Entrepreneur and Protagonist: Two Faces of a Political Career

A characteristic of the politician in perhaps every society is his tendency to talk more, and louder, than other people; and his assumption that these other people the public are interested in what he has to say. The cynic may place the politician's performance in the category of animal noises: barks and threats. The pseudo-cynic credits the politician with a strategic sense, but the 'spoils' turn out to be no more than 'desirable power positions'.2 The politician himself may well claim that his aim is to work towards the realization of his manifesto; and that although a strategic element is involved in reaching a position from which he has the power to implement his ideas, his job is principally to convince the public, and even his opponents, that his manifesto is morally justifiable. These three contrasting views of the business of politics correspond with Rapoport's distinction of 'Fights, Games and Debates'.3 The career of a politician may indeed embrace all these three approaches, and there is little point in trying to argue a case for the priority of one or the other. Whether a politician is driven by private ambition or moral fervour is a matter for his own conscience. However, the analysis of political debate appears to be a grossly neglected topic, whereas the game approach has been rather fashionable recently. In this paper I am concerned with those political middlemen who link 'the public' on the local community level with the higher echelons of the political system. My thesis is that the role of the political middleman encompasses two contrasting but complementary aspects, which I term the entrepreneur4 and the protagonist. The entrepreneurial aspect involves the purely strategic, game-like element, and the protagonist aspect the debate-like element of the middleman's career. The distinction is analytic; empirically the two aspects are mutually supporting and very hard to disentangle. However, consideration of both, rather than the strategic aspect alone, can allow a fuller and perhaps less cynical appreciation of a political career. I shall first sketch a theoretical framework in which the protagonist problem can be handled, and then go on to give a particular case-study, derived from my fieldwork in Finnish Lapland.