Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
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level mental attributes to permeate the minds of those who populate the political elites. 
The common conservative claim that institutions store up the ‘collective wisdom of 
the ages’ (e.g. Quinton 1978, 50) provides a good starting point for understanding 
these agencies. Whether by conscious intent or otherwise, such arguments run, 
institutions maintain stocks of heuristic guidance which exist on multiple cultural 
levels and may attain the status of ‘tradition’ over time. Yet we can never be sure 
how how well an institution’s ‘collective wisdom’ will serve as a source of heuristic 
guidance. There may often be no means to distinguish ‘useful learned behaviours’ 
from maladapted ‘cultural survivals’. Guidance which works well one year, or when 
applied to a particular issue, may fail when applied under changed circumstances 
encountered the following year, or when applied to another issue area. It is therefore 
unlikely that heuristic guidance will attain the status of tradition simply because its 
mettle has been tested by experience. In order to understand its endurance, we must 
rather consider why elite members internalise it and place faith in it.
This point can usefully be restated and developed with reference to the literature 
on memetic theory which has arisen since the 1976 publication of Richard Dawkins’ 
‘The Selfish Gene’. Dawkins then set out a fascinating and highly influential analogy 
between how genes and ‘memes’ replicate themselves. Memes are units of cultural 
information which are ‘copied over’ from one host mind to another. As recipient 
hosts often receive modified memes rather than true copies of originals, ‘variation’ 
arises. This in turn permits ‘selection’ between alternative memes. Successive 
selections then allow us to conceive of ‘memetic evolution’. Yet memetic selection, 
like genetic selection, cannot be explained in terms of its rationality for individual 
hosts. This applies both when we consider internal rationality for hosts (where 
hosts make selections oriented towards desired outcomes) and external rationality 
for hosts (where hosts make selections which objectively benefit them, as can be 
understood from enlightened external perspectives, but not necessarily by the hosts 
themselves). Memetic theory directs our search for the drivers of memetic selection 
away from these rationalities altogether. Instead, interactions between memes and 
their environments become decisive. Some memes are ‘active replicators’ whose 
successive replications are driven by inner potentials to replicate. Others are 
‘passive replicators’ whose spread hinges upon the existence of favourable external 
conditions. In both circumstances, a material consideration is human agency 
(including subjective sense-making) within the transmission process, yet this is 
viewed as facilitatory, not causal. 
Just like genes, memes may vary, mutate, compete, combine, lie dormant, drift, 
undergo purposeful modification or remain inert over successive replications. Some 
theorists have even conceived of memetic viruses which spread despite harming 
successive hosts (indeed, what makes this an alarming possibility is that memes can 
replicate much faster than genes). As a useful complement to memetic theory, we might 
also apply Max Weber’s classic notion that the locus for cultural transmission has 
varied widely throughout history between various religious, political and economic 
institutional carrier strata, depending in particular upon shifting distributions of 
social power. This potential for memetic copying-over between carrier strata can 
only add to the potential for memes to endure longer than rational calculations which 
sometimes create and support them.  

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
50
Crucially, then, these genetic metaphors help us see that the utilities of memes 
for their hosts may explain just part of their survival stories. Distin (2005) stresses 
that memetic evolution should allow for human volition and creativity. Nonetheless, 
a full understanding of cultural transmission requires that we also look well beyond 
these things.
Turning to consider political elite culture in particular, we can decentre human 
judgment and focus more upon memetic replicatory power by considering agencies 
of political socialisation. Dennis Kavanagh (1972, 30) observes that numerous 
agencies typically shape the political socialisation experiences which sustain political 
cultures. Many of these agencies are psychological in nature, relating directly to the 
experience of political elite membership. It is to these that we now turn in order to 
more fully understand cultural continuity within political elites.
Given the conflictual nature of politics, students of political culture will always 
find some value in Schachter’s famous (1959) finding that we tend to ‘affliliate under 
anxiety’.  An application of Schachter’s finding to the world of politics suggests 
that elected representatives will bind more closely within political subcultures 
when they experience shared adversities (e.g. the hazards of re-election) and face 
common foes (e.g. criticisms from other parties, the media or hostile constituents). 
Schachter stressed that heightened group solidarities are often maintained long after 
the threatening circumstances which create affiliation effects have passed. Hence 
it is likely that members of partisan groups like political parties and their internal 
factions will warm to certain ideological scripts (which can be conceived broadly 
as articulating attitudes, values, or even assumptions about human nature) because 
under threatening circumstances these take on symbolic significance as tokens of 
group identity and solidarity.  
As Margaret Hermann indicates, individual psychological characteristics may 
also converge within political groups because of ‘doppelganger effects’ (Bennis 
1973) whereby leaders tend to surround themselves with people who display similar 
stylistic preferences. Hence Hermann (1986, 175) observes that leadership styles 
tend to permeate institutions from the top down. However, given that new members 
of political elites often strive to attain professional identities which they perceive 
to work well for others, it becomes likely that both ‘top-down’ recruitment effects 
and ‘bottom-up’ ‘role modelling’ effects will synergise to increase psychological 
homogeneity. Hermann describes further bottom-up effects. When political leaders 
take office they are granted short ‘honeymoon periods’. They are also awarded a 
limited number of ‘idiosyncrasy credits’ by those followers upon whom their 
positions depend (Hermann 1986, 185). Sensing their dependency, successful leaders 
understand they must ‘work their audiences’ by gathering intelligence on followers 
and heeding their expectations. 
It therefore becomes reasonable to anticipate, irrespective of whether we are 
thinking of leaders who accommodate themselves to the expectations of followers, or 
vice-versa, that a good measure of belief convergence will occur through dissonance. 
Leon Festinger’s (1957) seminal theory of cognitive dissonance provides an analytic 
framework for phases of cultural resonance spanning beliefs and behaviours. It 
argues that where inconsistency (dissonance) exists between cognitions and their 
attendant behaviours, psychic discomfort results. This discomfort stimulates efforts 

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