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A Scale for Measuring a Tory Streak in Canada and the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Tom Truman
Affiliation:
McMaster University

Abstract

This paper reports the making and testing of an attitude scale to be used in measuring toryism-conservatism in both English Canada and the United States (and any other English-speaking country). The fact that the scale is to be used on both sides of the border affects the kinds of items included in the scale, but more of that later.

The inspiration for creating the toryism-conservatism scale came from Gad Horowitz's contention that the political cultures of both the United States and English-speaking Canada are Lockean liberal in content, but the English-Canadian political culture is different from the American because it has a “tory streak” which came in with the United Empire Loyalists, the expelled American “tories,” and was reinforced by later immigrations from the United Kingdom.

Type
Notes
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1977

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References

1 Horowitz, Gad, “Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada,” in Canadian Labour in Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 357.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., 19, 20.

3 Ibid., 4.

4 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1975).

5 First published as McClosky, Herbert, “Conservatism and Personality,” American Political Science Review 52 (1958), 2745CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and reprinted in various places including Renzo, Gordon di (ed.), Personality and Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 255–82.Google Scholar The final form of the McClosky nine-item scale which was the one used by this author was published in Robinson, John P., Rusk, Jerrold G., and Head, Kendra B. (eds.). Measures of Political Attitudes (Ann Arbor: Survey Research Centre, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 1968), 96.Google Scholar

6 Grant, George, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), 64.Google Scholar

7 Buck, How Conservatives Think, 26–28.

8 Hogg, Quintin, The Case for Conservatism (West Drayton, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1947), 16143.Google Scholar

9 I am very impressed with the willingness of my colleagues to give of their time and talents to help in this research project. I should, perhaps, mention here that Gad Horowitz thought that only one of my items was “specifically tory” although he granted that some of the others were distinctly “pre-liberal.” He also disagreed with my method of having judges select the items for the scale. Very generously, he sent me his idea of the items which should go into the scale if it were to be anything like an adequate test of his thesis, though he was not sure that survey research method was appropriate. Tests with both the Horowitz questionnaire and the tory-conservatism scale will be run and the results reported in a subsequent paper.

10 McClosky's sources were Burke (1963), Hearnshaw(1933), White (1950), and Hogg (1947). The foregoing are British writers; his sources also included such American conservatives as Kirk (1953), Rossiter (1955), Wilson (1951), Viereck (1955), and Huntington (1957). McClosky abstracted seven “quintessential elements of the conservative outlook,” which international agreement tends to refute the Hartzian contention that American conservatives are only right-wing liberals:

(1) Man is a creature of appetite and will, “governed more by emotion than reason” (Kirk) in whom “wickedness, unreason and the urge to violence lurk always behind the curtain of civilized behavior” (Rossiter). He is a fallen creature, doomed to imperfection, and inclined to license and apathy.

(2) Society is ruled by “divine intent” (Kirk) and made legitimate by Providence and prescription. Religion “is the foundation of civil society” (Huntington) and is man's ultimate defence against his own evil impulses.

(3) Society is organic, plural, inordinately complex, the product of long and painful evolution, embodying the accumulated wisdom of previous historical ages. There is a presumption in favour of whatever has survived the ordeal of history, and of any institution that has been tried and found to work.

(4) Man's traditional inheritance is rich, grand, endlessly proliferated and mysterious, deserving of veneration, and not to be cast away lightly in favour of the narrow uniformity preached by “sophisters and calculators” (Burke). Theory is to be distrusted since reason, which gives rise to theory is a deceptive, shallow and limited instrument.

(5) Change must therefore be resisted and the injunction needed that “[u]nless it is necessary to change it is necessary not to change” (Hearnshaw). Innovation “is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress” (Kirk).

(6) Men are naturally unequal, and society requires “orders and classes” for the good of all. All efforts at levelling are futile and lead to despair (Kirk and Rossiter), for they violate the natural hierarchy and frustrate man's “longing for leadership.” The superior classes must be allowed to differentiate themselves and to have a hand in the direction of the state, balancing the numerical superiority of the inferior classes.

(7) Order, authority and community are the primary defense against the impulse to violence and anarchy. The superiority of duties over rights and the need to strengthen the stabilizing institutions of society, especially the church, the family, and, above all, private property. (Di Renzo, Personality and Politics, 260–61.)

Viereck, Peter (Conservatism [Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1956])Google Scholar contends that Burke founded an international conservatism of a constitutional, parliamentary kind and that the founding fathers of the American Republic and the Revolution itself were profoundly Burkean and British (87). He names these seven classics of Burkean conservatism: The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, Defense of Constitutions, Thoughts on Government, and Discourses on Davila by John Adams, Letters of Publicola by John Quincy Adams, George Washington's Farewell Address and The Madison Papers.

11 Di Renzo, Personality and Politics, 262.

12 Ibid., 263.

13 See Byrne, Donn, An Introduction to Personality, A Research Approach (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 244.Google Scholar

14 Rummel, R. J., “Understanding Factor Analysis,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 11 (1967), 444–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sanford Labovitz is the authority who sanctions the using of the Pearson correlation coefficients of the factor analysis programme with ordinal level data. “The Assignment of Numbers to Rank Order Categories,” American Sociological Review 35 (1970), 515–24.

15 Rationalism in Politics, quoted by Buck, How Conservatives Think, 153.

16 Hogg, Case for Conservatism, 13.

17 The Conservative Tradition, quoted by Buck, How Conservatives Think, 174.

18 Conservatism, quoted in ibid., 130, 131.

19 Viereck, Conservatism, 10.

20 Ibid., 11.

21 Ibid., 15.

22 Di Renzo, Personality and Politics, 270.