Stability, Transformation, and Regime Interests

Abstract

Nordlinger and Zeitlin have each used survey research techniques to make insightful and important contributions to the analysis of political transformation and regime stability. Yet Nord-linger's book on British working-class Tory voters and Zeitlin's study of the revolutionary Cuban working class differ as widely in approach as do the two political systems they study. Zeitlin makes a central assumption “that the social pressures arising out of the work situation are fundamental to the workers' political outlook” (p. 221), and he concentrates on concepts such as alienation and exploitation, which Nordlinger never explicitly considers. But he pays less attention to the distinctive elements of Cuba's political tradition that contributed to the one successful socialist revolution in the Western hemisphere. By contrast, Nordlinger explicitly seeks to connect the exceptional stability of British democracy with such apparently undemocratic, but characteristically English, attitudes as social deference and acquiescence toward authority. Despite the weight of some of his own data, he only briefly considers an interpretation of working-class Labour supporters as acting rationally on the basis of their class interests.