Abstract
This paper presents a conceptualization of political alienation as an evaluative orientation toward the political system at the regime level. It then reviews the conceptual status of the most widely used measures of alienation, and concludes that the distinctions among them reflect differences in the attitude object and in the format of the survey questions which make them up. Next the paper reviews trends in attitudes toward American political institutions between 1964 and 1974, demonstrating that the decline in confidence in national leaders was only rarely accompanied by a repudiation of systemic values and processes. These findings are based upon national opinion surveys.
The main body of the paper reports on evidence about the relationship between political alienation and political action, drawn from surveys in the San Francisco Bay Area conducted by Berkeley's Survey Research Center in 1972 and 1973. A new Political Alienation Index is used as the attitude measure, and a model is developed to account for alienation's causal influence on participation in unconventional political protest. By the use of multiple regression analysis involving multiplicative terms, it is shown that political alienation interacts with the individual's cognitive and political skills, age, attitudes toward the protest act, and structural opportunities for action to promote protest behavior. Thus the political relevance of rising disaffection from the ongoing order can only be assessed when other characteristics of the alienated and their political context have been established.
The Inter University Consortium for Political Research provided access to the University of Michigan's national election surveys. I am grateful to Rober Kahn for permission to reproduce findings from the Bureaucratic Encounter Survey.
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Citrin, J. Political alienation as a social indicator: Attitudes and action. Social Indicators Research 4, 381–419 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00353142
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00353142