Abstract
All political cultures are mixed and changing. What is interesting in the English case, however, is the way in which a veritable army of scholars has seized on the deferential component. Other features in the overall cultural pattern have been neglected. This chapter is devoted to an examination of the concept of deference as it is applied to English politics. In particular it will focus on the different meanings that the concept has assumed in the literature describing and analysing the popular political attitudes, and those aspects of the political system, including stability, which it has been used to explain.1 My concluding argument is that deference, as the concept is frequently applied to English political culture, has attained the status of a stereotype and that it is applied to such variegated and sometimes conflicting data that it has outlived its usefulness as a term in academic currency.
Government and Opposition, 1971.
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Notes
The argument in this section is heavily indebted to Reinhard Bendix, Nation Building and Citizenship, Ch. 2, (New York, 1956)
And Reinhard Bendix Work and Authority in Industry, (New York, 1956), Ch. 2.
Also see Asa Briggs, ‘The Language of “Class” in Early 19th Century England’, in A. Briggs and John Saville (eds.), Essays in Labour History (London, 1960).
On the conservative effects of the French Revolution on many sociologists in the nineteenth-century, see Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, 1961), Chs. 1 and 2.
Richard Rose and Harve Mossawir, ‘Ordinary Individuals in Electoral Situations’, in Richard Rose (ed.), Policy Making in Britain (London, 1969), p. 75.
Richard Rose, Politics in England (London, 1965), p. 41;
Nordlinger, The Working Class Tories (London, 1967), pp. 17–18;
And A.H. Birch, Representative and Responsible Government (London, 1964), p. 245;
And A.H. Birch The British System of Government (London 1967), pp. 27–8;
Also see Harry Eckstein, ‘The British Political System’, in Samuel H. Beer and Adam Ulam (eds.), Patterns of Government (New York, 1965), pp. 75–7.
The citation is from Mark Abrams and Richard Rose, Must Labour Lose? (Harmondsworth, 1960), p. 25.
See Robert Alford, Party and Society (Chicago, 1963), pp. 164 ff., and Ralph Samuel, ‘Dr. Abrams and the End of Polities’, New Left Review, 1960, pp. 2–9.
See the evidence in the very thorough analysis of Jay Blumier and Denis McQuail, Television and Politics (London, 1969), pp. 115–17.
Also see National Opinion Polls for February 1968 and May 1969 and Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain (London, 1969), pp. 378–80.
Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton, 1963), p. 456.
Harvé Mossawir, The Significance of an Election (MA Thesis, University of Manchester, 1965).
See the data reported in Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London, 1969), ch. 3, pp. 66–7;
V. Subramanian, ‘Representative Bureaucracy: A Reassessment’, American Political Science Review, LXI, 1967, pp. 1010–19;
And V. Subramanian, Men Who Govern (Brookings Institute, 1968).
Allen Kornberg and N. Thomas, ‘Representative Democracy and Political Elites in Canada and the United States’, Parliamentary Affairs, 19, 1965–6, pp. 91–102.
On the gradual withdrawal of the social elite from politics, see W.L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite (London, 1963), ch. 3.
On this see D.A. Kavanagh, Constituency Electioneering in Britain (London, 1970). Japanese voters appear to be highly aware of and deferent to the candidates. See Scott C. Flanagan, ‘Voting Behaviour in Japan’, Comparative Political Studies, 1, 1968.
Eckstein, The British System of Government (New York, 1958), p. 90.
E.g. Brian Chapman, British Government Observed (London, 1963), and Richard Rose, ‘The Variability of Party Government’, Political Studies, 17, 1969.
Robert Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump (London, 1967).
Robert Jackson, Rebels and Whips (London, 1968).
For a sample of similar arguments see George Jones, ‘The Prime Minister’s Power’, Parliamentary Affairs, 18, 1965, pp. 167–85;
And Richard Rose, ‘The Variability of Party Government’, Political Studies, 17, 1969, pp. 413–45;
And Richard Rose, ‘Complexities of Party Leadership’, Parliamentary Affairs, 16, 1963, pp. 257–73.
Brian Chapman, op.cit; Thomas Balogh, ‘The Apotheosis of the Dilettante’, in Hugh Thomas (ed.), The Establishment (London, 1962);
Samuel Brittan, Steering the Economy (London, 1969);
And the contributions in W. J. Stankiewicz (ed.), Crisis in British Government (London, 1967).
See Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, 1943),
And Giovanni Sartori, Democratic Theory (Detroit, 1962).
G. Rude, The Crowd in History, 1730–1848 (London, 1964), p. 228.
E.P. Thomson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963).
Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian England (London, 1968), pp. 5, 71.
For a similar argument but from a different perspective see Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957), Ch. 3.
For particularly sweeping statements of this thesis, see S.M. Lipset, ‘Must the Tories always Triumph?’, Socialist Commentary, November, 1960; and Peter Pulzer, Political Representatives and Elections (London, 1968), p. 20.
David Goldthorpe et al, The Affluent Worker (Cambridge, 1969), p. 20.
Robert Alford, Party and Society (Chicago, 1963),
And Juan J. Linz, ‘Cleavage and Consensus in West German Polities’, in Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan (eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York, 1967).
See Nils Sternquist in Robert A. Dahl (ed.), Political Oppositions in Western Democracies (New Haven, Conn, 1965), p. 371.
Nordlinger, op.cit., pp. 27–8 and 131; Ralph H. Turner, ‘Sponsored and Contested Mobility in the School System’, American Sociological Review, 1966; Richard Rose, op.cit., Politics in England, pp. 69–71 and Ch. 3, and Rupert Wilkinson, The Prefects (London, 1966).
Denis McQuail et al, ‘Elite Education and Political Values’, Political Studies, 16, 1968, pp. 257–66.
E.R. Tapper, Secondary School Adolescents (Manchester PhD, 1967), Ch. 6.
For data supporting this position see also Richard Rose, Students in Society (Manchester, 1963)
And Jack Dennis et al ‘Support for Nation and Government Among English Children’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 1, 1971, pp. 25–48.
The problems involved in applying these hypotheses and the shortcomings in the theories themselves are brilliantly explored in Brian Barry, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy (London, 1970), Chs. 3 and 4. I have relied heavily on Barry in this paragraph.
Actual attempts to isolate such types as parochials, participants and subjects are likely to be unrewarding given that the qualities of such types are often mixed in most individuals. See Harvé Mossawir, The Significance of an Election, (MA Thesis, University of Manchester, 1965).
Many early nineteenth-century observers of English and American life were interested, for a variety of motives, in exaggerating the differences between the old world and the new. On this see Edward Pesson, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality and Politics (Illinois, 1969), p. 44.
For evidence of American deference, see Robert Lane, Political Ideology (New Haven, 1962), Ch. 2.
For a similar line of argument relating to Norwegian workers, see Stein Rokkan and Angus Campbell, ‘Citizen Participation in Political Life: Norway and the United States of America’, International Social Science Journal, Vol. 12, 1960, pp. 66–99.
Butler and Stokes, op.cit., pp. 104–7; John H. Goldthorpe et al, The Affluent Worker: Political Attitudes and Behaviour (Cambridge, 1968);
David Lockwood, ‘Sources of Variations in Working Class Images of Society’, The Sociological Review, Vol. 14, 1966, pp. 249–67.
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© 1990 Dennis Kavanagh
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Kavanagh, D. (1990). The Deferential English: a Comparative Critique. In: Politics and Personalities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20961-3_12
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