Political Recruitment in Four Selection Systems

• Author: Wayne R. Swanson,Jay S. Goodman,Elmer E. Cornwell
• DOI: 10.1177/106591297002300105
• Date: 01 March 1970
• Published date: 01 March 1970
• Subject Matter: Articles

POLITICAL RECRUITMENT IN FOUR
SELECTION SYSTEMS
JAY S. GOODMAN, Wheaton College, Massachusetts
WAYNE R. SWANSON, Connecticut College
ELMER E. CORNWELL, JR., Brown University
IVERSE
ACTIVISTS in American politics, from municipal reformers to
bosses, have perceived that the shape of the electoral system would affect
Jt―~ their own fortunes at the ballot box. Their perceptions about their stakes
in the structural rules of the game have led to repeated controversies about the
impact of nonpartisan versus partisan elections and, to a lesser degree, about such
provisions as single versus multi-member districts. The reformers who devised items
such as the nonpartisan election in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
had a number of consequences distinctly in mind: reduction in party activity, insu-
lation of local from national issues, increased efficiency in the management of
government, and selection of &dquo;better&dquo; people for public office.’ The concern of
the present article is with the recruitment aspect of the method of political selec-
tion. The problem is not trivial; Donald R. Matthews has observed that &dquo;the
convention that the political decision-maker’s behavior and decisions are influenced
by his personal life experiences not only has a long and honorable history, but is
also substantiated by modern psychological and sociological research.&dquo;
2
Do differences in selection systems in fact bring different kinds of people into
political offices? The scholarly literature seems to have focused on aspects of selec-
tion other than the actual characteristics of those chosen. Thus, Adrian’s typology
of nonpartisan elections is based on the dimension of party organization activity.3
Williams and Adrian were concerned in their empirical examination of voting in
local communities with the relationship between behavior in nonpartisan elections
versus that in partisan ones, and with whether local issues were insulated 4 Salis-
bury and Black inquired into the relative importance of class and party as inde-
pendent variables in a nonpartisan electoral context.5 Lee studied the variation in
NOTE : The authors are grateful to the Carnegie Corporation of New York which is sponsor-
ing a comparative behavioral study of state constitutional conventions. All data are
processed at the Brown University Computing Lab; those presented here were analyzed
with original crosstab program INTERVIEW written by Richard Croteau for the IBM
360/50.
1
See Richard S. Childs, Civic Victories (New York: Harper, 1952); Charles R. Adrian, "A
Typology for Nonpartisan Elections," Western Political Quarterly, 12 (June 1959),
449—58. Charles R. Adrian, Governing Urban America (New York: McGraw Hill,
1955), pp. 56-63; and John Porter East, Council-Manager Government: The Political
Thought of Its Founder, Richard S. Childs (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press,
1965). See also various articles in the National Municipal Review and the National
Civic Review from 1911 to the present.
2

The Social Background of Political Decision-makers (Garden City: Doubleday, 1954), p. 2.
3
Adrian, "A Typology for Nonpartisan Elections."
4
Oliver P. Williams and Charles R. Adrian, "The Insulation of Local Politics under the Non-
partisan Ballot," American Political Science Review, 53 (December 1959), 1052-63.
5
Robert H. Salisbury and Gordon Black, "Class and Party in Partisan and Nonpartisan Elec-
tions," American Political Science Review, 57 (September 1963), 584-92.
92

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93
levels of party activity in California’s local nonpartisan elections.6 Eldersveld
sought to ascertain the effects of a nonpartisan city electoral system on the strategies
of local party activists.7 Charles E. Gilbert considered the effects of nonpartisan-
ship on twenty-four cities in terms of national elections, strength of the minority
party, and policy outputs.8 Pomper found that the effect of nonpartisan elections
in Newark was to change the lines of electoral cleavage from party loyalty to ethnic
affiliation.9
On the other hand, the literature does contain propositions which suggest the
possible impact of selection systems on recruitment. Although he had little except
impressionistic data at the time, Charles R. Adrian hypothesized in an early article
that: ( 1 ) &dquo;the securing of active political party members to fill nonpartisan posi-
tions is difficult&dquo; and (2) &dquo;limited new channels for recruitment of candidates for
nonpartisan offices are opened by nonpartisanship.&dquo; 1’°
Using his own data on 38 councilmen in six California cities and Huckshorn’s
study of 283 Los Angeles councilmen, Eugene C. Lee found that nonpartisan elec-
tions seemed to result in disproportionately few people from certain elements in the
population: women, people in low status jobs, people from poorer neighborhoods.
Local nonpartisanship seemed to favor disproportionately those who were other-
wise affiliated with the minority party in the state.&dquo; Lee concluded that non-
partisan elections reduced the representation of minorities, of &dquo;... social, racial,
religious, and economic groups in the community... ,&dquo; 12
The reformers themselves considered the recruitment aspects of electoral
arrangements to be important. Nonpartisan elections were intended to force voters
to concentrate on head-to-head contests of individual candidates, without help
from party cues. Emphasis on personal qualifications and credentials was intended
to give an advantage to those who came from higher socio-economic strata, like
the reformers. The aim was &dquo;politics without politicians.&dquo; 13
Aside from Lee’s book, no empirical study presents data on the characteristics
of those who have been elected to office in the nonpartisan context. Further, there
is no comparative recruitment data which measures the impact of the election
system variable. In the process of conducting a comparative behavioral study of
constitutional conventions in the American states, we have collected extensive
information on the categoric, social, public participation, and party characteristics
of the delegates. What makes our data relevant to various selection system-recruit-
6
Eugene C. Lee, The Politics of Nonpartisanship (Los Angeles: U. of California Press,...