We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2009
The analysis described below forms an extension to the Netherlands and the United States of research on British political recruitment that has already been reported in this Journal. The object of the research is to make quantitative estimates of the influence of personal characteristics in pushing the socially better endowed into active politics, and particularly to measure the extent to which advantages on some characteristics make up for disadvantages on others. These processes are of interest because they determine to a large extent what type of persons will emerge as elective politicians, with possible consequences for agenda-setting and policy-making.
1 Budge, Ian and Farlie, Dennis ‘Political Recruitment and Drop-Out: Predictive Success of Background Characteristics over Five British Localities’, British Journal of Political Science, V (1975), 33–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Such consequences are not straightforward, however, because neither among politicians themselves nor as between politicians and electors does social background appear to have even probabilistic connections with particular issue preferences. See Farlie, Dennis and Budge, Ian ‘Elite Background and Issue Preferences: A Comparison of British and Foreign Data Using a New Technique’, Chap. 7 of Crewe, Ivor, ed., British Political Sociology Yearbook Vol. 1: Elites (London: Croom Helm, 1974).Google Scholar See also the last section of this article.
3 As the previous article made clear, this is not necessarily to dispense with the established paradigm of a screening process involving the possession of resources, and political motivation and opportunities. But it is to affirm that socioeconomic characteristics are quite successful indicators of all of these.
4 Various comments on the use of LiRaS within the recruitment context are Whiteley, P., ‘A Bayesian Comment on Budge and Farlie's Analysis of Recruitment’Google Scholar and Farlie, Dennis and Budge, Ian, ‘Rejoinder’ in British Journal of Political Science, VI (1976), 124–7.Google Scholar
5 It is possible that this is due to the nature of the data sets themselves. We have taken a sample of local councilmen and compared them with a national sample of voters. Because there are more smaller communities than larger ones, there are more councilmen from smaller communities than from larger communities in the sample. The religious parties are, in general, stronger in these smaller communities. Assuming that church attendance is generally higher in such communities, it is possible that the councillors are not higher in church attendance than those they represent but that both are above the national average.
6 Cf. Cleary, J. W., ‘Elite Career Patterns in a Soviet Republic’, British Journal of Political Science, IV (1974), 323–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hill, R. J., ‘Continuity and Change in USSR Supreme Soviet Elections’, British Journal of Political Science, II (1972), 47–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Such criticisms are implicit in the ‘power elite’ literature, overlapping with Marxist criticisms of bourgeois democracy. See Miliband, R. W., The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969)Google Scholar; Domhoff, G. W., The Higher Circles (New York: Vintage, 1971.Google Scholar
8 See the comprehensive references in Crewe, , ed., British Political Sociology Yearbook Vol. 1, Chap. 7, ‘Elite Background and Issue Preferences’.Google Scholar
