi- tionalism may help to account for the greater conservatism of women'); and the gratuitous
wonder in the face of the obvious which is (rightly) the sociologist's stock-in-trade is some- times a bit obtrusive. More disturbing is a seeming lack of discrim- ination in the sources culled. It sometimes looks as if anyone from Engels to Hoggart is being hauled in handcuffs into a footnote in order to support some very general contention, and some of the survey data cited may not be so un- questionably above suspicion as would appear (for instance, Sondages data on voting patterns in France) But the arguments on the whole are well supported, and if the evidence is not ade- quate to explain all that is described, Lipset would not for a moment pretend that it does. Of course, we can't give a final answer as to why women are more likely to vote Conservative or Catho- lics to vote Democratic, and if we ever did it would presumably come as much from the psychologist as the sociologist of politics. But within the framework of political sociology; we can now begin to offer answers to questions which Bentham or Bagehot wouldn't even have been able to formulate; and if these in turn raise as many as they settle, this is hardly to be Wondered at. In as new a field as political sociology, it may even be a virtue.
GARRY RUNCIMAN
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