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Generality or Specificity in Political Orientations: A Case Study
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
Extract
Recent studies addressing the origins of political orientations raise questions concerning the level of generality at which it is appropriate to conceptualize such orientations. In traditional treatments of the subject, the assumption is implicit that one’s orientation to government is a generalized disposition that has application across various levels of government–for example, that a citizen’s particular degree of trust (or distrust) in public officials to represent the public interest usefully characterizes his orientations to national, provincial and urban legislatures alike.
- Type
- Note
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 365 - 376
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l' Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1982
References
1 See Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 145.Google Scholar
2 See Kent Jennings, M. and Niemi, Richard G., “Patterns of Political Learning,” Harvard Educational Review 38 (1968), 443-67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 The data were originally collected and analyzed for Ontario’s Waterloo Region Review Commission (Steven D. Brown and John McMenemy, “An Analysis of Public Attitudes and Perceptions of Local Government in the Region of Waterloo, Ontario, 1978”). A sample of 3,200 people was selected from the Regional Municipality of Waterloo and was interviewed by telephone. For a detailed description of sampling procedures used in this study, see Brown and McMenemy, “An Analysis,” 5-8. For the questionnaire, see 69-76.
4 See, for example, Elkins, David and Simeon, Richard, Small Worlds: Provinces and Parties in Canadian Political Life (Toronto: Methuen, 1980).Google Scholar
5 It might be argued that “agreement” here is a surrogate for one’s simple–perhaps partisan–evaluation of that level of government rather than an aspect of trust. While our data (not shown) indicate that there is certainly an empirical association between these two kinds of judgments (gamma = .40), the degree of association suggests strongly that the two are not measuring the same construct.
6 Unfortunately, the research instrument in this study did not determine the partisan identification of respondents. Nevertheless, a comparison of aggregate voting behaviour with aggregate “agreement” levels in 18 identifiable subareas of the region provides no evidence for the partisan interpretation of “agreement.” That is, an area’s level of voting support for the governing Conservative party in the 1977 provincial election is unrelated to its manifest level of agreement with the provincial government (rank order coefficient rho = – .02). On the other hand, a comparison of aggregate “agreement” with aggregate voting turnout rates in the same areas reveals a strong positive association (rho = +.65). If a low turnout rate reflects high levels of cynicism in the area, this association would seem to support our interpretation of the measures.
7 See Almond, and Verba, , Civic Culture, 145.Google Scholar
8 Respondents were told: “A lot of people complain that government organization is too complex–that it is too difficult for the average person to figure out which government body is responsible for which service. We wonder how much information is generally known about government responsibilities.” Then they were asked in separate questions “who is responsible” for “establishing local school policies and education tax rates,” “flood control programmes and policies,” “establishing and maintaining fire protection services,” and “the Police Department in this area.”