Political Theory (1) Week 4-5 PDF

POLITCS POLITICAL THEORY (1) WEEK 4-5 GOVERNMEN THE STATE T  GOVERNMENT  DEFINITION: To ‘govern’ is to rule or exercise control over others. ‘Government’ is usually understood mor...

POLITCS POLITICAL THEORY (1) WEEK 4-5 GOVERNMEN THE STATE T  GOVERNMENT  DEFINITION: To ‘govern’ is to rule or exercise control over others. ‘Government’ is usually understood more narrowly to a set of established and permanent institutions whose function is to maintain public order and undertake collective action. All systems of government encompass three basic functions:  The making of laws, or legislation; the  GOVERNMENT CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES:  Government of any kind is both oppressive and unnecessary.  Government comes in various varieties that it is difficult to categorize or classify.  Government cannot be understood in isolation, separate from the society over which it rules.  GOVERNMENT  WHY WE HAVE GOVERNMENT?  GOVERNMENT AND GOVERNANCE  POLITICAL SYSTEMS  WHY HAVE GOVERNMENT?  The classic argument in favor of government is found in social-contract theory, which constitutes the basis of modern political thought.  Thomas Hobbes, J.-J. Rousseau & John Locke.  Social-contract theorists see government as a necessary defence against evil and barbarity, their view of human nature being essentially pessimistic.  An alternative tradition portrays government as intrinsically benign, as a means of promoting good and not just of avoiding harm.  WHY HAVE GOVERNMENT?  AQUINAS: The state is the ‘perfect community’ The proper effect of law was to make its subjects good. Government and law would be necessary for human beings even in the absence of original sin. This benign view of government as an instrument which enables people to cooperate for mutual benefit has been kept alive in modern politics by the social-democratic tradition.  WHY HAVE GOVERNMENT?  ANARCHISTS:  Government and all forms of political authority are not only evil but also unnecessary.  An optimistic conception of human nature, stressing the capacity for rational understanding, compassion and cooperation.  William Godwin:  ‘Man is perfectible, or in other words susceptible of perpetual improvement’.  In the state of nature, a ‘natural’ order will therefore prevail, making a ‘political’ order quite unnecessary.  Social harmony will spontaneously develop as individuals recognize that the common interests that bind them are stronger than the selfish interests that divide them,  When disagreements do occur, they can be resolved peacefully through rational debate and discussion.  Government is not as a safeguard against disorder, but the cause of conflict, unrest and violence.  By imposing rule from above, government represses freedom, breeding resentment and promoting inequality. GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNANCE  Although all governments have the objective of ensuring orderly rule, they do so in very different ways and have assumed a wide variety of institutional and political forms.  CLASSIFICATIONS OF TYPES OF GOVERNMENT:  Political philosophers - ‘The ideal constitution’  Political scientists and political theorists - ‘A science of government’ GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNANCE  GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNANCE  ARISTOTLE:  Categorization criteria: Who rules? Who benefits from rule?  Government can be placed in the hands of a single individual, a small group or the many. And can be conducted either in the selfish interests of the rulers or for the benefit of the entire community.  Six forms of government:  Tyranny, oligarchy and democracy are all perverted forms of rule in which, respectively, a single person, a small group and the masses govern in their own interests.  Monarchy, aristocracy and polity are to be preferred because the single individual, small group or the masses govern in the interests of all.  GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNANCE  ARISTOTLE:  Tyranny is the worst of all possible constitutions since it reduces all citizens to the status of slaves.  Monarchy and aristocracy are the best but impractical: they are based on a God-like willingness to place the good of the community before one’s own interests.  Polity, rule by the many in the interests of all, is the most practicable of constitutions, but feared that the masses may resent the wealth of the few and too easily come under the sway of a demagogue.  He therefore advocated a ‘mixed’ constitution which would leave government in the hands of the ‘middle classes’, those who are neither rich nor poor.  GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNANCE  LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES:  Liberal:  Individual rights and liberties enjoy some form of protection from government  They respect the principle of ‘limited government’:  The constitution  Checks & balances  Civil society  GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNANCE  LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES: Democratic:  They organize regular and competitive elections.  They respect the principle human rights:  Freedom of expression  Freedom of assembly  Freedom of movement  The cornerstone of liberal democracies id political pluralism  GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNANCE  TYPES OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES:  Republics or constitutional Monarchies  Parliamentary or Presidential  Majoritarian or Coalition governments  CONTEMPORARY ALTERNATIVES TO LIBERAL DEMOCRATIES:  New democracies  East Asian government  Islamic government  military government  GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNANCE  NEW DEMOCRACIES (In post-communist, or ‘transition’, countries):  Assume assume an outwardly liberal-democratic form, with the adoption of multi-party elections and the introduction of market-based economic reforms.  Lack democratic consolidation, exhibiting ‘flaws’ such as a weak or undeveloped civil culture, inadequate checks on executive power, fragmented or unstable party systems, or a general weakness of state power.  EAST ASIA GOVERNMENT (South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.):  Priority to boosting growth and prosperity over individual freedom in the Western sense.  Broad support for ‘strong’ government (Powerful leaders or ruling parties).  Respected principles of loyalty, discipline and duty  GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNANCE  NEW DEMOCRACIES (In post-communist, or ‘transition’, countries):  Assume assume an outwardly liberal-democratic form, with the adoption of multi-party elections and the introduction of market-based economic reforms.  Lack democratic consolidation, exhibiting ‘flaws’ such as a weak or undeveloped civil culture, inadequate checks on executive power, fragmented or unstable party systems, or a general weakness of state power.  EAST ASIA GOVERNMENT (South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.):  Priority to boosting growth and prosperity over individual freedom in the Western sense.  Broad support for ‘strong’ government (Powerful leaders or ruling parties).  Respected principles of loyalty, discipline and duty  GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNANCE  ISLAMIC GOVERNMENT:  The fundamentalist version:  Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan under the Taliban  Theocracies:  Political and other affairs have been structured according to ‘higher’ religious principles.  Political office closely linked to religious status.  Guided Islamic democracy:  Malaysia & Indonesia.  Islam has the status of an official state religion  Islam operates alongside a form of ‘guided’ democracy.  GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNANCE  MILITARY GOVERNMENT:  Despite a general trend towards civilian government and some form of electoral democracy, military government continues to be important in Africa, the Middle East and parts of South-East Asia and Latin America.  The classic form of military government is the junta, a clique of senior officers that seizes power through a revolution or coup d’état.  Other forms of military government include military-backed personalized dictatorships and regimes in which military leaders content themselves with ‘pulling the strings’ behind the scenes.  GOVERNANCE  DEFINITION: The various ways in which social life is coordinated. Government is merely one of the institutions involved in governance.  DIFFERENT MODES OF GOVERNANCE Hierarchies, markets and networks (informal relationships and associations) offer alternative means of making collective decisions.  GOVERNANCE  The growing emphasis on governance has resulted from two important shifts in modern government and the wider society:  The boundaries between the state and civil society have become increasingly blurred.  Government is no longer a specific activity which takes place within discrete societies.  Multi-level governance’:  A shift in policy-making responsibility away from national government, as power is both ‘drawn down’ and ‘sucked up’, creating a complex process of interactions.  The former trend involves the strengthening of sub-national bodies through a process of localization or devolution; the latter reflects the growing importance of international bodies (Global governance).  POLITICAL SYSTEMS  Classifications of government are clearly linked to what are called ‘political systems’.  The notion that politics is a ‘system’ is relatively new, only emerging in the 1950s, influenced by the development of systems theory and its application in works like Talcott Parsons’s The Social System (1951)  It has, nevertheless, brought about a significant shift in the understanding of governmental processes.  POLITICAL SYSTEMS PARSONS’ SOCIAL SYSTEM  POLITICAL SYSTEMS EASTON’S POLITICAL SYSTEM  POLITICAL SYSTEMS  Systems analysis has broadened the understanding of government by highlighting the complex interaction between it and the larger society.  The political system is thus a dynamic process, within which stability is achieved only if outputs bear some relationship to inputs:  If policy outputs do not satisfy popular demands, these will progressively increase until the point when ‘systemic breakdown’ will occur.  The capacity to achieve such stability is based on how the flow of inputs into the political system is regulated by ‘gatekeepers’, such as interest groups and political parties, and the success of government itself in converting inputs into outputs.  Some political systems will be far more successful in achieving stability than others.  POLITICAL SYSTEMS  Liberal democracies contain institutional mechanisms which force government to pay heed to popular demands, creating channels of communication between government and the governed.  The existence of competitive party systems means that government power is gained by that set of politicians whose policies most closely correspond to the preferences of the general public.  Even if politicians are self-seeking careerists, they must respond to electoral pressures to have any chance of winning office.  Demands that are not expressed by parties or articulated at election time can be championed by interest groups or other lobbyists. Further, the institutional fragmentation typically found in liberal democracies offers competing interests several points of access to government.  This might explain the survival and spread of liberal-democratic forms of government.  POLITICAL SYSTEMS  On the other hand: Stress can build up within liberal-democratic systems. Electoral democracy may degenerate into a tyranny of the majority, depriving economic, ethnic or religious minorities of an effective voice. Parties and interest groups may be far more successful in advancing the demands of the wealthy, the educated and the articulate than they are in representing the poor and disadvantaged.  POLITICAL SYSTEMS Communist & non-democratic regimes, by comparison with liberal democracies, operated within political systems that were clearly less stable:  In the absence of party competition and independent pressure groups, the dominant party-state apparatus simply lacked mechanisms through which demands could be articulated, so preventing policy outputs from coming into line with inputs.  Tensions built up in these systems, first expressed in dissent and later in open protest, fueled by the emergence of better educated and more sophisticated urban populations and by the material affluence and political liberty apparently enjoyed in Western liberal democracies.  POLITICAL SYSTEMS  The analysis of government as a systemic process is, however, not without its critics.  Easton’s work reflects an essentially liberal conception of politics:  It assumes a consensus model of society that suggests that any conflicts or tensions that occur can be reconciled through the political process.  This implies that an underlying social harmony exists within liberal capitalist societies.  A fundamental bias operates within the political system in favor of stability and balance.  Systems are self-regulating mechanisms which seek to perpetuate their own existence, and the political system is no exception.  Once again, this reflects the liberal theory that government institutions are neutral, in the sense that they are willing and able to respond to all interests and groups in society.  Such beliefs are linked not only to a particular conception of society but also to a distinctive view of the nature of state power.