The conceptualization of political support

By Christian Atabong

Introduction

Scholarly insistence on the need for congruence between the form of government institutions, on the one hand, and political culture, on the other, can easily be traced in an unending stream back at least to Aristotle. However, among modern democratic theorists, the concept of political support and its component elements is most commonly discussed with reference to the work of David Easton (Klingermann, Hans-Dieter; 1998, Pp 98-202). But the concept of support is very complex, and scholars throughout history have sought to analyze this complexity for better comprehension.

In this respect, Easton makes a clear distinction between the object of support and the types of support. According to him, the objects of support can be demarcated into support for the political community, the regime, and the incumbent authorities. With regards to the types of support, Easton discriminated between two kinds of support:  specific and diffuse. For the purpose of this paper, I am going to focus on specific political support, particularly on political authorities at the level of chief executives; those individuals who currently hold positions of political authority, such as prime ministers, presidents, legislators, or in a broader sense the pool of political elites from which government leaders are drawn.

My main focus will be to investigate, how citizens evaluate the present incumbents of office rather than the office itself. Evaluation of political authorities is an important element of the political process (Russell J. Dalton 2004; Pp.6). Dalton posits that in a well-functioning political system, the citizens support the incumbents of government who make authoritative political decisions, as well as endorsing the general principles of the political system.

Conceptualization of specific support

The specificity of political support therefore lies on the distinction between affects for the incumbent and affects for the system. Muller (1977) argues that the hypothesis behind the distinction between incumbent affect and system affect is that the latter is more consequential for the stability of a political regime than the former. However, serious doubts about the applicability of the incumbent-system distinction to the real world has arisen which center around the question of whether it is possible to measure something like “effectiveness” or approval of the performance of an incumbent administration, as opposed to something like “legitimacy” or support for the system of government in general (Edward Muller and Thomas Jukam; 1977, pp. 1561-1595). Other scholars in the domain of politics such as Gerhard Loewenberg, have found a strong correlation between incumbent-system affect, hence attempting to isolate Easton’s distinction between specific and diffuse support. Muller, agreeing with Leowenberg insists that if it turns out that incumbent-system distinction is impossible to validate empirically, then it has no utility as part of any explanation of the stability or instability of a political regime. He therefore tried to add “aggressive political behavior” as a conditional variable to modify Easton’s discrimination between specific and diffuse support. However, despite his plausible arguments, I still believe that Easton’s axiomatic differentiation between specific and diffuse support stand on unshakable academic grounds.

I therefore agree with Easton that “without discriminating in some way between specific and diffuse support, we could not explain adequately the occurrence of extreme political tension, conflict and discontent in some systems, especially democratic ones, without all these giving rise to serious threats to the stability of the regime or political community” In this respect, and without underestimating other scholarly arguments and criticisms, I consider Easton’s conceptualization of specific support the most appropriate to use in designing a questionnaire for survey research.

According to Easton, the uniqueness of specific support lie in its relationship to the satisfactions that members of a system feels they obtain from the perceived outputs and performance of the political authorities. Specific support is a response to the authorities; it is only indirectly relevant, if at all, to the input of support for the regime or political community. I argue that, acknowledging the indirect relevance of specific support for the regime or community should not in any case sound like a contradiction to his very claim of demarcating between specific and diffuse support.

Since the incumbent operates under a government of a nation or community, specific support for the incumbent whether at the negative or positive direction will have some indirect repercussions on the regime or community which he governs. And this does not in any way captures a diffuse proportion of support. Easton himself clarifies this potential doubt in a latter article Easton (1976) with some thoughtful questions:

“To what extent are people able to discriminate between what they view as the evils of a particular administration and the regime within the context of which this leadership functions? Even if members of a system are able to distinguish between the incumbent authorities and the regime, at what point does distrust of a particular administration begin to erode confidence in all authorities and finally in the regime itself”?

Easton’s response to these questions not only clarifies our understanding of specific support but also helps draw a line (however tiny it maybe) between the two dimensions of support that he propounded. He believes that there has been a kind of sequence of events, all within the span of living memory, in which subsequent new major causes for distrust of existing authorities could lead both elites and members to search for some alternative, more acceptable, regime, possibly on the left, more probably on the right. The specific support that is characteristically generated or diminished through political outputs would thereby have overflowed to erode the diffuse support that had attached members to the present regime. Specific support according to Easton is object-specific. It is directed to the perceived decisions, policies, actions utterances or the general style of the authorities. People may seek in a rough way to match perceived outputs to their articulated demands. The authorities will be evaluated according to the extent to which these demands are perceived to have been met. Evaluation of the authorities may be of a positive or negative dimension and may therefore turn on the assessment of the perceived general performance of the authorities (David Easton; 1975. Pp. 435-457).

Talking about evaluation, Douglas Hibbs (1982) argues that people are assume to evaluate an administration’s performance relatively than absolutely. Douglas is right if this assumption is based on comparative evaluation of performance. For instance when evaluating the cumulative performance of two incumbent presidents in two different countries. However, since I are evaluating a single incumbent, I believe that absolute evaluation is more suitable, that is why my request for answer focuses on absolute rather than comparative judgment.

Working definition and the scope of analysis

Having situated ourselves in the context of specific support, I therefore propose to adopt as my working definition that proposed by Easton; namely that specific political support is based on close evaluation of what political authorities do and how they do it. Specific support is directed towards the political authorities and authoritative institutions. It assumes that members have sufficient political awareness to be able to associate satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the perceived behavior of these authorities, whether the behavior is in the form of identifiable actions or some attributed general performance (David Easton; 1975. Pp. 439).

This performance can be further singularized into three types, namely; instrumental, expressive and extraneous. Instrumental performance is based on the satisfaction or dissatisfaction by members from efforts to meet their policy preference. Expressive performance is when members offer or withhold their support because of symbolic behavior through which the authorities are “reassuring to the members in a political context”. In this respect, authorities are being favored because they are viewed as generally qualified persons. Finally, even when members have little knowledge of the authorities, the latter may be perceived simply as being likeable- extraneous performance (David Easton; 1975. Pp. 442).

My subsequent analysis will try to seek a few explanatory variables to uphold each of the above mentioned types of specific supports. I believe that instrumental support deals with satisfaction/dissatisfaction, and evaluation, the former being policy outcome while the latter being policy effort. Expressive may deal with competence because it assesses the general qualification of the incumbent. Finally, extraneous performance which deals with likeability is a category based on support due to the authority’s charismatic appeal.

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