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IV. Place anyone?
POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY QUARTERLY, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1987, 39-40
IV. Place anyone? A comment on the McAllister and Johnston papers
JOHN A. AGNEW Departments of Geography and Social Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY 13244, USA
How can two papers on the same theme using similar kinds of data reach such antithetical conclusions? A sociologist of knowledge might suggest that the respective authors are merely defending disciplinary turf. The political scientist (McAllister) is protecting the central shibboleths of his discipline-voluntarism, individualism, the centrality to analysis of national census categories, and the identity of statistical regularity and causality. The geographer (Johnston) is defending the sacred concepts of his discipline-spatial variation, place, contextual determination and geographical analysis. One need not accept the most cynical implication of this viewpoint, however, that empirical research is a total artifact of assumptions and presuppositions, to see that these papers are much conditioned by very different conceptions of the causes of political behavior and how these can be measured. Most research suggests that voting is not entirely arbitrary. From one point of view, we have individuals who as ‘members’ of various national social/demographic categories are pushed towards specific voting decisions by dint of membership of these categories. Ultimately, however, voting behavior is determined by these categories labelled as individual attributes. To the extent that there is a contextual or local effect on voting behavior it is residual and can be reduced by allocating individuals to more satisfactory categories. I would argue that this is the sine qua non of modern political sociology. Context has long been regarded as a residual effect, fading away under the onslaught of modemization and nationalization (Agnew, 1985). Only when context seemed to persist in importance or nationalization was not complete have political scientists shown much interest in ‘contextual effects’. And they have usually seen them as ‘add-ens’, ad hoc devices to complement the preferred non-contextual explanation. The ‘neighborhood effect’ has been the most popular of these in that it retains the central focus on the individual voter but adds neighborhood to the list of membership categories. No reconceptualization of the process whereby social influence is translated into voting decisions has been involved. So McAllister’s paper is much more conventional than McAllister would have the reader believe. His analysis is premised on the idea that context is merely an epiphenomenon produced by a failure to exhaust the possibilities of individual attributes or national membership categories. This has been the consensus position in modern political sociology. All the ‘technical’ decisions on data selection, data manipulation, and data interpretation follow from the basic premise. Context is viewed as a separate effect rather than as an 0260-9827/87/01
0039-02 $03.00 0 1987 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
40
Place anyone?
individual/local-group interaction effect. This is inevitable when no information about local social life is included in the definition of context. Context is reduced to a measure of electoral district/national socio-economic status that is then regressed with a battery of individual measures of the same phenomenon against individual vote. The individual measures are seen as controls which can and do eliminate much of the separate effect of context. Hauser (1970: 661-662), a critic of contextual analyses generated by regression models, has pointed out that the procedure McAllister used necessarily assumes that context involves an additive increment or decrement, whether ‘proving’ or ‘disproving’ a contextual effect. Just as the ‘contextual fallacy’ in regression analysis involves a failure to generate sufficient all-inclusive categories for individuals so the ‘individualist fallacy’ involves the assumption, in Hauser’s (1970: 662) words: ‘that the individual predictor variables have exactly the same influence within every group [context] and the unique effect of the group is just an additive increment or decrement’. There is no role in McAllister’s empirical analysis for context-individual interactions. His theorization of voting behavior will not allow it. The message determines the medium; the medium delivers the message. From another point of view, we have individuals who live in different social contexts and are led to vote in specific ways by their ‘active socialization’ into different political outlooks, depending on the social structure and historical antagonisms of those contexts. National social categories are neither empirically appropriate nor theoretically coherent as predictors of voting behavior. I see this as a ‘strong’ position on the geography of voting behavior. Johnston’s paper does indeed present evidence for a substantial geography of English voting behavior. There are also hints, here and there, of the strong position. But in his discussion Johnston eschews any explanatory claims beyond invoking the ‘information bias’ of the neighborhood effect. This suggests that Johnston, although working with data in such a way that seemingly demonstrates a fundamental contextual dimension to voting behavior, is still unprepared to completely abandon the individualism and national census categories of conventional political sociology for the micro-sociological emphasis of a fully fledged place perspective (but see Johnston, 1985). To return to the original question: how can two papers on the same theme using much the same data reach such antithetical conclusions? Clearly, data are not enough. They do not speak for themselves. If one accepts the theorizing of voting behavior behind McAllister’s analysis that national categories somehow cause individual voting decisions then one will find his analysis convincing. He deploys considerable and praiseworthy technical virtuosity. But if one theorizes the causes of voting behavior micro-sociologically, in terms of the histories and social structures of specific places, then cross-sectional multivariate analysis misses precisely what should be emphasized: causality cannot be discovered as regularity independent of time and space but only as specific social mechanisms that translate social structure into individual acts and vice versa. From this viewpoint, it is the social process in places rather than the individual Robinson Crusoe buffeted by the pressures of nominalist attributes that constitutes the proper focus for political-sociological inquiry. It is not so much defending disciplinary turf as conceptualizing causality (Agnew, 1987).
References AGNEW, J. A. (1985). The Intellectual Devahation of Place and the Possibility of Strong Democracy. Syracuse, NY: Center for the Study of Citizenship, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, Occasional Pub. No. 5. AGNEW, J. A. (1987). Pkzce and Politics. Boston: Allen and Unwin. HAUSER, R. M. (1970). Context and Consex: a cautionary tale. American Journal of Sociology 73, 645-664. JOHNSTON,R. J. (1985). Class and the geography of voting in England: towards measurement and understanding. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (NS) 10, 245-255.
IV. Place anyone? A comment on the McAllister and Johnston papers
JOHN A. AGNEW Departments of Geography and Social Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY 13244, USA
How can two papers on the same theme using similar kinds of data reach such antithetical conclusions? A sociologist of knowledge might suggest that the respective authors are merely defending disciplinary turf. The political scientist (McAllister) is protecting the central shibboleths of his discipline-voluntarism, individualism, the centrality to analysis of national census categories, and the identity of statistical regularity and causality. The geographer (Johnston) is defending the sacred concepts of his discipline-spatial variation, place, contextual determination and geographical analysis. One need not accept the most cynical implication of this viewpoint, however, that empirical research is a total artifact of assumptions and presuppositions, to see that these papers are much conditioned by very different conceptions of the causes of political behavior and how these can be measured. Most research suggests that voting is not entirely arbitrary. From one point of view, we have individuals who as ‘members’ of various national social/demographic categories are pushed towards specific voting decisions by dint of membership of these categories. Ultimately, however, voting behavior is determined by these categories labelled as individual attributes. To the extent that there is a contextual or local effect on voting behavior it is residual and can be reduced by allocating individuals to more satisfactory categories. I would argue that this is the sine qua non of modern political sociology. Context has long been regarded as a residual effect, fading away under the onslaught of modemization and nationalization (Agnew, 1985). Only when context seemed to persist in importance or nationalization was not complete have political scientists shown much interest in ‘contextual effects’. And they have usually seen them as ‘add-ens’, ad hoc devices to complement the preferred non-contextual explanation. The ‘neighborhood effect’ has been the most popular of these in that it retains the central focus on the individual voter but adds neighborhood to the list of membership categories. No reconceptualization of the process whereby social influence is translated into voting decisions has been involved. So McAllister’s paper is much more conventional than McAllister would have the reader believe. His analysis is premised on the idea that context is merely an epiphenomenon produced by a failure to exhaust the possibilities of individual attributes or national membership categories. This has been the consensus position in modern political sociology. All the ‘technical’ decisions on data selection, data manipulation, and data interpretation follow from the basic premise. Context is viewed as a separate effect rather than as an 0260-9827/87/01
0039-02 $03.00 0 1987 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
40
Place anyone?
individual/local-group interaction effect. This is inevitable when no information about local social life is included in the definition of context. Context is reduced to a measure of electoral district/national socio-economic status that is then regressed with a battery of individual measures of the same phenomenon against individual vote. The individual measures are seen as controls which can and do eliminate much of the separate effect of context. Hauser (1970: 661-662), a critic of contextual analyses generated by regression models, has pointed out that the procedure McAllister used necessarily assumes that context involves an additive increment or decrement, whether ‘proving’ or ‘disproving’ a contextual effect. Just as the ‘contextual fallacy’ in regression analysis involves a failure to generate sufficient all-inclusive categories for individuals so the ‘individualist fallacy’ involves the assumption, in Hauser’s (1970: 662) words: ‘that the individual predictor variables have exactly the same influence within every group [context] and the unique effect of the group is just an additive increment or decrement’. There is no role in McAllister’s empirical analysis for context-individual interactions. His theorization of voting behavior will not allow it. The message determines the medium; the medium delivers the message. From another point of view, we have individuals who live in different social contexts and are led to vote in specific ways by their ‘active socialization’ into different political outlooks, depending on the social structure and historical antagonisms of those contexts. National social categories are neither empirically appropriate nor theoretically coherent as predictors of voting behavior. I see this as a ‘strong’ position on the geography of voting behavior. Johnston’s paper does indeed present evidence for a substantial geography of English voting behavior. There are also hints, here and there, of the strong position. But in his discussion Johnston eschews any explanatory claims beyond invoking the ‘information bias’ of the neighborhood effect. This suggests that Johnston, although working with data in such a way that seemingly demonstrates a fundamental contextual dimension to voting behavior, is still unprepared to completely abandon the individualism and national census categories of conventional political sociology for the micro-sociological emphasis of a fully fledged place perspective (but see Johnston, 1985). To return to the original question: how can two papers on the same theme using much the same data reach such antithetical conclusions? Clearly, data are not enough. They do not speak for themselves. If one accepts the theorizing of voting behavior behind McAllister’s analysis that national categories somehow cause individual voting decisions then one will find his analysis convincing. He deploys considerable and praiseworthy technical virtuosity. But if one theorizes the causes of voting behavior micro-sociologically, in terms of the histories and social structures of specific places, then cross-sectional multivariate analysis misses precisely what should be emphasized: causality cannot be discovered as regularity independent of time and space but only as specific social mechanisms that translate social structure into individual acts and vice versa. From this viewpoint, it is the social process in places rather than the individual Robinson Crusoe buffeted by the pressures of nominalist attributes that constitutes the proper focus for political-sociological inquiry. It is not so much defending disciplinary turf as conceptualizing causality (Agnew, 1987).
References AGNEW, J. A. (1985). The Intellectual Devahation of Place and the Possibility of Strong Democracy. Syracuse, NY: Center for the Study of Citizenship, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, Occasional Pub. No. 5. AGNEW, J. A. (1987). Pkzce and Politics. Boston: Allen and Unwin. HAUSER, R. M. (1970). Context and Consex: a cautionary tale. American Journal of Sociology 73, 645-664. JOHNSTON,R. J. (1985). Class and the geography of voting in England: towards measurement and understanding. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (NS) 10, 245-255.