Title: Elite Recruitment in Democratic Polities: Comparative Studies Across Nations, <i>by Heinz Eulau and Moshe M. Czudnowski</i>
Abstract: Recent years have seen a rapid increase in highly descriptive, methodologically sophisticated studies of the backgrounds and attitudes of political elites. Much of this work has added to our factual knowledge about elite composition and recruitment. Often, however, empirical rigor has not been matched by adequate attention to the linkage between the new data and the older questions that are the rich legacy of traditional elite theorists. The strengths and the weaknesses of current research on elites are faithfully represented in this collection of research papers. The central question that most needs posing about elite recruitment patterns is so what7 Dwaine Marvick puts the point clearly: Political recruitment study is empty and futile exercise if it merely asks 'who governs7' instead of asking how governance is shaped by the skills, contacts, and values of those who participate (p. 29). Several of the papers in this volume valiantly address this issue in empirical terms. Unexpectedly, and to some extent inadvertently, their evidence suggests that easy assumptions about obvious consequences of recruitment practices may be wrong. Chong Lim Kim, Justin Green, and Samuel C. Patterson draw on surveys of U.S. state legislators to assess the consequences of party-controlled recruitment, but the patterns they discover are surprisingly weak and inconsistent. Neither in terms of role conceptions nor in terms of roll-call behavior do party-recruited legislators differ significantly from their self-recruited colleagues. Galen A. Irwin's Dutch replication of the Eulau-Prewitt study of Bay Area city councillors demonstrates that party plays a more important role in recruitment in Holland, but the evidence that party thereby plays a more important role in ensuring electoral accountability in the Netherlands is inconclusive. In unusually thoughtful paper, Sidney Tarrow and V. Lamonte Smith show that a disproportionate share of French and Italian mayors were initially inducted into politics during periods of national crisis. However, the measurable differences in outlook and behavior between these crisis-recruits and their conventionally recruited colleagues are neither statistically significant nor cross-nationally consistent. In short, these studies provide more question marks than exclamation points about the impact of recruitment patterns on political attitudes and behavior. Somewhat hidden in the masses of descriptive material in this volume are some nuggets of unusual interest and potential significance. Moshe Czudnowski's exhaustive report on the value structures of Illinois political activists includes the intriguing finding that, as compared to ordinary citizens, politicians place much more emphasis on an active, challenging life and much less emphasis on economic security. Werner Kaltefleiter's annotated returns from a survey of West German elites suggest that political elites are consistently and significantly more accessible to recruits from a variety of social backgrounds than are elites in business, administration, science, and the mass media. Michael R. King and Lester G. Seligman offer some suggestive evidence that linkages among electoral realignment, turnover patterns, elite recruitment, and policy changes . . . set apart critical from other presidential elections (p. 265). In one of the volume's most interesting papers, Kenneth Prewitt and William McAllister report the bittersweet
Publication Year: 1978
Publication Date: 1978-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 8
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