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47 Soc. F. 288 (1968-1969)
Two Categories of Political Alienation

handle is hein.journals/josf47 and id is 298 raw text is: SOCIAL FORCES Republican, and unless one assumes that the move to suburbia coincided with a switch from Republican to Democratic, the transfer (or screening) thesis appears to be more acceptable than the chameleon thesis. Proponents of the chameleon thesis appear to have fallen victim to the place theory of political behavior, and to have ignored the social forces which are a part of the place. The big city vote, the farm vote, and the sub- urban vote are more products of the kinds of people who inhabit the big city, the farm, and the suburb than of the place per se. This is not to suggest that place has no impact on political behavior. The work by Berelson, Asch, and Maccoby clearly illustrates the impact of community pressures upon per- ceptions and behavior.21 There is no data, how- 21Bernard Berelson, et al., Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954) ; Soloman Asch, Effects of Group Pressure Upon the Modi- fication and Distortion of Judgments, in Dorwin ever, which suggests that large-scale permanent changes in political behavior occur within the context of normal patterns of residential or social mobility. On the other hand, work by Campbell et al., Jackson, Blau, and Eulau sug- gest that basic political change is manifested in only a small minority of the electorate and that upward social mobility is not necessarily re- lated to becoming either more conservative or switching from Democratic to Republican.22 Cartwright and Alvin Zander (eds.), Group Dy- namics (Evanston: Row, Peterson, & Co., 1953); and Eleanor Maccoby, et al., Youth and Political Change, Public Opinion Quarterly, 18 (Spring 1954). 22 Angus Campbell, et. al., The American Voter (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960), p. 459; Elton Jackson, Status Consistency and Symptoms of Stress, American Sociological Review, 27 (August 1962) ; Peter Blau, Social Mobility and Interpersonal Relations, American Sociological Review, 21 (June 1956) ; and Heinz Eulau, Class and Party in the Eisenhower Years (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962). TWO CATEGORIES OF POLITICAL ALIENATION* MARVIN E. OLSEN Indiana University ABSTRACT Political alienation, defined as attitudes of estrangement from the political system, is con- ceptualized as falling into two broad categories: political incapability and discontentment. In the first instance, alienation is forced upon the individual by his environment, whereas in the second case it is voluntarily chosen by him. Survey data indicates that incapability occurs most commonly among persons occupying various disadvantaged social statuses, while dis- contentment is most prevalent among those comprising the old middle class. Neither category of alienation is markedly correlated with any form of political participation, but they do differ sharply in their relationships to party preference and voting. Persons with high incapability and low discontentment vote overwhelmingly Democratic, whereas those with high discon- tentment and low incapability largely vote Republican. oncern with alienation is not unique to our era. The idea has appeared through- out all of mankind's recorded literature,' * This paper was partially drawn from my un- published Ph.D. dissertation, Political Assimila- tion, Social Opportunities, and Political Aliena- tion, University of Michigan, 1965. I am par- ticularly indebted to Professors William A. Gamson and Sheldon Stryker for their many helpful sug- gestions and criticisms. 1 For a brief but comprehensive survey of the history of the idea of alienation, see Eric Josephson and Mary Josephson, Man Alone: Alienation in and it was a persistent theme in the writings of nineteenth-century sociologists such as Marx, T6nnies, Durkheim, and Weber. In recent years, however, social scientists have redis- covered alienation-to use Daniel Bell's phrase2-and made it a dominant theme in Modern Society (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1962), pp. 9-53. 2 Daniel Bell, The Rediscovery of Alienation: Some Notes Along the Quest for the Historical Marx, Journal of Philosophy, 56 (November 1959), pp. 933-952.

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