¹ Relatively more attention has been devoted to losers other than the common electoral variety, particularly the (old) revolutionary left and radical right, although the normative assumptions and methodological adequacy of such research are now a matter of intense dispute. Whatever minor problems might be created by attaching “loser” to revolutionary and/or radical is unintentional; the term is used in the electoral sense and neither group has been conspicuous for its success. However, research is beginning to appear more frequently on electoral losers. Frank Sorauf's study of legislative recruitment in Pennsylvania, , Party and Representation (New York: Atherton Press, 1963)Google Scholar, included social and political background data on winners and losers, as did Seligman's, Lester G. analysis of candidates in Oregon, “Party Structure and Legislative Recruitment,” this Review, LV (09, 1961), 77–86 Google Scholar. More recently, others have focused on the perception of winning and losing candidates toward voters, seeking to ascertain how politicians come to terms with electoral defeat or success. See, for example, Kingdon, John, “Politicians' Beliefs About Voters,” this Review, LXI (03, 1967), 136–147 Google Scholar, and his expanded treatment in Candidates for Office: Beliefs and Strategies (New York: Random House, 1968)Google Scholar. The substantial barriers associated with acquiring campaign resources—organization, money, information—is explored in a comparative case-study of ten Northern California congressional races by Leuthold, David A., Electioneering in a Democracy (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968)Google Scholar. And, the Survey Research Center's representation and Congress study, under the direction of Warren Miller and Donald Stokes, sampled both incumbents and nonincumbents, but no work has been published which systematically compares these two gioups except on occasional indicators of candidate salience; e.g., whether nonincumbents who live in the same community as voters are recognized more often. See their two articles, “Party Government and the Saliency of Congress,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Winter, 1962), 531-46Google Scholar, and “Constituency Influence in Congress,” this Review, LVII (03, 1963), 45–56 Google Scholar.

² Seligman, Lester G., “Political Leadership: Status Loss and Downward Mobility,” (paper delivered at the 1966 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, 09 2–6, 1966)Google Scholar. Lewis Edinger's study of Kurt Schumacher, the post-war German SPD leader, is a brilliant example of an analysis which explores the conditions which made Schumacher a powerful success within the party, but a tragic failure in the West German political system, Kurt Schumacher: A Study in Personality and Political Behavior (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

³ For the larger study, see my Parties, Candidates and Recruitment: West Germany and the United Slates (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1969)Google Scholar.

⁴ An excellent and comprehensive study of congressional elections since 1920 can be found in Cummings, Milton G. Jr., Congressmen and the Electorate (New York: The Free Press, 1966)Google Scholar. See also, Jones, Charles O., “The Role of the Campaign in Congressional Elections,” in Jennings, M. Kent and Zeigler, L. Harmon (eds.), The Electoral Process (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), particularly pp. 21–27 Google Scholar.

⁵ “The Institutionalization of the U. S. House of Representatives,” this Review, LXII (03, 1968), 144–169 Google Scholar.

⁶ For some possibilities, see Polsby's, speculative comments in his Congress and the Presidency (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964)Google Scholar.

⁷ This is equally true of the older social background studies, examined by Matthews, Donald in his The Social Background of Political Decision-Makers (New York: Random House, 1953)Google Scholar; the excellent career-line study by Schlesinger, Joseph, Ambition and Politics (New York: Rand, McNally, 1966)Google Scholar; and those using social-psychological categories, exemplified by Wahlke, John, et al., The Legislative System (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1963)Google Scholar; or Barber, James, The Lawmakers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965)Google Scholar. It is less relevant to the work of Sorauf, or Seligman, op. cit.

⁸ Jacob, Herbert, “Initial Recruitment of Elected Officials in the U. S.-A Model,” Journal of Politics (1962), p. 708 Google Scholar; and Browning, Rufus P., “The Interaction of Personality and Political System in Decisions to Run for Office,” Journal of Social Issues (06, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Ambng which see Seligman, Lester, “Recruitment in Politics,” PROD, (1958), 14–17 Google Scholar; Jacob, op. cit.; Snowiss, Leo M., “Congressional Recruitment and Representation,” this Review, LX (09, 1966), 627–640 Google Scholar; Fiellin, Allan, “Recruitment and Legislative Role Conceptions: A Conceptual Scheme and Case Study,” Western Political Quarterly (06, 1967)Google Scholar; and Schwartz, David, “Toward a Theory of Political Recruitment” (paper presented to the 1967 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 09 4-8, Chicago)Google Scholar. Moreover, Rufus Browning has been in the process of developing a simulated model of recruitment, applicable to various groups in the political system, part of which is outlined in his “Hypotheses about Political Recruitment: A Partially Data-Based Computer Simulation,” in Coplin, William (ed.), Simulation in the Study of Politics (Chicago: Markham Publishing, 1968)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Two other consequences were considered in the original study. First, it was anticipated that a modified “social ladder” process would be operating on the structure of recruitment reflecting an openness in the character of access not evident by looking only at the established (incumbent) leadership in each party; i.e., greater proportions would be black, female, sociallymobile, urban-born, and drawn from ethnic and religious minorities. While small cracks in the wall of white, Protestant, middle-class dominance did appear, these are not apparently preludes to a flood. Challengers, like their opponents, tend to reflect the high-status character of American political leaders. Second, ethnic, religious and more recently, racial balancing is a phenomenon long evident in the electoral strategies of each party and one would expect nonincumbent candidates to “mirror” the opposition, or at least depart significantly from their party's “normal” social character. Some evidence did indicate that this was occurring among small numbers of Republican challengers, but, and significantly, GOP candidates from social minorities were almost without exception defeated. All the Blacks (5), all the educators, all those under 30, most of the upwardly mobile, almost all the Catholics, and all the Jews went down to defeat. Nor was this an artifact of the unusually bad Republican year in 1964. It is precisely in those districts where Republican honincumbents tend most often to mirror the minority status of their Democratic opponents that they stand, statistically, the least chance of winning. This suggests that the electoral system is partially reinforcing those social cleavages which since the depression have divided the two parties, even though these divisions are not reflected among leaders to the same degree as among followers.

¹¹ “A Revised Theory of American Political Parties,” this Review, XLIV (1950), 669–677 Google Scholar. Unlike Huntington's, this paper does not propose that the most ideologically conscious tend to emerge precisely in those districts where they would stand the best opportunity of winning, but rather that a coherent party ideology is not suspended by a majority of each party's candidates simply because the structure of party competition would permit possible electoral victory. This point is developed further above.

¹² McClosky's, Besides “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics,” this Review, LVIII (06, 1964), 361–382 Google Scholar; and McClosky, , Hoffmann, Paul J. and O'Hara, Rosemary, “Issue, Conflict and Consensus Among Party. Leaders and Followers,” this Review, LIV (06, 1960), 406–427 Google Scholar, a sample would include, Marvick, Dwaine and Nixon, Charles, “Recruitment Contrasts in Rival Campaign Groups,” in Marvick, (ed.), Political Decision-Makers (Glencoe: The Free Press 1963)Google Scholar; Hirschfield, Robert, et al., “A Profile of Political Activists in Manhattan,” Western Political Quarterly, XV (09, 1962), 489–497 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Costantini, Edmund, “Interpaity Attitude Conflict: Democratic Party Leadership in California,” Western Political Quarterly (1963), 956–972 Google Scholar: and three recent books, Eldersveld, Samuel J., Political Parties: A Behavioral Approach (New York: Rand, McNally, 1963)Google Scholar; Agger, Robert, et al., The Rulers and the Ruled (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964)Google Scholar; and Scoble, Harry M., Ideology and Electoral Action (San Francisco: Chandler, 1967)Google Scholar.

¹³ The concept “ideology” has undergone such massive variation in use that discriminating observers will probably blanch at its intrusion here. Yet the liberal-conservative continuum has proved a useful organizing device for (some) political activists and (some) political scientists and is, Philip Converse suggests, “… a serviceable yardstick for simplifying and organizing eveuts in most AVestern politics.” It shares many attributes of formal ideologies, despite substantial change in particular issues and repeated efforts to refine by adding “corporate” or “radical” before either of these positions on the continuum. See his persuasive argument, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Apter, David (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1964), p. 214 Google Scholar. See also Minar, David, “Ideology and Political Behavior,” Midwest Journal of Political Science (11, 1961), 317–331 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Connolly, William, Political Science and Ideology (New York: Atherton Press, 1967), pp. 2–3 Google Scholar; or Lane, Robert, Political Ideology (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1962), pp. 13–16 Google Scholar.

¹⁴ There is no logical contradiction between a politics which is simultaneously “ideological” and “brokerage” although many elements of the “new” and “old” left would deny this, as would most scholars (e.g., Daniel Bell) who take as their model the classic struggles of the European left and right.

¹⁵ This rate does not compare unfavorably with that reported for the Survey Research Center's national election studies (85 to 86 percent), is higher than James Barber's rate for Connecticut legislators (65 percent), somewhat lower than Leon Epstein's study of Wisconsin legislators (83 percent), but considerably lower than the range reported by John Wahlke, Heinz Eulau, William Buchanan and LeRoy Ferguson for their fourstate legislative study (91 to 100 percent).

¹⁶ Initially, the study was designed to include incumbents, but it seems clear that congressmen have been so deluged by mail questionnaires, from so many sources that continued use of “mailers” (and in this I agree with Lewis Dexter) will be destructive of other kinds of necessary research; i.e., via personal interviews. The same judgement does not, however, apply to nonincumbents, nor to a large variety of highly active partisans in American society. Others have shown that mail survey research techniques are not subject to the usual problems of abnormally high non-response rates where the population is skewed away from the normal adult population in terms of income, education, and political activity. See Scoble, Harry M. (with Bachrach, Stanley), “Mail Questionnaire Efficiency: Controlled Reduction of Non-Response,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Summer, 1967), 265–272 Google Scholar, and Crotty, William, “The Utilization of Mail Questionnaires,” Western Political Quarterly, XIX (03, 1966), 44–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Basically, two techniques are available to increase the researcher's confidence that results from a mail questionnaire are reliable (from the viewpoint of response rate only). First, as Scoble has suggested, one should anticipate resistance and design procedures (advance mailings, personalized appeals, special delivery postage, diversified appeals in follow-ups) in advance to overcome it. Second, some technique for gaining information on the non-response should be introduced (for example, a number keying each questionnarie to an individual) so that statistical tests can be undertaken to enable the researcher to comparatively and partially measure non-response error where these tests are appropriate; that is to say, if one is attempting to inductively generalize from a sample to a finite population. However, where an effort is made at enumeration, and neither simple nor stratified random sampling procedures are employed, it is clearly inappropriate to use statistical tests associated with sampling methodology to estimate non-response error. This study, which was an attempted enumeration, does not rest on any misguided (or misleading) statistical tests estimating the probable bias created by non-response. On the other hand, since information on the non-response was collected, three critical baselines were established by which to compare those who responded with those who did not: party, region, and constituency characteristics. Differences between the response and non-response groups on these three factors did not exceed 2 percent, an encouraging if not completely reassuring finding. The sources of bias in survey research always involve much more than sampling problems (question construction, coding, interpretation, etc.) and every effort was made to reduce these sources, as well as those stemming from non-response.

¹⁷ Minar, op. cit., pp. 329–331.

¹⁸ The use of factor analysis with attitude data is rejected by many statisticians because social science has not yet created attitude scales which meet interval assumptions of measurement. Lewis Guttman and James Lingoes have developed a new set of programs for multivariant analysis on ordinal level data—smallest space analysis—which may enjoy increasing use in attitude research. For an example, see Schubert, Glendon, “Ideological Distance: A Smallest Space Analysis Across Three Cultures,” Comparative Political Studies, I (10, 1968), 319–347 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Each related to the conventional question of federal domestic intervention and were directed at the following areas: regulating business; providing medical care for the aged; providing aid to assist public education; providing help for the poor generally; engaging in programs to assist Negroes and other minorities. See Table 2 for the exact format.

²⁰ On an eleven-point Guttman rank-ordering, 86 percent of the Democratic challengers scored one, two, or three.

²¹ That these questions did not reveal substantial intra-party conflict in the fall of 1964 among Democrats suggests some interesting problems. Democratic nonincumbents were almost exclusively non-southern Democrats and one would expect maximum homogeniety among this group on general questions relating to economic intervention, particularly in 1964. The Vietnam war had not really surfaced as a divisive issue, although one year later my interviews with freshmen showed that some were becoming increasingly restless as American involvement grew more massive. However one might feel about events surrounding the 1968 campaign, and the impact of “new politics” on the stability of the New Deal coalition, it seems clear that many of the issues political scientists have been using for the past twenty years are undergoing as yet unpredictable modification. The situational character of all our operational measures reinforces the need for developmental studies, perhaps using a modified panel technique, on the way politicians adjust “old” labels to “new” issues or vice-versa.

²² Converse, op. cit., p. 229. McClosky has also provided some evidence along these lines, noting the strong association between scale scores and self-classification for leaders, but not followers, in his “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics,” op. cit., p. 375.

²³ An excellent intellectual history which emphasizes similarities between the late twenties and mid-sixties is Lasch's, Christopher The New Radicalism in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), especially pp. 251–308 Google Scholar.

²⁴ I don't mean to imply that the distinctions aren't important; quite the contrary. Each has ideological components that are very different and these differences are surely as significant as the similarities suggested in the sometimes radical, sometimes conservative, attacks on the ubiquity of American Liberalism.

²⁵ Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties (New York: John Wiley & Sons, rev. ed., 1963), p. 22 Google Scholar.

²⁶ The question of whether American parties offer a significant choice is one so obviously saturated by an individual's value preferences (in addition to empirically demonstrable evidence) that few answers will satisfy anyone. Since I believe that political scientists should make explicit their own value positions, I should add (if it is not already apparent) that mine usually dump me on the liberal to left wing of the Democratic party. Thus, while often finding party differences “inadequate,” I rarely agree they are “insignificant” or “echoes.”

²⁷ Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), particularly pp. 96–142 Google Scholar. This is a phenomenon stressed in the work of McClosky, Eldersveld, and James Q. Wilson and entertained more formally in the reformulation of Downs by Stokes, Donald, “Spatial Models of Party Competition,” reprinted in Campbell, Angus, et al., Elections and the Political Order (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), pp. 175–176 Google Scholar.

²⁸ Tests of statistical significance will not be used on these data, for reasons similar to those argued by Heinz Eulau in The Legislative System, op. cit., pp. 455–463. Tests of significance, like chi-square, are based on the assumption that data are drawn from a random sample of the population to which the analyst is interested in making references. Since the data reported above are not a sample, but an attempted enumeration, the assumptions of randomization are not met and tests based on that assumption are misleading. On the other hand, Hubert Blalock suggests that even enumerations are implied samples (of a theoretically infinite population) and hence “ … some sort of significance test will practically always be helpful in evaluating one's findings,” but then admits that “…. a skeptic can legitimately claim that had he divided his (data) into three classes according to almost any irrelevant criteria, he would probably have obtained difierences as large as ours,” Social Statistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 270 Google Scholar. The choice is thus not an easy one. I have followed those conventions outlined by Eulau and will treat only those differences of 10 percentage points or more as “large,” less than that as “small.” On these problems, and the long simmering controversy, the best recent discussion can be found in Galtung, Johan, The Theory and Method of Social Research (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 358–388 Google Scholar.

²⁹ Among which, see Turner, Julius, Party and Constituency (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1951)Google Scholar; MacRae, Duncan Jr., Dimensions of Congressional Voting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Truman, David B., The Congressional Party (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959)Google Scholar; and, Froman, Lewis A. Jr., Congressmen and Their Constituencies (Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co., 1963)Google Scholar.

³⁰ LeRoy Rieselbach has shown, however, that few presidents can rely on a generalized ideology of “internationalism” when attempting to build support for specific programs, if the president's strategy is based on expectations of party differences that were more obvious in the immediate post-war period. See his The Roots of Isolationism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). pp. 141–164 Google Scholar.

³¹ See the citations in footmote 29. These studies, based on roll call voting behavior, are subject to the same logical problem since they deal only with incumbents. But the probability of inter-party differences disappearing under the impact of constituency (outside the South) seems remote, particularly in light of the extensive constituency controls examined in each of the above. Further, Lewis Froman has shown that there is even significant variation among congressmen from the same party, although his analysis is restricted to votes on reciprocal trade. Froman op. cit., Chapter 8.

³² Eldersveld, op. cit., pp. 528–535.

³³ Scoble, Ideology and Electoral Action, op. cit., pp. 26–61.

³⁴ Snowiss, “Congressional Recruitment …” op. cit., p. 628.

³⁵ Turner, op. cit., and MacRae, “The Relationship …” op. cit.

³⁶ Among which, see Sorauf, op. cit.; John Wahlke, Heinz Eulau, et al., op. cit.,; and Snowiss op. cit.

³⁷ Most of these studies are extensively summarized and critically examined in Eulau, Heinz and Hinckley, Katherine, “Legislative Institutions and Processes,” Robinson, James (ed.), Political Science Annual, I (1966), pp. 85–150 Google Scholar.

³⁸ Froman, op. cit., pp. 85–122. I think he overemphasizes what are actually quite small statistical differences.

³⁹ See the discussion on this point by Froman, ibid., pp. 118–119. Among the competitive districts included above, 49 percent were rural.

⁴⁰ Freidman, Robert, “The Urban-Rural Conflict Revisited,” Western Political Quarterly, (1961), 959 Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Running counter to the drift of much postwar attitude research on the mass electorate, the importance of party as a strong discriminating factor in explaining differences toward public issues, even on civil rights, has recently been reemphasized in Wolfinger, Raymond E. and Greenstein, Fred, “The Repeal of Fair Housing in California: An Analysis of Referendum Voting,” this Review, LXII (09, 1968), particularly pp. 759–760 Google Scholar. The authors found that Democrats with a high school diploma were “scarcely less likely to vote No (favoring fair housing) than Republicans with a college education.” Wolfinger and Greenstein suggest this finding “ … may serve as a corrective to interpretations of discrimination and backlash politics that place exclusive emphasis on social class as an independent variable.”

⁴² This finding applies only to the Chicago delegation, a group conspicuous for the extensive number of “machine” liberals. Large-scale corn parative research, as Snowiss suggests, will be necessary before the generality of such an argument can be tested.

⁴³ The work on political socialization is large and growing. More recently, see Dawson, Richard and Prewitt, Kenneth, Political Socialization (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969)Google Scholar. Even among those who are now the center of popular “generation gap” literature, college radicals, some evidence exists which suggests that it is less a “gap” and more an extension of the traditionally left-wing, highly involved political activity of their parents. For some not very reliable but highly suggestive data, see Lipset, S. M. and Altbach, Philip, “Student Politics and Higher Education in the United States,” in Lipset, (ed.), Student Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1967), pp. 199–253 Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Lehman, Harvey, Age and Achievement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Walker, David, “The Age Factor in the 1958 Congressional Elections,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, IV (02, 1960)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 176.

⁴⁷ Peabpdy, op. cit.

⁴⁸ Costantini, op. cit.

⁴⁹ A similar lack of experience (although of a different type) was noted by Aaron Wildavsky for Goldwater supporters at the 1964 convention in his “The Goldwater Phenomenon: Purists, Politicians and the Two-Party System,” Review of Politics, 27 (07, 1965)Google Scholar. Nelson Polsby points out that Goldwater appealed, in addition, to a considerable number of professionals, regardless of misgivings about the electoral consequences, simply because they agreed with his specific programs. But he adds that 74 percent of the delegates—an unusually high figure—had not been to either of the two previous conventions. See his “Strategic Considerations,” in Cummings, Milton (ed.), The National Elections of 1964 (Washington, D. C.: The Brookings Institution, 1966), pp. 100-1Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Froman, Lewis A., “A Realistic Approach to Campaign Strategies and Tactics,” in Jennings, M. Kent and Zeigler, Harmon (eds.), The Electoral Process (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 4 Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Cummings, op. cit., pp. 232–233.

⁵² The Hays-Alford contest in the fifth district of Arkansas, the example cited, was extraordinary: 100 percent of the voters knew who Hays and Alford were and apparently also thought Brooks Hays, a 20-year veteran, too soft on civil rights. He was defeated by a write-in campaign for Alford.

⁵³ Professionals among the Democrats were more often educators, journalists and ministers than were Republicans, but the differences are not substantial.

⁵⁴ The low visibilit3r of most congressional campaigns restricts any possible extension of this argument to other (more salient) electoral arenas. For two recent studies of the presidential struggle which go beyond the more typically unsystematic or “how to” research on political campaigns, see Lamb, Karl and Smith, Paul, Campaign Decision-Making (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1968)Google Scholar; and, Kessel, John H., The Goldwaler Coalition (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ On this point, I part company with Froman, if I understand the character of his recommendations, since T still believe campaigns can be educational in the old-fashioned sense and that restructuring the present relationship between candidates and the public is perhaps one of the most important long-run effects losers could have on electoral politics. Froman does recognize that “latent functions” (including issue development) are important components of the campaign process, but the gist of his paper is concerned with exploiting the current environment. See his “A Realistic Approach…” op. cit., pp. 8–19.