¹ Nisbet, Robert A., Community and Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 15 Google Scholar.

² Sykes, Gerald (ed.), Alienation: The Cultural Climate of Our Time (New York: George Braziller, 1964), Volume 1, p. xiii Google Scholar.

³ Bell, Daniel, “The Rediscovery of Alienation: Some Notes Along the Quest for the Historical Marx,” Journal of Philosophy, 56 (1959), pp. 933–934 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ See, for example, Erich Fromm's introduction to Fromm, Erich (ed.), Marx's Concept of Man (New York: F. Ungar Publishing Co., 1961)Google Scholar; and Mills, C. Wright, White Collar (New York, Oxford University Press, 1951)Google Scholar.

⁵ Seeman, Melvin, “On the Meaning of Alienation,” American Sociological Review, 24 (1959), p. 783 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The five “variants” (as Seeman calls them) are: 1) Powerlessness; 2) Meaninglessness; 3) Normlessness; 4) Isolation; and 5) Self-Estrangement.

⁶ Several of Seeman's students and others inspired by him have been particularly interested in empirical investigations of the dimensionality of these variants. See, in particular, Dean, Dwight G., “Alienation: It's Meaning and Measurement,” American Sociological Review, 26 (1961), 753–758 Google Scholar; and Neal, Arthur G. and Rettig, Salomon, “On the Multidimensionality of Alienation,” American Sociological Review, 32 (1967), 54–64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Keniston, Kenneth, The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1965), p. 454 Google Scholar.

⁸ Ibid., p. 454.

⁹ Ibid., p. 452.

¹⁰ For an extended discussion of the forms of alienation commonly used in the literature and a critique of Seeman's article, see Aberbach, Joel D., Alienation and Race (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1967), especially pp. 7–12 and 71–74 Google Scholar.

¹¹ See, for the best known example, Kornhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959)Google Scholar. For Kornhauser, alienation is described rather indiscriminately in several forms. He employs operational measures of political inefficacy, social distrust and low ego strength in his secondary analyses and alludes to expressions of hostility and resentment against established institutions in the text. (See, among others, pp. 109–112, 148 and 166.) Economic dislocation, social shock caused by events like defeat in war and/or social confusion accompanied by demogogic attack on the existing political system can arouse the public susceptible to mass appeals. The mass man (who suffers from “a lack of proximate attachments”) lacks internalized standards and is, therefore, politically volatile. When there are no clear signals available his anxiety is mixed with political apathy, but spasmodic “flights into activity” are also characteristic. Precise predictions about the behavioral and psychological results of alienation are not made by the theory except at the extremes of a continuum which runs from no signals (resulting in apathy) to appeals in time of acute societal distress (yielding active mass movements).

¹² Polsby, Nelson W., “Toward an Explanation of McCarthyism” in Polsby, Nelson W., Dentler, Robert A. and Smith, Paul A. (eds.), Politics and Social Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963), p. 816 Google Scholar.

¹³ Rogin, Michael, “Wallace and the Middle Class: The White Backlash in Wisconsin,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 30 (1966), 98–109 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On page 100 he says that “In Wisconsin, a state where Republicans can vote in the Democratic primary, Wallace's vote closely resembled the normal Republican vote.” This analysis involves ecological correlations and thus all of the risks which go with it but Polsby's basic technique is similar.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 106. Rogin, it should be noted, points to the fact that there were some differences in the support attracted by Wallace and McCarthy. Wallace was stronger in working-class areas, while McCarthy did much better in rural areas. But he emphasized that “each was strong among conservative Republicans” (p. 105). This is a deduction supported by some reasonable evidence, but Rogin discounts the unpopularity of Governor Reynolds who stood in for Johnson in the primary and the possibility that Republicans crossed over to vote for Wallace in order to embarrass the Democrats. These data, of course, cannot be used to make a definitive conclusion in this area.

¹⁵ Wolfinger, Raymond E., Wolfinger, Barbara Kaye, Prewitt, Kenneth, and Rosenhack, Sheilah, “America's Radical Right: Politics and Ideology,” pp. 262–293, in Apter, David E. (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964)Google Scholar. See especially, p. 288. The subjects in this study felt quite efficacious politically (and, therefore not alienated in the powerlessness sense), were fundamentalist Goldwater supporters and “old-fashioned individualists.”

¹⁶ Rogin, op. cit., p. 106.

¹⁷ Greenstein, Fred I., “The Impact of Personality on Politics: An Attempt to Clear Away Underbrush,” this Review, 61 (1967), 629–642.Google Scholar Personality is not defined by Greenstein because psychologists themselves have not come close to an agreed-upon meaning of the term and, more importantly, because he is really talking about “psychological factors” (p. 630) which is a very broad category indeed. This broad focus is forced upon him by the content of the literature being reviewed as much as by any personal preference.

¹⁸ Lane, Robert E., Political Life (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959), p. 99 Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Thompson, Wayne E. and Horton, John E., “Political Alienation as a Force in Political Action,” Social Forces, 38 (1960), p. 195 Google Scholar.

²⁰ Ibid.; and McDill, Edward L. and Ridley, Jeanne Claire, “Status, Anomia, Political Alienation and Political Participation,” American Journal of Sociology, 68 (1962), 205–214 Google Scholar. No test of unidimensionality is reported.

²¹ Ghiselli, Edwin E., The Theory of Psychological Measurement (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 184 Google Scholar. When the analyst wishes to make hia measurement of a variable more homogenous and precise he chooses elements which have relatively high intercorrelations. One does not greatly increase the correlation between a composite variable and an outside variable if the components added to form the composite are highly correlated. However, when a composite is developed for purposes of prediction, the components will probably be correlated at a low level with each other and the addition of each element will greatly increase the level of correlation with the outside variable. The goal in this case, then, is a composite formed of relatively independent components each highly correlated with the outside variable we wish to predict.

²² See Curtis, Richard P. and Jackson, Elton P., “Multiple Indicators in Survey Research,” American Journal of Sociology, 68 (1962), 195–204 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ This argument is made in detail in Aberbach, op. cit., Ch. 2. I am currently preparing an article which reviews the literature on alienation in these terms.

²⁴ Stone, Clarence N. makes a simular point in “Local Referendums: An Alternative to the Alienated-Voter Model,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 29 (1962), 213–222 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Horton, John E. and Thompson, Wayne E., “Powerlessness and Political Negativism: A Study of Defeated Local Referendums,” American Journal of Sociology, 67 (1962), p. 485 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ There is an implied, but not explicit, element of distrust in the second element of the definition.

²⁷ Horton and Thompson, op. cit., p. 490, Table 1.

²⁸ Gamson, William, “The Fluoridation Dialogue,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 35 (1961), p. 533 Google Scholar; citing Coleman, James, Community Conflict (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

²⁹ Gamson, op. cit., p. 531.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 535. As in the other studies, these relationships hold with social status controlled.

³¹ Stone, op. cit., p. 222. He includes school bonds in this category along with fluoridation and charter elections. More “concrete” issues which Stone hypothesizes draw large turnouts, but do not activate feelings of alienation, include such things as water supply, fire protection, etc. This is the familiar distinction between style and position issues.

³² Templeton, Fredric, “Alienation and Political Participation,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 30 (1966), p. 252 Google Scholar. In light of our discussion of alienation in terms of form and focus it should be noted that Templeton believes “it … unlikely that the present findings would be appreciably modified by using one of the other currently available measures of alienation.”

³³ Ibid., pp. 254–255.

³⁴ Levin, Murray B. and Eden, Murray, “Political Strategy for the Alienated Voter,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 26 (1962), 47–63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, citel in Templeton, op. cit., p. 255.

³⁵ Ibid., p. 256. Note that Templeton believed the 1964 election might constitute a “partial exception to this generalization.”

³⁶ Ibid., p. 256.

³⁷ See, for example, Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960), pp. 103–105 Google Scholar.

³⁸ Stokes, Donald E., “Popular Evaluations of Government: An Empirical Assessment” in Cleveland, Harlan and Lasswell, Harold D. (eds.), Ethics and Bigness: Scientific, Academic, Religious, Political and Military (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), p. 64 Google Scholar.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 69. Stokes is referring to the small number of people who fall into the SRC a-political category and not to those who classify themselves as independents.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 72.

⁴¹ Lane, Robert E., “Political Personality and Electoral Choice,” this Review, 49 (1955). 173–190.Google Scholar See Table IV on p. 181 and the conclusion, p. 190.

⁴² Milton, O., “Presidential Choice and Partisan Performance on a Scale of Authoritarianism,” The American Psychologist, 7 (1952), 597–598 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The reference is from Christie, Richard, “Authoritarianism Re-examined,” pp. 123–197 Google Scholar in Christie, Richard and Jahoda, Marie (eds.), Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality” (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1954)Google Scholar.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 146.

⁴⁴ This was a part of the rhetoric of the campaign in the primaries as well as the national election, but was also accepted by less directly partisan individuals. See, for example, Dahl, Robert A., “The American Oppositions,” pp. 65–68 Google Scholar in Dahl, Robert A. (ed.), Political Oppositions in Western Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar, where he discusses the response of the “Alienated Right” (p. 66) to both Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. Both, he says, wished to “shake off the shackles of two-party pragmatic, compromising politics and offer a radical and uncompromising alternative.”

⁴⁵ Rosenberg, Morris, “Misanthropy and Political Ideology,” American Sociological Review, 21 (1956), 690–695, developed the basic scaleCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ Angus Campbell, et al., op. cit., pp. 516–517, developed this measure as an “agree-disagree” scale. It has since been modified.

⁴⁷ It would be better to have political efficacy questions which focus on the federal government also. See Litt, Edgar, “Political Cynicism and Political Futility,” The Journal of Politics, 25 (1963), 312–323 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an example of the potential importance of this. I am currently conducting a study designed, in part, to check the relevance of focus in measuring efficacy.

⁴⁸ Principal component factors with eigen-values (amount of variance explained) greater than one were rotated using both orthogonal and oblique criteria. The four factors extracted explained about 65 percent of the variance of all variables. The clarity of structure was marked, with the items for each measure showing strong loadings on separate factors. An oblique factor analysis using the biquartimin solution recommended by Harmon (see Harmon, Harry, Modern Factor Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 261–337)Google Scholar yielded the following correlations between the primary factors:

See Aberbach, op. cit., pp. 75–101 for a full discussion. These findings will be reported in detail in an article I am now writing. Similar findings are reported in Neal, Arthur G. and Rettig, Salomon, “On the Multidimensionality of Alienation,” American Sociological Review, 32 (1967), 54–64 Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Negro bloc-voting is not uncommon, even in less dire situations. John C. Legget, for example, studied the 1958 gubernatorial election in Michigan using a sample of 375 Detroit blue-collar workers. He found that class consciousness and union militance had a strong influence on white workers' voting behavior (the more militant voted for the reform candidate), but that Negroes voted for the reform candidate regardless of militance or union membership. See Legget, John C., “Working Class Consciousness, Race and Political Choice,” American Journal of Sociology, 69 (1963), 171–177 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁰ The ordinal correlation used here is Kendall's tau_c (T_c). It ranges between 0 and 1, but reaches unity when all cells are empty except those in the diagonal. Since this rarely happens, T_c seldom approaches unity and is a very conservative (although sensitive) measure of association. See Kendall, Maurice G., Rank Correlation Methods (London: C. Griffin, 1955), Chs. 1 and 3Google Scholar; and Blalock, Hubert M., Social Statistics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960), pp. 321–324 Google Scholar.

⁵¹ See, for example, Morris Rosenberg, op. cit., pp. 690–695; Lane, Robert E., Political Life (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959), p. 164 Google Scholar; and Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 285 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² Campbell, et al., op. cit., Chs. 3, 14, 19.

⁵³ Ibid., pp. 128–133.

⁵⁴ Presidential, as compared to Congressional, elections usually stimulate turnout. This was true in 1964 as compared to 195S, although it is not always the case. See Campbell, Angus, “Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 24 (1960), 397–418 Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ The 1966 SRC election study, now available for analysis, had items comparable to those asked in 1958 and 1964 and results of a quick analysis confirm what is reported throughout the body of this article. On the particular point at issue here, Democrats (with their party in power) were slightly more trusting than Republicans (T_c = .13) and the trusting voted for the Democratic candidates for Congress (T_c = .16). Again the other alienation measures were totally irrelevant in predicting the voters' choices.

⁵⁶ It is interesting to note that Gamma coefficients are less sensitive to this fact, but give a better indication of the fact that a relationship exists for every group of identifiers. These coefficients are as follows:

⁵⁷ See Converse, Philip E., Clausen, Aage R. and Miller, Warren E., “Electoral Myth and Reality: The 1964 Election,” this Review, 59 (1965), 321–337 Google Scholar; and Stokes, Donald E., “Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency,” this Review, 60 (1966), 19–29, especially pp. 21–23.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ It should be noted that very few members of the troublesome Wisconsin electorate are represented in the 1964 SRC sample since only Sheboygan was in the sampling frame. A study done in Wisconsin ( Ranney, Austin and Epstein, Leon D., “The Two Electorates: Voters and Non-Voters in a Wisconsin Primary,” Journal of Politics, 28 (1966), 598–617)Google Scholar, however, demonstrated that even there (p. 613) “primary voters, far more than party identifiers who did not vote in primaries, merited the description ‘the party faithful’” since they (primary voters) did not defect as much from their party in general elections as non-primary voters and were more active politically.

⁵⁹ Unfortunately, the SRC data do not indicate who the individual voted for in the particular primaries.

⁶⁰ In Stokes, op. cit., there is very minor evidence of a relationship between past voting participation and political distrust, i.e., the greater the distrust, the less regular a person's voting turnout. There is no evidence of this in the Goldwater election. This not only negated a part of his electoral strategy, but goes against notions about the mobilization of the alienated non-voter in certain electoral situations.

⁶¹ The correlations between Republican identification and issue attitudes also increased.

⁶² SRC asked respondents to rate their agreement with an attitude statement on a five point Likert scale ranging from “Agree Strongly” to “Disagree Strongly” in 1958, and in 1964 asked them their opinions on an issue first and then assessed opinion intensity.

⁶³ The 1966 election data reveal a similar pattern.

⁶⁴ In contrast, the highly efficacious voters with positive issue attitudes tended to vote for Johnson.

⁶⁵ See Campbell, et. al., op. cit., Chs. 8 and 9, and Converse, Philip E., “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” pp. 206–262 Google Scholar in Apter, David E. (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964)Google Scholar. Given the research reported by these scholars, an ideological interpretation must be approached with great caution.

⁶⁶ See Philip E. Converse et al., op. cit., pp. 321–336. They point out how poor Goldwater's appeal was on most policy issues and how fear of his position on non-racial issues often muted the so-called “white-backlash” which did exist as a powerful potential. A more effective candidate with his views who could avoid labels like “trigger-happy” might have done considerably better. Certainly, these data indicate that an appreciable increase in the number of people holding strongly negative issue opinions would increase the vote totals of a Goldwater-type candidate.