John Levi Martin, Ph.D.

Arbeitsvorhaben

Deference and Disruption in Political Interaction

I will be examining the traces of political action left by political actors in the floor debate of the Weimar Reichstag—a case where the multiparty system, and the complexity of the space of alliance, led to complicated political maneuvering until the end, at which point there was an utter collapse of the possibility of politics. To do this, I propose to use formal textual analysis, concentrating less on the substance of what people say and more on how they reference one another and respond to one another. While floor debate is rarely a good place to learn what political actors think, it can be an excellent place to examine how parties signal their willingness to move about in a space of alliances—to increasingly affiliate with some and disaffiliate with others. In particular, I am interested in how parties signal their willingness to move closer to others on future issues, as well as how some party members may signal their interest in possibly abandoning their fellows and shifting parties. (We can partially assess parties’ willingness to affiliate with others by examining their future alignment in terms of voting, and individuals’ willingness to shift parties on the basis of later changes.) They do this, I propose, in large part by continually adjusting their degrees of politeness (deference) when reacting or referring to others. Rather fine differences in degree of deference, however, can be communicated only in a relatively “quiet” parliament. Where the overall level of emotion runs high, subtle signals are likely to be washed out, and one of the things I am interested in is whether and when the extreme parties (Communist and Nazi) made it difficult for other parties to maneuver politically. I am also interested in the fact that there were partisan differences in the respect with which representatives were treated—many hard-right nobles may have been treated with surplus deference because of their titles, age, fame, or military service, and many working-class representatives were perhaps treated more curtly despite their willingness to conform to parliamentary norms—biases that could interfere with the capacity to signal. I also will look at how some actors deliberately contravened norms in order to signal to their (outside) constituents the authenticity of their opposition to the parliamentary regime, but sometimes at the cost of being absent for critical maneuvering with insiders.

Recommended Reading

Martin, John Levi. Social Structures. Princeton University Press, 2009.
—. The True, the Good, and the Beautiful: The Rise and Fall and Rise of an Architectonic for Action. Columbia University Press, 2024.
Rohr, Benjamin, and John Levi Martin. “The State and the Emergence of the First American Party System: Roll Call Voting in the New York State Assembly during the Early Republic.” American Sociological Review, first published July 15, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224251344574.

Kolloquium, 03.02.2026

Taking a Position in the Political Field: The German Reichstag, 1920-1932, or, Towards, and halfway there, a Formal Ethology of Political Action

The zealous focus on an experimental causality as the only valid form of explanation has only exacerbated the formal social sciences’ innate weaknesses when it comes to understanding political action. Political actors are both more and less strategic than we give them credit for—more in that they may violate patterns because they are valid patterns, and less in that they are affected by blindnesses, emotions, and reasoning errors just like the rest of us. Using the very rich transcripts of floor debates in the Weimar Reichstag, I try to recreate parties’ positions in the field as they experienced it and to make sense of their actions as (in some cases) attempts to move in this field. We make use of extensive stenographer records to do an “ethological” analysis—one that tracks the behavior patterns of subjects—in addition to more conventional analyses of voting patterns and computational analyses of speech similarity. We use these data to recreate, as best as we can, actors’ conception of the feel of the whole—how the parties were arranged in reciprocal relations, and their own place. We can then use these overall patterns to select particular episodes for closer analysis, our selection based not on the intrinsic interest of the debate, but on ethological aspects of their action. In particular, the analysis highlights the pivotal role played by the hard right DNVP and how their differentiation strategy shaped the overall perception of the alignment of the political field.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Martin, John Levi (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2025)

The state and the emergence of the first American party system : roll call voting in the New York State Assembly during the early republic

Martin, John Levi (New York, 2024)

The true, the good, and the beautiful : the rise and fall and rise of an architectonic for action

Martin, John Levi (Princeton, NJ. [u.a.], 2009)

Social structures