Marital Status, Sex and the Formation of Political Attitudes in Adult Life
| Author | Jenny Chapman |
| Published date | 01 December 1985 |
| Date | 01 December 1985 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1985.tb01583.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Political Studies
(1985),
XXXIII,
592-609
Marital Status, Sex and the Formation of
Political Attitudes in Adult Life
JENNY
CHAPMAN*
University
of
Strathclyde
Little is known about the effect of adult experience on political attitude formation.
Recent work
on
political and social change asks
us
to take
on
trust a quantum leap
from personality and childhood experience to adult political preference and neither
accounts
for
rapid political change
nor
acknowledges the variety
of
experience which
may produce a spurious ‘time-lag’ effect in political response to change.
In this study the attitudes of divorced and separated people, a social group recently
formed out of the existing adult population, are compared with those
of
persons
without those attributes. The results show that a satisfactory theoretical model
of
political attitude formation must incorporate adult experience as an important
determinant and distinguish carefully between social conditions in general and the
specific social experience of individuals.
This article examines the effect of two independent variables-marital status
and sex-on political attitudes, tracing their interaction with each other and
their relationship with
a
third variable-income-to define a distinct socio-
political group (divorced and separated people) with an associated political
outlook. It is therefore
a
departure from the convention
of
British empirical
enquiry which starts with the dependent variable, usually voting behaviour, and
uses survey data to explain broad outcomes as economically as possible.
Twenty years ago Almond and Verba argued that adult experience plays a
crucial part in shaping political attitudes.’ They succeeded in demonstrating
that experience with what they called ‘the political structures
of
,
.
.
non-
political groups’, mainly in childhood and early adult life, has some effect on
psychological orientations towards politics.* More recent work on the rale
of
group consciousness in stimulating political participation3 and the marginaliz-
ing effect
of
that participation on black people4 and women5 has added to our
*
I
am grateful for the constructive advice of the editor and referees of
Political Studies,
and in
I
G.
Almond and
S.
Verba,
The Civic Culture
(Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press,
particular Professor lvor Crewe, in the preparation of this article.
1963),
p.
34.
Almond and Verba,
The Civic Culture,
Ch.
12,
pp.
323-74.
S.
Verba and
N.
Nie,
Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality
(New
E. Stonequist,
The Marginal Man: a Study in Personality and Culture Conflict
(New York,
J.
Prestage and
M.
Githens,
A
Portrait
of
Marginality: the
PoliticalBehaviouroftheAmerican
York,
Harper and Row,
1972),
pp.
149-73.
Russell and Russell,
1961)
had already blazed the trail.
Woman
(New York, David McKay Company, Inc.,
1977).
0032-3217/85/04/0592-18/$03.00
0
1985
Political Studies
JENNY
CHAPMAN
593
awareness of the importance of genuinely adult experience, but mainly, yet
again, in the psychocultural sphere. We still know very little about the effect of
adult life-experience
on
the formation of political attitudes as they are
ordinarily understood, that is, attitudes towards political issues rather than
oneself. Taken
at
face value, Inglehart’s results appear to show that
it
has
none.6 He finds that socioeconomic change is reflected in attitudes, but only
after a ‘time-lag’ which is explained in his ‘generational’ model by the
formation in early life of a ‘basic personality structure’. The latter results in the
fixing of political values
on
the basis of experience in the ‘formative years’
which are held to be as much as
10
or
15
years before entering the electorate.’
Change
in
political attitudes is believed to depend
on
nothing less than a change
in basic personality. Not only does this approach demand that we take
on
trust
a quantum leap from personality and childhood experience to specific adult
political preferences, which is not borne
out
by other research,* but also it fails
altogether to account for rapid political change. Furthermore, the inter-
pretation of the ‘time-lag’ phenomenon as a ‘generational’ effect, derived from
differences in psychological receptivity between adults and children, assumes
that social experience
is
shared equally by all age groups and individuals. Since,
on the contrary, people’s experiences vary greatly in character and degree
according to their circumstances, this assumption amounts to a confusion
between social change in general and the particular social experience of
individuals. ‘Time-lag’ may simply reflect differences in the experience of
different age groups
or
the gradual and cumulative diffusion of new
experiences among the adult population.
A
rapidly changing society is, however,
an
excellent laboratory in which to
identify the r61e
of
adult experience in attitude formation.
A
comparison of the
attitudes of a social group which has recently formed out of the existing adult
population with those of people of different social groups would show whether
short-term adaption to change takes place among adults. (Of course, controls
would be made for other social-structural and demographic variables.) The
crux of the matter is to grasp the nature and political implications of the
experience which defines the group,
so
that specific hypotheses about its effect
on attitudes may be formulated.
In
testing them, we put the underlying proposi-
tion to the test.
In
the present instance, this depends
on
an understanding of the
way
that the situation
of
the chosen group-divorced and separated people-
interacts with that of another, overlapping, group-women.
Several factors pointed to the selection of marital status and its interaction
with sex for this enquiry. First, marital status has already been identified as an
influence
on
electoral behaviour both
on
its own9 and, in the United States, in
conjunction with sex.l0 Secondly, divorce and separation are experiences which
are open only to adults,
so
that their effects cannot be confused with those of
R.
Inglehart, ‘Post-materialism in an Environment
of
Security’,
The
American Political
Science Review,
74: 4, 880-900.
Inglehart, ‘Post-materialism’, p. 882.
8
R.
Dowse and
J.
Hughes, ‘Pre-Adult Origins
of
Adult Political Activity:
A
Sour
Note’, in
C. Crouch (ed.),
British Political Sociology Yearbook, Vol.
3
(London, Croom Helm, 1977),
9
I.
Crewe,
T.
Fox
and
J.
Alt, “on-Voting in British General Elections, 1966-October 1974’,
in
10
A. Miller, ‘The Emerging Gender Gap in American Elections’,
Election Studies
1: 1,
7-12.
pp. 202-21.
Crouch (ed.),
British Political Sociology Yearbook,
pp. 38-109.
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