Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Testing Pareto’s Theory
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appear to become more innovative (p<.02) and more positively disposed towards 
risk (p<.05). Conservative MPs display exactly the opposite tendencies. They seem 
to become less innovative (p<.01) and less positively disposed towards risk (to a 
statistically insignificant degree). These widening gaps might plausibly be interpreted 
as corresponding to axes along which MPs slowly accommodate themselves to the 
very different orientations towards risk and innovation which mark out the social 
personalities of their respective Parliamentary parties. 
In conclusion, we can say that convergence between Labour and Conservative 
MPs on conservatism-liberalism, together with divergence on caution-risk and 
convention-innovation, may plausibly stand for real processes of political socialisation 
or acculturation to parliamentary life for the following reasons. Convergence 
between the parties on conservatism-liberalism is likely to count as such because it is 
more closely related to duration of parliamentary experience than to age. Divergence 
between the parties on caution-risk with increasing duration of parliamentary 
experience is also very plausibly a reflection of political socialisation as this would 
explain why Labour MPs should buck the trend for both Labour and Conservative 
mean scores to decline with age. This is also true for divergence between the parties 
on convention-innovation because we can see that this trend is very strongly related 
to duration of parliamentary experience whilst being completely unrelated to age. Of 
course, strictly speaking, the above evidence merely shows that more experienced 
Labour MPs are more ‘conservative’ and more positively oriented towards risk 
and innovation than their less experienced colleagues, and that more experienced 
Conservative MPs are more ‘liberal’ and more negatively oriented towards risk and 
innovation than their less experienced colleagues. To interpret these differences as 
convergence and divergence effects, rather than simply as indicators of differences 
between generational cohorts is to make ambitious inferences which this thesis will 
leave as useful hypotheses which deserve fuller investigation.
Finally, one trend common to both parties deserves special attention here, 
because it supports the hypothesis that prolonged role-playing by politicians might 
conceivably produce higher levels of identity confusion amongst MPs. Firstly, levels 
of dissociative experience clearly drop with increasing age by significant amounts 
for both subpopulations (a fall of .63 SDs (p<.01) appears for the Conservatives and 
a fall of .29SDs (p<.02) appears for Labour). Yet levels of dissociative experience 
drop to reduced extents with the accumulation of parliamentary experience (a fall 
of only .37 SDs (p<.05) appears for the Conservatives and a fall of only .01 SDs 
appears for Labour). This pattern may be intriguing, especially as it is common to 
both parties, yet on its own it constitutes flimsy evidence in support of the hypothesis 
that aspects of parliamentary experience somehow influence both Labour and 
Conservative MPs to resist the general tendency for older MPs to report fewer 
dissociative experiences.
Fortunately, more substantial evidence is at hand. It is not just the dissociative 
experience variable that exhibits this pattern for both Labour and Conservative 
subpopulations. The aggression variable shows it too. Scores on the aggression scale 
dip by .23 SDs with age (a statistically insignificant amount) for the Conservatives, 
and yet they increase by .49SDs (p<.01) with accumulating political experience. 
Scores on the aggression scale dip by .47 SDs (p<.01) with age for Labour, yet 

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
178
they fall by only .26 SDs (p<.05) with accumulating political experience. Hence 
findings show that the cohorts of veteran Labour and Conservative MPs who have 
served in Parliament for more than nine years retain relatively buoyant scores on 
both dissociative experience and aggressiveness, compared with the scores of 
their less experienced colleagues, even though the groups of older Labour and 
Conservative MPs both have much lower scores on these variables than their younger 
counterparts.
This link between dissociative experience and aggressiveness might well have 
been anticipated in view of the preceding discussion of the dissociative experience 
construct, where correlations with ‘angry hostility’ and ‘vulnerability’ were 
mentioned. What was more interesting was the fact that scores on aggressiveness 
were not substantially lower for more experienced MPs, as they were for older MPs. 
Hence it will be concluded that this pattern might conceivably represent a tendency 
for political role-playing, or perhaps other aspects of political experience, to inhibit 
the slow development of the adult personality towards that state of integration which 
Jung labelled ‘individuation’ and Erikson labelled ‘ego integrity’. A more certain 
conclusion is that this finding at least lends some narrow support to Pareto’s theory 
relating Machiavellian personality to the membership of political elites.
5.7  Seniority within Parliament
The next question was whether any of the above patterns related to the accumulation 
of political experience might appear more saliently when the variable tapping high 
level political experience was controlled. Subpopulations were now split between 
those who had risen no higher than PPS or Whip, and those who had managed 
to become junior or senior (shadow) ministers. Mean scores were run for both 
subpopulations. Ns were around 60 and 17 for the Labour subpopulation and around 
21 and 19 for the Conservative subpopulation. Resulting differences between mean 
scores moving from MPs with only low level political experience to those with high 
level political experience are as follows:
These findings amplify only one trend which appeared to be linked more closely 
to parliamentary experience than to increasing age. However, the trend in question is 
also perhaps the most intriguing of those to have been highlighted in the last section. 
It is the one whereby levels of dissociative experience and aggression remain buoyant 
among veteran MPs even though they decline more steeply with age. These trends 
are not now accentuated by any great amounts, yet mean scores hold up better on 
both variables and for both Labour and Conservative subpopulations. Hence it seems 
that the tendency for levels of dissociative experience and aggression not to decline 
with increasing age amongst veteran MPs of both parties might best be explained not 
just with reference to political experience in general but rather with reference to high 
level political experience in particular. Remembering once more that dissociative 
experience and aggression can both be counted as elements of Machiavellianism-
psychopathy, it may be concluded that this surprising finding of a relationship 
between these two variables and level of eliteness within both the Labour and 
Conservative Parliamentary Parties constitutes a partial upholding of Pareto’s notion 

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