Background Characteristics of Delegates To the 1972 Conventions: a Summary Report of Findings From a National Sample

Abstract

JN 1965, Aaron Wildavsky examined what he termed ;. the great mystery of American politics. . the nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater as the Republican presidential candidate, with the accompanying disastrous consequences for the party.' He concluded that .. the Goldwater phenomenon, which once seemed so strange, may become a persistent feature of the American political scene, nonetheless disturbing because it reappears under different ideological guises.2 Spared such an occurrence in 1968, it may be that the American political system was merely given a respite until 1972. The temptation to draw parallels between the 1964 and 1972 elections (and the accompanying agony of the Republican and Democratic parties in those years) is great; and, it may well be that there is a common basis for the Goldwater and McGovern phenomena. On both occasions, the electorally suffering experienced an influx to its national convention of delegates who were political novices, amateurs, ideological purists.3 In the larger study from which data for this research note are drawn,4 attention is directed to identifying relevant dimensions of what is termed a perception of party along which activists fall. As a preliminary to an extensive analysis of how Democratic and Republican delegates differed in their perceptions concerning the as a political institution, an analysis was conducted of certain demographic social and political data which were available for the 1972 delegations. The purpose of this analysis was to develop a descriptive chapter on the characteristics of the delegates who responded to a survey. In addition to supplying useful background data for the larger study, however, these demographic social and political data also provide a rare opportunity to examine differences in the characteristics of delegates to the Democratic and Republican national conventions.5 While such differences are widely assumed to