Elmer Eric Schattschneider

Elmer Eric Schattschneider (August 11, 1892 – March 4, 1971) was an American political scientist.

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• I suppose the most important thing I have done in my field is that I have talked longer and harder and more persistently and enthusiastically about political parties than anyone else alive.
  • As quoted by Sidney A. Pearson, Jr. in the 2004 introduction to Party Government: American Government in Action

The Semisovereign People (1960)

• Every fight consists of two parts: (1) the few individuals who are actively engaged at the center and (2) the audience that is irresistibly attracted to the scene. The spectators are as much a part of the over-all situation as are the overt combatants. The spectators are an integral part of the situation, for, as likely as not, the audience determines the outcome of the fight. The crowd is loaded with portentousness because it is apt to be a hundred times as large as the fighting minority, and the relations of the audience and the combatants are highly unstable. Like all other chain reactions, a fight is difficult to contain. To understand any conflict it is necessary, therefore, to keep constantly in mind the relations between the combatants and the audience because the audience is likely to do the kinds of things that determine the outcome of the fight. This is true because the audience is overwhelming; it is never really neutral; the excitement of the conflict communicates itself to the crowd. This is the basic pattern of all politics.
  • Chap. 1 : The Contagiousness of Conflict

• The role of conflict in the political system depends, first, on the morale, self-confidence and security of the individuals and groups who must challenge the dominant groups in the community in order to raise an opposition.
  • Chap. 1 : The Contagiousness of Conflict

• The attack on politics, politicians and political parties and the praise of nonpartisanship are significant in terms of the control of the scale of conflict. One-party systems, as an aspect of sharply sectional party alignments, have been notoriously useful instruments for the limitation of conflict and depression of political participation. This tends to be equally true of measures designed to set up nonpartisan government or measures designed to take important public business out of politics altogether.
  • Chap. 1 : The Contagiousness of Conflict

• The effectiveness of democratic government as an instrument for the socialization of conflict depends on the amplitude of its powers and resources. A powerful and resourceful government is able to respond to conflict situations by providing an arena for them, publicizing them, protecting the contestants against retaliation and taking steps to rectify the situations complained of; it may create new agencies to hear new categories of complaints and take special action about them.
  • Chap. 1 : The Contagiousness of Conflict

• Political conflict is not like a football game, played on a measured field by a fixed number of players in the presence of an audience scrupulously excluded from the playing field. Politics is much more like the original primitive game of football in which everybody was free to join, a game in which the whole population of one town might play the entire population of another town moving freely back and forth across the countryside.
  • Chap. 1 : The Contagiousness of Conflict

• In the nature of things a political conflict among special interests is never restricted to the groups most immediately interested.
  • Chap. 2 : The Scope and Bias of the Pressure System

• The distinction between public and special interests is an indispensable tool for the study of politics. To abolish the distinction is to make a shambles of political science by treating things that are different as if they were alike.
  • Chap. 2 : The Scope and Bias of the Pressure System

• If we are able, therefore, to distinguish between public and private interests and between organized and unorganized groups we have marked out the major boundaries of the subject; we have given the subject shape and scope. We are now in a position to attempt to define the area we want to explore. Having cut the pie into four pieces, we can now appropriate the piece we want and leave the rest to someone else. For a multitude of reasons the most likely field of study is that of the organized, special-interest groups. The advantage of concentrating on organized groups is that they are known, identifiable and recognizable.
  • Chap. 2 : The Scope and Bias of the Pressure System

• The class bias of associational activity gives meaning to the limited scope of the pressure system, because scope and bias are aspects of the same tendency. The data raise a serious question about the validity of the proposition that specialinterest groups are a universal form of political organization reflecting all interests. As a matter of fact, to suppose that everyone participates in pressure-group activity and that all interests get themselves organized in the pressure system is to destroy the meaning of this form of politics. The pressure system makes sense only as the political instrument of a segment of the community. It gets results by being selective and biased; if everybody got into the act the unique advantages of this form of organization would be destroyed, for it is possible that if all interests could be mobilized the result would be a stalemate.
  • Chap. 2 : The Scope and Bias of the Pressure System

• The vice of the groupist theory is that it conceals the most significant aspects of the system. The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upperclass accent. Probably about 90 per cent of the people cannot get into the pressure system.
  • Chap. 2 : The Scope and Bias of the Pressure System

• One possible synthesis of pressure politics and party politics might be produced by describing politics as the socialization of conflict. That is to say, the political process is a sequence: conflicts are initiated by highly motivated, hightension groups so directly and immediately involved that it is difficult for them to see the justice of competing claims.
  • Chap. 2 : The Scope and Bias of the Pressure System

• It is the losers in intrabusiness conflict who seek redress from public authority. The dominant business interests resist appeals to the government. The role of the government as the patron of the defeated private interest sheds light on its function as the critic of private power relations.
  • Chap. 2 : The Scope and Bias of the Pressure System

• From the standpoint of party politics the margins within which pressure groups operate are limited. If a group divides equally in an election, its impact is zero.
  • Chap. 3 : Whose Game Do We Play?

• The scope and bias of the pressure system do not fit easily into the calculus of party politics. First, the pressure system is much too small to play the role sometimes assigned to it. Secondly, the supposed party neutrality of the pressure groups is largely a myth.
  • Chap. 3 : Whose Game Do We Play?

• Since it is not easy to move special-interest groups from one party camp into the other, is it not better party strategy to try to capitalize on the public hostility toward many of these groups than it is to woo them?
  • Chap. 3 : Whose Game Do We Play?

• The power of pressure groups tends to evaporate when it is translated into other dimensions of politics because the calculus of party politics is entirely different from the calculus of pressure politics. Numbers are everything in one dimension and very little in the other. We are dealing with two different strategies of politics and two different concepts of political organization. Moreover, the end product of party politics is inevitably different from that of pressure politics. Inevitably some people prefer one game to the other.
  • Chap. 3 : Whose Game Do We Play?

• Most of the organizational problems of the parties are unique. The party system is by a wide margin the largest mobilization of people in the country. The parties lack many of the qualities of smaller organizations, but they have one overwhelming asset of their own. They are the only organizations that can win elections.
  • Chap. 3 : Whose Game Do We Play?

• The failure to understand that unification and division are a part of the same process has produced some illusions about politics.
  • Chap. 4 : The Displacement of Conflicts

• In the competition of conflicts there is nothing sacred about our preference for big or little conflicts. All depends on what we want most. The outcome is not determined merely by what people want but by their priorities.
  • Chap. 4 : The Displacement of Conflicts

• Political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power; the antagonists can rarely agree on what the issues are because power is involved in the definition.
  • Chap. 4 : The Displacement of Conflicts

• The substitution of conflicts is the most devastating kind of political strategy. Alliances are formed and re-formed; fortresses, positions, alignments and combinations are destroyed or abandoned in a tremendous shuffle of forces redeployed to defend new positions or to take new strong points. In politics the most catastrophic force in the world is the power of irrelevance which transmutes one conflict into another and turns all existing alignments inside out.
  • Chap. 4 : The Displacement of Conflicts

• There is a perpetual effort of the parties to isolate each other. To say it crudely, all radical proposals for the re-organization of American politics propose to isolate the rich.
  • Chap. 4 : The Displacement of Conflicts

• Sectionalism tends strongly to depress party organization because elections in one-party areas are won not by competing with the opposition party but by eliminating it.
  • Chap. 5 : The Nationalization of Politics

• Democracy is a competitive political system in which competing leaders and organizations define the alternatives of public policy in such a way that the public can participate in the decision-making process.
  • Chap. 8 : The Semisovereign People

Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (1969)

• What is government? From the outside it looks like a security system based on the marriage of land and people, From the inside, it looks like and attempts to create a community. A government is like an oyster, hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the outside and inside are utterly dependent on each other.
  • p. 24

• People who do not know what government is are not likely to know what democracy is either, for democracy is only what the soft inside of the oyster looks like.
  • p. 35

• The love of people goes far beyond liberty, rights, equality, and justice. It is something positive, seeks the fullest possible self-realization; it contemplates happiness, overflows all differences, and creates the kind of wealth that can be produced only by people who enjoy their common participation in a community.
  • p. 43

• Democracy begins as an act of imagination about people. For this reason democracy is a doctrine of social criticism.
  • p. 46

• Democracy has no place for the kind of justice implied in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Democracy is a system for the resolution of conflict, not for vengeance. Simple black-white notions of right and wrong do not fit into democratic politics. Political controversies result from the fact that the issues are complex, and men may properly have differences of opinion about them. The most terrible of all over-simplifications is the notion that politics is a contest between good people and bad people. Democracy is based on a profound insight into human nature, the realization that all men are sinful, all are imperfect, all are prejudiced, and none knows the whole truth. That is why we need liberty and why we have an obligation to hear all men. Liberty gives us a chance to learn from other people, to become aware of our own limitations, and to correct our bias. Even when we disagree with other people we like to think that they speak from good motives, and while we realize that all men are limited, we do not let ourselves imagine that any man is bad. Democracy is a political system for people who are not sure that they are right.
  • p. 53

• Government is the most successful idea in the world, but for all its success and importance it is something imperfect. There is no ideal state. After thousands of years it is still a mixture of good and evil.
  • p. 116