Seymour Martin Lipset and political sociology¹

In the English speaking world, Seymour Martin Lipset was arguably the most important political sociologist of the second half of the twentieth century. Certainly he was one of them. Claims such as these are always invidious, but it is clear that Lipset's work stands out in a number of respects. The sheer range and volume of his writings is phenomenal. Over a period of fifty years he produced some 25 books, edited another 25, and wrote at least 485 articles and commentaries (Marks and Diamond 1992 and Lipset 1996). But more than this, the centrality of the issues he addressed, their rootedness in classic questions of the sociological canon, and the impact he had on other scholars, all attest to the special significance of his work. During his working life, Lipset moved every ten years or so, holding posts at Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard and Stanford, before moving in retirement to George Mason University. In addition, he played a major role in fostering collaboration both within North America and beyond. And he won a unique level of recognition from his peers, becoming the only person to have been elected President of both the American Political Science Association and the American Sociological Association. Right at the beginning of this corpus of work sits the research for ‘Democracy in Private Government’ (2010 [1952]). Lipset's lifelong intellectual and scholarly agenda emerged from his early activist commitments and involvement in socialist politics. Initially a Trotskyist, while a young student at the beginning of the Second World War, he remained in the (social democratic) Socialist Party until 1960, before latter shifting to what he described as a ‘centrist’ or ‘conservative’ Democratic party position (Lipset 1996: 1). It was activist debates that led him to Michels'Political Parties (1947) and the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. For Michels seemed to offer an explanation both for the autocratic outcome of the communist experiment in Russia and for the failure of social democratic organizations – particularly in Germany where they had been especially powerful – to vigorously pursue fundamental socialist change. This in turn led him to thinking about his father's union, the International Typographical Union, which seemed to be an exception to Michels' argument. But there was another activist question that seemed equally pressing. Debates about developments outside the USA focused on the respective impacts of the communist and social democratic wings of the socialist movement. But within the USA, the problem facing socialist activists was the failure to establish an electorally significant socialist movement in the first place. These two sets of questions jockeyed for Lipset's attention when he began his graduate studies at Columbia University in 1943. Indeed Robert Merton (1992: x) recalls a kind of competition between himself and Robert Lynd for Lipset's scholarly affections, with each urging him to pursue their preferred project. Lipset decided to do both. For his PhD, he opted to study the growth of the Canadian Cooperative Commonwealth Federation – now the New Democratic Party – a farmer-labour party that promised to shed light on the failure of similar experiments in the USA. This became his first book, Agrarian Socialism (1950). He then returned to an earlier research paper on the ITU which became part of his second book, Union Democracy (Lipset, Trow and Coleman 1956). When the manuscript was finished he brought it to Merton declaring ‘Here is my second dissertation’ (Lipset 1996: 8). It is this research paper that he published in the BJS. In his companion essay in this volume, Patrick McGovern has set out three good reasons why ‘Democracy in Private Government’ is especially noteworthy. I will not repeat those arguments here. Rather I aim to do two things. First, I will take a closer look at the article itself. Lipset's article and his subsequent work on union democracy has set the terms for a number of longstanding debates that continue to exercise contemporary sociologists.2 Here I aim to identify three issues with Lipset's argument each of which has given rise to one such debate. Second, I want to place Lipset's BJS article in the context of his overall contribution to scholarship. Here I propose to briefly review the major themes of his life's work and highlight the extent to which the basic concerns that underpinned Lipset's BJS article helped to set the agenda for this subsequent research. The first issue concerns the importance attributed to parties. According to Lipset, the thing that is distinctive about the ITU is the presence of ‘longstanding institutionalized opposition parties’ (Lipset 2010 [1952]: 22 [61], his emphasis). It is this internal party system, he argues, that enables the ITU, unlike most other unions, to escape from Michels' iron law of oligarchy (Lipset 2010 [1952]: 13, 21 [52, 59]). But while party competition within unions is indeed unusual, factional competition is commonplace, and this, too, seems to offer an escape from an oligarchic fate (Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 2003). Indeed in many countries regular competition between factions – some more formalized and some less – has been a standing feature of internal union politics for much of the twentieth century. One reason for this has been endemic factional struggles between the left and right wings of the labour movement: struggles that have often been underwritten, at least in part, by conflicts between Communist party supporters and their opponents. It is one of the great paradoxes that Communist parties, which were so frequently autocratic when they achieved state power, were often an important source of pluralism in countries where they did not, especially within the ‘civil society’ of the labour movement. However this was not something to which the anti-communist left (to which Lipset belonged) was likely to be well attuned.3 Moreover it is arguable that the development of a fully institutionalized party system is more ambiguous in its consequences for the prospects for democracy and oligarchy than Lipset suggests. Perhaps factions might actually provide a better basis for containing oligarchic tendencies. In Britain, for example, it is often argued, following Bryce (1921), that the rise of parties at Westminster led to the decline of parliamentary democracy, replacing an earlier ‘golden age’ in which a looser more nebulous factional system had prevailed (Norton 1990). In some ways the rise of parties has strengthened oligarchic tendencies by providing political leaders – and especially those holding executive office – with a disciplined vehicle through which to impose their will on the legislature and the citizenry. However, American experience may slightly obscure this. For in the USA, these developments did not take place to the same extent. There, parties have remained more nebulous organizations, without the formal apparatus or membership of parties in Europe and elsewhere, and with far less control over the selection and behaviour of their elected representatives (Epstein 1986). But if parties are indeed a prerequisite for union democracy, and factional conflict really is insufficient, then another question arises. Do parties themselves require an internal party system to be democratic? Michels, after all, was concerned not just with union organizations, but above all, with the internal organization of political parties. And if parties do require an internal party system, what about those parties? At some point, something short of a party system must suffice. It cannot be a case of ‘parties all the way down’. The second issue concerns the meaning of democracy. As he himself later attests, Lipset (1960: 45, 1996: 10) adopts a Schumpeterian conception in which democracy consists of an electorate periodically selecting its rulers from at least two sets of competing elites. He does not entertain the possibility of a more participatory conception of democracy of the sort later reinvigorated by the work of Carol Pateman (1970) and more generally by the ideological posture of the New Left (to which he was not sympathetic). But different definitions leave different unions looking democratic. The ITU was one of the old established craft unions in the American Federation of Labor. Indeed it was one of the oldest craft unions in the country, and among these it may have been atypical (Marks: 1989: 120–54). But a number of the newer industry-wide unions that formed the Congress of Industrial Organisations in the 1930s had developed a participatory organizational culture by the time Lipset was writing, especially in those cases where they had emerged from extensive direct action or rank and file insurgency (Zeitlin and Stepan-Norris, 1992). The West Coast Longshoremen's Union – the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) – provides a particularly interesting example. Lipset mentions it briefly as a prime example of the oligarchic tendencies of American unions. But more recent studies deploying a participatory conception of democracy see it as something of a model, with strong rank and file control over key decisions (Kimeldorf, 1988, Levi et al. 2009). Lipset (2010 [1952]: 22 [60]) quotes an ill-advised comment by the union's president, Harry Bridges, defending the Soviet Union by equating ‘totalitarianism’ with the system of government in the union. But the actual system of government in the union ensured that rank and file opposition forced Bridges to disaffiliate from the pro-Soviet World Federation of Trade Unions a few years later (Levi et al. 2009: 218–19). This talk of totalitarianism points to a certain black and white quality in Lipset's approach in his BJS article. At one point he suggests that, bar the ITU and one or two other exceptions, ‘most labour unions’ share characteristics that are ‘indigenous to the structure of totalitarian states’ (Lipset 2010 [1952]: 22 [60]). Unions have often been voluble champions of democracy, and certainly they have frequently fallen short of their own rhetoric. But even on a purely procedural conception, they have typically been among the more democratic organizations in capitalist countries. One reason for Lipset's approach may be his tendency to see potential sources of organizational power as being monopolized by a union's central administrative apparatus (Lipset 2010 [1952]: 22, 23 [60, 62]). But in many unions, this central apparatus is counterbalanced by strong workplace organizations. And just as with states, this ‘federal’ structure often provides dissidents and alternative leaders with an ongoing power base, as well as the potential to exercise some authority, even when they are out of office at the top. The third issue concerns an apparent tension between union democracy and union effectiveness in conflicts with employers and others. Can a union be both a ‘town meeting’ and an ‘army’ (Muste 1928)? Lipset does not address this question directly in his article. But it figures in much of the subsequent response and remains the subject of contemporary debate (Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin, 2003, and Levi et al. 2009). In his own further work, Lipset (1960: 37–39, 357–99) emphasizes that union democracy (despite the internal disruption that accompanies it) can strengthen membership loyalty to the organization, by making clear that there is a distinction between its current rulers and the organization itself, and thereby helping to stop discontent with the former spilling over into discontent with the latter. But this still leaves open the question of whether oligarchic or democratic leaders make better union ‘generals’: whether they are better, that is, at winning conflicts for their members. Oligarchic leaders are likely to have more room to manoeuver in negotiations about how to settle conflicts with employers. But is that always an advantage? Thomas Schelling (1960: 21–52) has shown that, as a leader, having constraints placed on your room for maneuver can strengthen your hand in negotiations. In situations of pure bargaining, where there are a range of potential outcomes each of which is better for both sides than no agreement at all, the outcome is determined by which side can show that they are credibly committed to their demands. Democratic accountability can thus be a significant advantage for union leaders. An employer faced with union leaders who can demonstrate that their hands are tied by a democratic mandate is more likely to settle on terms favourable to the union. All other things being equal, an oligarchic union leader is more likely to be forced to make greater compromises. In short, there are good reasons to doubt that there is a systematic tension between union democracy and union effectiveness. Of course democratic mandates are not the only source of credible commitments. Radical leftists and others with known commitments to revolutionary ideologies or the virtues of industrial action might have a similar advantage. If an employer knows that a union leader would actually like to have an excuse for negotiations to fail, they are more likely to make concessions. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why such leaders are often elected despite having far more radical commitments than most of the membership. Let me now turn to my second task and try to locate Lipset's article within the broader sweep of his subsequent work. In the course of a life time of scholarly writing, Lipset repeatedly returned to two great themes. Each can already be seen emerging from both his ‘two dissertations’ and his article for the BJS. One concerns the social prerequisites for democracy, and formed the basis of his presidential address to the American Sociological Association (Lipset 1994). The other concerns the comparative study of labour organizations and their politics, and formed the basis of his presidential address to the American Political Science Association (Lipset 1983). These were certainly not his only themes. Lipset tackled a remarkable range of different topics, including, amongst many others, the development of extreme right wing movements, student protest, the political affiliations of intellectuals, and the Jewish community in America. But these two themes represent his most enduring concerns, and his writings on them are likely to remain his most influential. Of his many writings on the social conditions that underpin democracy, two seminal articles are especially worthy of note. In ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy’, Lipset (1959) emphasizes the strong relationship between capitalist economic development and the prospects for democracy, an argument to which he returned in his ASA presidential address. This correlation is now widely accepted, and subsequent debate has focused on which causal mechanisms are responsible for it. Is it the growth of the middle class and various related effects as Lipset contends, or is it the shift in the balance of class power and especially the growth of the working class as some others have argued (Diamond 1992, and Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens 1991)? In ‘Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments’ Lipset and his co-author Stein Rokkan argue that the origins of the different party systems in Europe can be traced to four great cleavage-inducing conflicts: the conflicts between center and periphery, church and state, landed and industrial elites, and workers and capitalists (Lipset and Rokkan 1967 and Lipset 1985). Despite its anachronistic Parsonian framework, this is the inescapable starting point for virtually all subsequent studies of the development of party systems. Coincidentally, in a now standard debate, Lipset and Rokkan's social cleavage argument is frequently used to cast doubt on another ‘sociological law’ in another book entitled Political Parties: this time not Michels' law but Duverger's law about the effect of electoral systems on party systems (Duverger 1954). Lipset's interest in the comparative study of labour organizations and their politics stemmed not only from his early activist commitments but also from a scholarly conviction that – with all due qualifications – the class basis of electoral politics was ‘the most impressive single fact’ about democratic politics in the developed capitalist world (Lipset 1960: 223). Lipset was struck by the uniform presence of this ‘democratic translation of the class struggle’. This was, he said, ‘the principal generalization’ that could be made about party competition in twentieth century democracies (Lipset 1960: 220). However Lipset was also interested in the different forms that labour politics had taken in different countries and at different times. In his APSA presidential address, ‘Radicalism or Reformism: The Sources of Working-Class Politics’, he sought to demonstrate that the degree of radicalism of labour politics was in large part a product of the degree of state repression which labour movements had faced (Lipset 1983). But above all Lipset was by among the capitalist the USA did not have an electorally significant labour or socialist This was the question that him to both his first and his book (Lipset and Lipset and And he may have of it as his single most important of work. to provide a to this question was, he the only that he had and he (Lipset 1996: Perhaps this work be of as a third great in its own For it into a more interest in the of American politics and and especially in arguments about (Lipset In addition, in to pursue these it led him to a interest in (Lipset Lipset's explanation for the of a labour or socialist party on many However, like and he special on the of the and that he as distinctive of American political As I have argued elsewhere, there are many with his not least American labour leaders themselves typically these as an than a as did their in similar such as where labour parties were established But Lipset's argument has a and that has made it for of of American politics and The social prerequisites for democracy, labour and politics in capitalist and the to the great American that the from first to Lipset has left a remarkable and of work that will continue to Lipset always the of the sociological As have Michels was a and was an But it is and that are arguably the most important The of remains strong from the and his of both in his BJS article and his other early research. However over the of is also that is from Lipset's work. Indeed there is already a to some of his arguments in ‘Democracy in Private Government’ 2010 [1952]: 22 and 1960: But by the he was even on as a in of the of his of the between the USA and (Lipset and This shift can be seen in Lipset's writings on democracy, where the (Lipset of his in Political is in his later writings by arguments about political culture in and and in (Lipset similar development can be seen in his work on labour politics. the enduring of and the importance of are particularly clear in his to why there is no party in the USA. It is the – as Lipset always – that the question for But it is that an important part of his and and by them did Lipset that a sociologist could make of the political Lipset's article on ‘Democracy in Private Government’ and his related work on union democracy are of enduring Here I have to establish this in two First, I have sought to demonstrate their enduring significance by a on three issues with his argument that have set the terms for much subsequent debate. Each of these issues to and remains the subject of contemporary sociological Second, I have to show that the concerns with which Lipset in his article the most important themes of his subsequent research. The concerns that at the of his article – the with the for democracy and the with labour organizations and their politics in the – also to the central themes of his subsequent and the of research on which his

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