The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (271 page)

A key concept within Marxist analysis that denotes the surplus labour (S) expended by a worker which is in excess of the necessary labour or variable capital (V) required to satisfy basic subsistence requirements. It is the ratio between necessary and surplus labour that Marx calls the rate of exploitation or rate of surplus value (S/V). Consider a worker who has to perform four hours of necessary labour (V) in order to reproduce himself and his family. A capitalist sets the working day at eight hours which means that the worker labours four hours for himself and four hours for the capitalist. The worker has performed four hours surplus labour and the capitalist has accured a surplus value equal to four hours of labour time. The rate of surplus value or exploitation is, in this case, 100 per cent. The origin of surplus value is the labour power, the capacity to work, expended by the worker in the production process. This is realized by the capitalist when the commodity is sold on the market and the surplus value takes the ‘form’ of profit. Marx denoted two ways in which surplus value is extracted. Absolute surplus value refers to the way capitalists attempt to lengthen the working day and thereby increase surplus labour. Relative surplus value involves reducing necessary labour whilst still making the worker labour the full working day. This can be done through productivity increases by making people work harder or expelling labour and introducing machinery into the production process.
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The scientific study of mass political behaviour began in the 1930s with the discovery that a properly designed survey of a small number of people could produce more accurate predictions than an improperly designed survey of a large number of people. In 1936 the
Literary Digest
forecast that Franklin D. Roosevelt would lose that year's US presidential election. The forecast was based on some 2 million telephone calls. Simultaneously some of the first
Gallup
polls, having sampled only around 2,000 people, were correctly predicting that Roosevelt would win by a landslide. The
Literary Digest
poll failed because telephones, in 1936, mostly belonged to the rich, who mostly opposed Roosevelt: thus it had an incorrect ‘sampling frame’. In statistical theory a sample is representative of a population if, and only if, each member of the population had an equal probability of being selected for the sample. The rigorous way to achieve a representative sample is to get a list of the eligible population (such as the electoral register, for voting samples), and select every (
P/n
)th member of the population, where
P
is the size of the population and
n
is the desired sample size. In practice most surveys use the rough-and-ready ‘quota’ method, in which the interviewer is instructed to interview the correct proportion of each principal social and demographic group in the population, or to sample in a restricted geographical area.
If a sample is correctly drawn, the laws of statistics enable us to predict how close its distribution of the trait being examined (such as voting intention) is to the unknown distribution of that trait in the population from which it is drawn. The form of this prediction is always that there is a high probability (usually 95 or 99 per cent) that the sample distribution varies by not more than a small proportion (typically 1 or 3 per cent) on either side of the true distribution. This form is insufficiently understood by headline writers, who typically overinterpret small shifts in voting intentions revealed by successive polls. One remedy is to take a ‘poll of polls’ including all the reputable polls taken at roughly the same time, and pool their results for the best available forecast of voting intentions.
The surveys of most interest to political science are not those of voting intention (‘If there were a general election tomorrow, how would you vote?’; but every respondent knows there will not be), but rather those which tap attitudes and behaviour at deeper levels. Nationwide election surveys which have run continuously since 1952 in the United States and since 1963 in Britain have built up a full picture of why people vote in the ways that they do. The earlier surveys were held to justify the
Michigan school's
picture of the electorate as illinformed and responding more to their inherited ‘party identification’ than to the issues. More recent work suggests that voters are closer to the
rational choice
school's image of people who choose the party which is closest to offering them what they want; current analysis accepts that both schools of thought have a valid contribution to make towards understanding what makes voters tick.
Survey research underpins almost all good empirical work on large populations in political science and sociology, as there is no other way of making reliable generalizations about them (which does not deter many selfconfident people from making unreliable ones).

 
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A measure of the change between one election result and the next. As originally defined and used by D. E. Butler , ‘swing’ was the average of the winning party's gain in share of the vote and the losing party's loss. This formula, while a valuable summary measure that is still in daily use, suffers from two problems to which there is no generally agreed remedy:

(1)  It is hard to apply when more than two parties are in contention. Perhaps for this reason it has been little used for electoral analysis outside Britain, the United States, and Australasia.
(2)  It averages percentages of one thing (the vote shares at the first election) with percentages of another (the vote shares at the second). So what is the resulting percentage figure a percentage of?

Ingenious but cumbersome ideas of triangular swing have been put forward to deal with the first problem (but how do you summarize four-party movement, for instance in Scotland?) The second problem leads statistical purists to eschew ‘swing’ altogether. Matrix measures of electoral change could be substituted in the (rare) cases where details are available of every type of movement from one behaviour at the first election to another at the second. Otherwise no handy summary measure seems to have been suggested.

 
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A doctrine of socialist transformation rooted in an emphasis on the role of the trade union (
syndicat
in French) as an agent of revolutionary class struggle. The syndicalist movement spread rapidly in Europe, North and South America, and Australia between about 1895 (the year of the foundation of the French Confédération Générale du Travail) and the mid-1920s. The general strike was considered to be the great weapon of syndicalist revolution, and was seen to be potentially more effective than any parliamentary route to socialism or indeed any political overthrow of the state in establishing a new social order based on
workers' control
. The anti-statist and antipolitical tendency of syndicalism suggests strong similarities with
anarchism
(hence the use of the term ‘
anarcho-syndicalism
’). Amongst the many thinkers who contributed directly to the development of syndicalist theory, Georges
Sorel
and Daniel de Leon (one of the founders of America's Industrial Workers of the World, 1905) were particularly important.
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