ABSTRACT
Politicians are fork-tongued people who enter the partisan fray to feed their egos and fill their pockets. So goes one popular stereotype of the political breed. Politics is in part a debate about values and goals. Three interrelated themes emerge from the ethnographic data: participation in the political process, the role of the parties in the process; and para-political factionalism, which refers to intra party conflicts that help shape the role. The research is also about a particular role—the political party district leader—and the unit is the “field” in which they carry on their activities. A political field has been defined as composed of the groups within which political processes can be observed. In ideal grassroots party politics there should have been, then, a Greenburgh Democratic committee of 156, but there is always a steady turnover and several vacancies.
