Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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and predictable ways to problems characterised by cognitive indeterminacy, and it 
was argued that orientations towards conservatism-liberalism and caution-risk in 
particular represent heuristics upon which collective entities like political parties 
must increasingly rely, as levels of cognitive indeterminacy rise.
To return to the analysis of findings, it is particularly interesting to note that the 
Machiavellian measure of ideological conviction-relativism aligns with measures of 
liberalism, creativity and tolerance of risk, as Pareto’s model predicts. One possible 
explanation is that high scorers on this scale will often be emotionally expressive 
individuals who will tend not to require sublimated outlets for their emotions. Low 
scorers may then be emotionally inhibited individuals whose searches for sublimated 
outlets have drawn them to the world of politics. It is certainly noteworthy that 
Conservative MPs were the lowest scorers. Following the Freudian listing of 
‘intellectualisation’ as one of the ego defence mechanisms, and Harold Lasswell’s 
classic formulation of political man in this Freudian vein as someone who displaces 
private thoughts onto public objects, we may think here of the superego dominated 
person who experiences emotion vicariously as fierce ideological conviction.
One particularly intriguing pattern remains to be considered. Liberal Democrat 
scores on external locus of control are elevated significantly above Conservative 
scores by a large interval (p<.01), whilst Labour scores are lower than Conservative 
scores by an even larger interval (p<.01). This suggests that Labour MPs are more 
likely than Conservative MPs, and much more likely than Liberal Democrat MPs, 
to possess internal locus of control. As this survey took place just one year after the 
1997 general election, this finding may in part reflect the high morale of Labour 
MPs during the honeymoon period following their election. And in particular, it 
may convey their heightened optimism concerning the new government’s capacity 
to bring about positive change. To venture the alternative explanation and argue 
that Labour MPs really are more inclined to possess internal locus of control as 
an enduring personality trait is to run with what has become a political football. In 
the wake of the 1997 election, as commentators began to form impressions of the 
character of the new administration, there emerged a pronounced tendency amongst 
the hostile media to label it as an arrogant, ‘control freak’ government. The term has 
since stuck. In a February 2006 interview for ‘The Independent’ newspaper, Labour 
Chancellor Gordon Brown responded to the suggestion that he was reputed to be a 
‘control freak’ by referring to his commitment to devolution, and by stating that ‘the 
twenty-first century must be about governments giving power to the people’.
8
 There 
is perhaps some irony here. It is worth reminding ourselves, by glancing back at the 
earlier list of locus of control items, that the Chancellor’s belief that ‘the people’ can 
exercise effective control is itself a marker for internal locus of control.
The real value of the above finding is perhaps to draw attention to the fact that 
further correlational research using locus of control and related constructs may well 
prove fruitful in the further exploration of social personality (and perhaps individual 
psychobiography) within the Parliamentary Labour Party, the party grassroots, 
and perhaps democratic socialist movements more generally. Such research could 
8  Steve Richards’ interview of the Chancellor appeared on p. 4 of ‘The Independent’ on 
28/2/2006.

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Testing Pareto’s Theory
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conceivably help redress the weight of literature which positions ‘authoritarian 
personality’ firmly on the political right, by teasing out a more limited sense in which 
a rather different kind of authoritarianism, based upon an overestimation of the 
capacity for control, resides with the democratic socialist approach to politics. The 
idea that Labour governments are ambitious and overconfident beyond their means, 
as is suggested by the internal locus of control construct, cannot be levelled at every 
Labour government. Some may be tempted to refer to this trait in order to understand 
the political will which led to the post-war nationalisation of industries such as 
mining, or the construction of social welfare institutions such as the National Health 
Service. Others may regard it as a psychological motivator for measures designed to 
control individuals, such as anti-terror legislation, national identity cards, anti-social 
behaviour orders, and the like, which came to characterise Tony Blair’s three terms 
in office as Prime Minister. Such wild speculation suggests that internal locus of 
control, if it really can exist as a government attribute, is likely to constitute a mixed 
blessing, because it may simultaneously be a force for incompetent meddling, for 
building great institutions and for making great changes. 
To continue in this vein, we might regard the wide gulf (.63 SDs) between Labour 
and the Liberal Democrats on the locus of control measure as providing an important 
sense in which the Liberal Democrat MPs stand out more than the MPs of any other 
party as being ‘individualists’. Of course, both conservatives and liberals have, over 
the years, criticised ‘big government’, they have shared Churchill’s suspicions of 
‘construction’, and they have warmed to Friedrich Hayek’s advocacy of ‘spontaneous 
order’ over state intervention, and indeed Hayek’s preferences for the rule of law 
over ‘socialist legality’. More fully, we might say that Conservative individualism 
echoes the Liberal Democrat theme of control to the extent both perspectives are 
ideologically rooted in the seventeenth Century Whig concern to instil a rule of law 
which protects the individual from arbitrary decisions by government; a concern which 
was to endure into the late eighteenth century with Burke and on into the twentieth 
century with Hayek (Raeder 1997). Irrespective of whether the bogey has been the 
Stuart monarchy, French revolutionary zeal, or state socialism, the shared feeling 
that the rule of law must protect the individual from arbitrary force has endured. And 
now that the great ideological battles of the twentieth century have been played out, 
both Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs continue to apply this shared thinking 
within their criticisms of micro-management from Whitehall. 
Yet the significant interval (0.37 SDs) between Liberal Democrats and Conservatives 
on the locus of control measure provides us with a basis for teasing apart subtly different 
senses in which these two groups are ‘individualists’. If conservative resistance to 
‘big government’ is to be regarded as stemming from something other than a fatalistic 
belief that events are inherently uncontrollable, then we might usefully take as our 
starting point the idea that conservative individualism focuses not upon the properties 
of events themselves but rather upon the properties of those who act to bring events 
under control. Here we might usefully consider that lack of faith in human nature which 
has become integral to contemporary theories of ‘conservative realism’ (e.g. Minogue 
(ed.) 1996). This conservative realist orientation towards human nature stresses both 
the limitations of the intellect and the power motive as a fundamental driver of human 
behaviour. It also assumes what might problematically be termed human ‘selfishness’ 

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