Robert E. Lane

Political Personality and Electoral Choice.

The most widely-held and well-supported theories of electoral choice today relate such choice to group membership, socializing, so to speak, the vote decision. In this process the personality of the individual voter has tended to be overlooked or its influence minimized. In focussing in this discussion upon the relationship of authoritarianism to electoral choice, therefore, we hope not only to contribute to our knowledge of a particular personality pattern in a political context but also, more generally, to restore the individual, as contrasted to the group, to an important place in a theory of the electoral process. In an electoral situation, as in any other situation, personality factors play a double role: (1) they affect the perceptions of the individual, screening out some stimuli, distorting others, and admitting others intact; and (2) they shape the responses of a person, selecting among the various possible responses those which are most serviceable to basic personality needs. Every personality develops certain attitudes to assist in this process of selecting among the possible responses. For example, interest in the election, sense of duty, sense of political efficacy, or sense of social integration with the community might form the nucleus of the attitudes bearing on the decision whether or not to vote. Identification with a political party, position on current political issues, candidate preference, anticipation of economic or political advantage, prestige considerations, or identification with a partisan social group might affect the vote itself.

The Fear of Equality.

We move in equalitarian directions; the distribution of income flattens out; the floor beneath the poorest paid and least secure is raised and made more substantial. Since the demise of Newport and Tuxedo Park, the very rich have shunned ostentatious display. The equality of opportunity, the chance to rise in the world is at least as great today as it was thirty years ago. The likelihood of declining status is less. Where does the energy for this movement come from? Who is behind it? Since 1848, it has been assumed that the drive for a more equalitarian society, its effective social force, would come from the stratum of society with the most to gain, the working classes. This was thought to be the revolutionary force in the world—the demand of workers for a classless society sparked by their hostility to the owning classes. It was to be the elite among the workers, not the lumpenproletariat , not the “scum,” who were to advance this movement. Just as “liberty” was the central slogan of the bourgeois revolution, so “equality” was the central concept in the working class movement. Hence it was natural to assume that whatever gains have been made in equalizing the income and status of men in our society came about largely from working class pressure.

Procedural goods in a democracy: How one is treated versus what one gets

There are four classes of procedural goods, each of which is an appropriate ground for answering the question: “Is this a fair procedure?” (i) It is unfair not to treat a person with dignity; the dignity goods are self-respect, personal control, and an understanding of the procedures that determine relevant outcomes. (ii) It is unfair to impose upon a person heavy (net) costs, such as overburdened cognitive capacities and high information costs, excessively painful interpersonal conflict, threats beyond those inherent in the situation, and humiliation. (iii) It is unfair to disregard (but not necessarily to violate) the persons own sense of justice, the codes of honor and practice of his own group and culture. And, of course, (iv) it is unfair to use a procedure that does not have the highest probability of achieving distributive or retributive justice. Few of the standard articles of democratic theory (e.g., liberty, equal treatment before the law, rights, and sharing of power) offer sufficient protections for the first three of these procedural goods.

The Politics of Consensus in an Age of Affluence.

Marx is surely right when he says that the way men earn their living shapes their relations to each other and to the state; but this is, of course, only the beginning. Aside from all the other non-economic factors which also have these effects, there is the matter of the source of income, the level of income, and, especially, the security of income. Moreover, each of these factors has both an individual effect, a set of influences apparent in the study of individual enrichment or immiseration, and a social effect, the influences which appear when whole societies become richer or more secure economically. So I am led to inquire into what is happening to mens political interests, behavior, and attitudes toward politics and government in an Age of Affluence, a period when mens economic security and income have increased and when, for the first time in history, it appears likely that the business cycle can now be controlled. Like Marxs, my interest is in change over time.

Self-Reliance and Empathy: The Enemies of Poverty-and of the Poor

Starting with a brief review of why all post-industrial societies tend to be inegalitarian, this paper develops two main themes: (1) how the idea that people are individually responsible for their own fates reduces poverty but impedes redistribution, and (2) how both the loose ties of individuals to their societies and the selective nature of their empathy and pity for others reduces compassion for the poor, making redistribution unlikely. The first theme is elaborated through psychological research on dispositional versus circumstantial attributions, showing their effects on the widely shared belief in a just world and more generally on the prevailing theory of the justice of deserts. The attribution-affect-action model is used to show how dispositional attributes evoke either anger or pity for victims and, if anger, then unwillingness to help. The development of the second theme shows how people divorce their own fates from those of their nations, how the basic tendency to favor the familiar and similar limits support for redistribution, how converting concern regarding deprivations of the self to concern for (fraternal) deprivation of people like the self excludes those who most need help, how envy fails to lead to redistribution, and finally, how people’s ideas of the privileged and the disadvantaged reflect market values and often mark the poor and the different as overprivileged.

The Tense Citizen and the Casual Patriot: Role Confusion in American Politics

As a city is a collective body, and, like other wholes, composed of many parts, it is evident our first inquiry must be, what a citizen is: for a city is a certain number of citizens.... For he who has a right to share in the judicial and executive part of government in any city, him we call a citizen of that place; and a city, in one word, is a collective body of such persons sufficient in themselves to all the purposes of life. Aristotles Politics (Everyman) pp. 67, 68.

Moral Blame and Causal Explanation

People are excused from moral blame for the harm they are said to have caused if they could not have done otherwise. Such excuses rely on causal explanations deriving mostly from social and biological sciences whose paradigms are probabilistic, disjunctive, and combine dispositional and circumstantial factors according to the variance accounted for by each type of factor. The more complete the explanation, the less choice the harm-doer seems to have and therefore the less moral blame is warranted. Thus, the biological bases of peoples behaviour, their earlier socialization, and their prior choices reduce the scope and severity of moral blame - but have no effect on judgments of right and wrong. Fairness also requires a similar analysis of the behaviour of moral judges whose standards vary with their dispositions, social class, and culture. It follows that moral assessments are joint products of both ethics and the social and biological sciences, with neither group able to make fair moral assessments of peoples behaviour without help from the other.

Political Observers and Market Participants: The Effects on Cognition

People develop their cognitive abilities and styles from their daily life experiences. Market tasks develop cognition characterized by frequent, personality significant, cybernetically informed, socially discussed, direct experiences more often regarded as rewarding than punishing. In contrast, political tasks often demand, but cannot effectively teach, abstract, personally remote, cybernetically less-informed cognitions required for effective citizenship. Market cognition tends to dominate political cognition because of its vividness and personal consequences, but the cognition taught by the market is often inappropriate for political tasks. Does market cognition impair or advance political thinking?

Waiting for lefty

As the curtain goes up we see a bare stage. On it are sitting six or seven men in a semi-circle. Lolling against the proscenium Down Left is a young man chewing a toothpick: a gunman. A fat man of porcine appearance is talking directly to the audience. In other words he is the head of a union and the men ranged behind him are a committee of workers. They are now seated in interesting different attitudes and present a wide diversity of type, as we shall soon see. The fat man is hot and heavy under the collar, near the end of a long talk, but not too hot: he is well fed and confident. His nome is Harry Fatt.

After the End of History: The Curious Fate of American Materialism

A creative presentation of Lanes career research as an ongoing conversation between two fictitious social scientists with opposing views Robert E. Lane spent his career studying money, happiness, materialism, and humanism, and how these differ in rich and poor countries. In this book Lane illustrates his research by presenting us with a dialogue between two protagonists - two social scientists who regularly meet for lunch in a diner just off-campus. One of them is a narrowly trained economist who believes that wealth matters above all else; his companion is an eclectic, humanistically inclined political scientist who believes that the materialistic perspective is outdated and that social scientists should be thinking about other, more direct routes to human well-being. Their conversations draw from a wealth of sources; ideas from history, philosophy, psychology, and religion; and address topics such as justice, money, development, work, and happiness.