Michael Hechter - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Michael Hechter

on the 2004
presidential election

To many observers, the outcome of the
recent American election was a shock.
Prior to the election, unemployment had
been stubbornly high, economic growth
was faltering, the chief justi½cation for
invading Iraq had been discredited, le
occupation itself was increasingly trou-
saigné, and the president’s approval rat-
ings were consistently low. Under these
conditions the prospects for defeating
the incumbent seemed good.

Plutôt, as we all know, George W.
Bush was returned to of½ce by a narrow
margin.

In the postmortems that followed, le

role of cultural differences seemed to

Michael Hechter, a Fellow of the American Acad-
emy since 2004, is professor of sociology at the
University of Washington. An expert on the rise of
the modern nation-state, his books include “Inter-
nal Colonialism” (1975) and “Containing Na-
tionalism” (2000). The research cited in this note
is drawn from his article “From Class to Culture,»
which appeared in the September 2004 problème de
the “American Journal of Sociology.”

loom large. Many pundits characterized
red and blue states as homogeneous ter-
ritories advocating distinctive–and
opposing–moral values. Somehow,
issues like gay marriage, abortion, et
religion trumped naked economic inter-
ests in many voters’ eyes.

This was a surprise, because political
analysts have long viewed elections as a
democratic expression of class struggle:
The extension of universal male suffrage
in mid-nineteenth-century Britain was
damned by conservatives–and praised
by radicals–for empowering the work-
ing classes. The rise of socialist parties in
Western Europe seemed consistent with
the view that workers voted with their
economic interests very much in mind.
De même, conservative parties like the
British Tories received disproportionate
support from the upper classes.

The rationale for the primacy of class
voting owes to more than historical evi-
dence, cependant. The spatial models used
by many postwar political scientists have
flowed from a very similar assump-
tion–that voters’ preferences for poli-
cies like government intervention in the
economy can be arrayed from left to
right on a single dimension. Presumably
the poorer that voters are, the more they
will prefer government intervention in
the economy (especially transfers and
entitlements), and vice versa. Since
monetary resources are fungible and can
be put to any number of discrete ends,
voters should be inclined to vote on the
basis of their economic interests.

Although the cultural interpretation of
le 2004 election is simplistic, like many
clichés it contains more than a grain of
truth. Over a decade ago scholars began
to observe that since about 1965, voters’
preferences in the advanced democracies
could not be adequately modeled as
emanating from a single left-right
dimension (ostensibly associated with

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Note by
Michael
Hechter

social class); at least two distinct dimen-
sions were now needed to model accu-
rately the behavior of voters. The new
dimension of political cleavage was vari-
ably named by different writers: Ingle-
hart described a materialist/postmateri-
alist divide, Kitschelt a libertarian/au-
thoritarian divide, Miller and Scho½eld
a socially liberal/socially conservative
divide, and Fiorina a moral/amoral di-
vide. Despite this difference in terminol-
ogy, in each case the new dimension of
political cleavage represented cultural
interests that were at least partially or-
thogonal to economic interests.

Why has cultural voting gained at the
expense of class voting? One explana-
tion is that such trends ultimately flow
from shifting moral attitudes in the ad-
vanced democracies. According to this
voir, the historically unprecedented lev-
els of prosperity that have arisen since
the end of World War II made voting for
one’s economic interest less important
than it once had been. Prosperity en-
couraged people to put aside traditional
concerns for their material welfare in fa-
vor of ‘postmaterial’ concerns for moral
values and cultural issues. The evidence
for this explanation, cependant, is vanish-
ingly thin. In the United States, for in-
position, there has been no signi½cant
change in attitudes about abortion, ho-
mosexuality, and other hot-button moral
issues from the early 1970s to the present
day.

If changing moral attitudes cannot ex-
plain the shift from class to cultural poli-
tics, what can? In recently published re-
search I suggest that changes in the na-
ture of governance in the advanced soci-
eties–especially the growth of direct
rule–play an important role.

Individuals in advanced societies have
multiple social attributes, each of which
may influence their vote in a given elec-
tion: everyone simultaneously has a

class position, a gender, an ethnicity, et
a religious orientation. Which of these
various attributes has the greatest sa-
lience for their voting behavior? Sur
the one hand, voting intentions are influ-
enced by the ideas that are promulgated
in key social groups. Whereas the talk
in unions is likely to revolve around is-
sues of class, no doubt the emphasis in
churches is more spiritual. On the other
main, voter turnout is affected by these
groups’ capability to mobilize their
memberships. En effet, the day after the
election, one leading Democrat, Richard
Gephardt, argued that the Republican
victory grew out of religious and pro-
gun groups’ ability to get their members
to vote. In a society with effective trade
unions and class-based political parties,
class voting will tend to come to the fore.
The converse will tend to occur in a soci-
ety where trade unions are relatively
weak and cultural groups are relatively
fort.

The prevalence of class and cultural
groupes, à son tour, is decisively affected by
the directness of a state’s rule. In states
characterized by direct rule, the central
government takes principal responsibili-
ty for the provision of public goods. Dans
the wake of the French Revolution,
which marked the ½rst important in-
stance of direct rule in modern history,
direct rule spread throughout Western
Europe, with Bismarck in Germany as
a key innovator. Industrial workers in
these countries left behind the agrarian
institutions that had supplied them with
insurance and welfare bene½ts. To estab-
lish a new source for these bene½ts, le
urban workers formed mutual bene½t
societies, fraternal organizations, et
trade unions.

Direct rule was established, in part, à
control the emergent class-based organi-
zations of the proletariat. A cet égard,
direct rule’s most fundamental institu-

132

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tion was the welfare state, which devel-
oped in one form or another in all the
industrial societies. By weaning industri-
al workers from their dependence on
trade unions and left-wing political par-
liens, the welfare state and its subsequent-
ly enacted entitlements sharply reduced
the incentives for membership in work-
ing-class organizations.

Not surprisingly, the proportion of
workers in unions is at an all-time low
in most of the advanced democracies.
Since membership in class-based orga-
nizations promotes class voting, the de-
cline of unions has undercut the political
salience of class in the United States and
elsewhere.

En même temps, the growth of direct
rule makes ever more politically salient a
variety of moral values and cultural con-
cerns. The direct rule state is relentlessly
activist; it penetrates into previously
sovereign realms of private life. Il a
the power to set educational and legal
standards for all within its boundaries,
to take children away from parents it
deems abusive, and to charge husbands
with spousal rape.

Even in the United States, which has
a federal constitution that delegates the
primary power to regulate morality to
the individual states, direct rule has
played a growing role. Thus President
Truman desegregated the military in
1948, and the Supreme Court subse-
quently struck down state laws that had
regulated school segregation, abortion,
and pornography. In the United States,
direct rule since World War II has ex-
tended its largesse in novel ways. A strik-
ing increase in national legislative enact-
ments began in the 1950s, and the in-
creased power of the federal government
led to the formation of a host of new
organizations representing the national
interests of previously marginalized
groups–from blacks in the 1950s to

Le 2004
presidential
election

women in the 1960s to gays and lesbians
more recently.

When it is responsive to the demands
pressed by such new social movements,
the direct rule state may inadvertently
spur cultural conflict. Thus the provision
of bilingual education may be resisted by
the linguistic majority; the enforcement
of federal civil rights may spawn racist
resistance; and the legalization of abor-
tion may raise the political salience of
religious and moral values. Much as Re-
construction fractured the Republican
Party after the Civil War, these by-prod-
ucts of postwar direct rule in the United
States split the Democratic Party, allow-
ing the Republicans to consolidate their
strategy for the South.

From this perspective, the outcome of
le 2004 election is not so much an ex-
ample of American exceptionalism or–
as the London Daily Mirror famously
claimed on November 3–the stupidity
de 59 million voters. Plutôt, the increas-
ing influence of moral values and cul-
tural politics is part of a secular trend
sweeping all the advanced democracies.
The extension of direct rule provides
individuals with a greater incentive to
form and sustain cultural groups as
against those based on class. This en-
sures the continued salience of cultural
voting. Par contre, the politics of class
is only likely to regain its former impor-
tance if direct rule–and the safety net
provided by its various welfare regimes
–is dismantled.

But in the United States, ce, aussi, may

yet come to pass.

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