Political theory
particularly reflected in the re-emergence of ethnic and nationalist tensions
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Andrew Heywood Political Theory Third E
particularly reflected in the re-emergence of ethnic and nationalist tensions or the rise of organized crime. Politics, Government and the State 71 Government forms in East Asia, notably in Japan and the so-called ‘tiger’ economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, have tended to be characterized by the priority given to boosting growth and delivering prosperity, over considerations such as individual freedom in the Western sense of civil liberty. They often exhibit broad support for ‘strong’ government, sometimes exercised through powerful leaders or ‘ruling’ parties, underpinned by widely respected Confucian principles such as loyalty, discipline and duty. Islamic government contains both fundamentalist and pluralist forms. The fundamentalist version of political Islam is most commonly associated with Iran and Afghanistan under the Taliban, where theocracies have been constructed in which political and other affairs have been structured according to ‘higher’ religious principles and political office has been closely linked to religious status. By contrast, in states such as Malaysia, Islam has the status of an official state religion but operates alongside a form of ‘guided’ democracy. 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 classical form of military government is the junta, a clique of senior officers that seizes power through a revolution or coup d’e´tat. 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. In the modern period, political analysts have often shifted their attention from the structures of government to the broader activities and processes of governing. This has been reflected in wider interest in the phenomenon of governance. Although it still has no settled or agreed definition, governance refers, in its widest sense, to the various ways in which social life is coordinated. Government can therefore be seen as merely one of the institutions involved in governance; it is possible to have ‘governance without government’ (Rhodes, 1996). From this perspective, a number of modes of governance can be identified, each of which helps to coordinate social life in its own way. Hierarchies, markets and networks (informal relationships and associations) offer alternative means of making collective decisions. The growing emphasis upon governance has resulted from two important shifts in modern government and, indeed, the larger society. In the first place, the boundaries between the state and civil society have become increasingly blurred through, for example, the growth of public/ private partnerships, the wider use within public bodies and state institu- tions of private-sector management techniques, and the increasing im- portance of so-called policy networks. Second, in the process of managing complex modern societies, government itself has become increasingly complex, leading to the idea of multi-level governance. Not only do 72 Political Theory supranational and subnational bodies now vie with national institutions, but government must deal with a growing array of non-state actors, ranging from the mass media to the institutions of global economic governance such as the WTO. The traditional image of government as a command and control system has thus been displaced by one which emphasizes instead bargaining, consultation and partnership. Political systems Classifications of government are clearly linked to what are called ‘political systems’. However, 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. Traditional approaches to government focused upon the machinery of the state and examined the constitutional rules and institutional structure of a particular system of government. Systems analysis has, however, broadened the understanding of government by highlighting the complex interaction between it and the larger society. A ‘system’ is an organized or complex whole, a set of interrelated and interdependent parts that form a collective entity. Systems analysis therefore rejects a piecemeal approach to politics in favour of an overall approach: the whole is more important than its individual parts. Moreover, it emphasizes the importance of relationships, implying that each part only has meaning in terms of its function within the whole. A political system therefore extends far beyond the institutions of govern- ment themselves and encompasses all those processes, relationships and institutions through which government is linked to the governed. The seminal work in this area was David Easton’s The Political System ([1953] 1981). In defining politics as ‘the authoritative allocation of values’, Easton drew attention to all those processes which shape the making of binding decisions. A political system consists of a linkage between what Easton called ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’. Inputs into the political system consist of both demands and supports. Demands can take the form of the desire for higher living standards, improved employment prospects or welfare benefits, greater participation in politics, protection for minority and individual rights and so forth. Supports, on the other hand, are the ways in which the public contributes to the political system by paying taxes, offering compliance and being willing to participate in public life. Outputs consist of the decisions and actions of government, including the making of policy, the passing of laws, the imposition of taxes and the allocation of public funds. Clearly, these outputs generate ‘feedback’ which in turn will shape further demands and supports. As Easton conceived it, the political Politics, Government and the State 73 system is thus a dynamic process, within which stability is achieved only if outputs bear some relationship to inputs. In other words, 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 upon 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. It is sometimes argued that this explains the survival and spread of liberal-democratic forms of government. Liberal democracies contain a number of institutional mechanisms which force government to pay heed to popular demands, creating channels of communication between government and the governed. For instance, 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 a number of points of access to government. On the other hand, stress can also build up within liberal-democratic systems. Electoral democracy, for example, may degenerate into a tyranny of the majority, depriving economic, ethnic or religious minorities of an effective voice. Similarly, 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. Nevertheless, by comparison with liberal democracies, communist regimes 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, fuelled 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. The analysis of government as a systemic process is, however, not without its critics. Although systems analysis is portrayed as a neutral and scientific approach to government, normative and ideological biases undoubtedly operate within it. Easton’s work, for example, reflects an essential liberal conception of politics. In the first place, it is based upon a consensus model of society that suggests that any conflicts or tensions that 74 Political Theory occur can be reconciled through the political process. This implies that an underlying social harmony exists within liberal capitalist societies. Further- more, Easton’s model assumes that a fundamental bias operates within the political system in favour 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. The state The term ‘state’ can be used to refer to a bewildering range of things: a collection of institutions, a territorial unit, a historical entity, a philosophical idea and so on. In everyday language, the state is often confused with the government, the two terms being used interchangeably. However, although some form of government has probably always existed, at least within large communities, the state in its modern form did not emerge until about the fifteenth century. The precise relationship between state and government is, nevertheless, highly complex. Government is part of the state, and in some respects is its most important part, but it is only an element within a much larger and more powerful entity. So powerful and extensive is the modern state that its nature has become the centrepiece of political argument and ideological debate. This is reflected, in the first place, in disagreement about the nature of state power and the interests it represents, that is, competing theories of the state. Second, there are profound differences about the proper function or role of the state: what should be done by the state and what should be left to private individuals. Government and the state The state is often defined narrowly as a separate institution or set of institutions, as what is commonly thought of as ‘the state’. For example when Louis XIV supposedly declared, ‘L’e´tat c’est moi’, he was referring to the absolute power that was vested in himself as monarch. The state therefore stands for the apparatus of government in its broadest sense, for those institutions that are recognizably ‘public’ in that they are responsible for the collective organization of communal life and are funded at the public’s expense. Thus the state is usually distinguished from civil society. The state comprises the various institutions of government, the bureau- cracy, the military, police, courts, social security system and so forth; it can Politics, Government and the State 75 be identified with the entire ‘body politic’. It is in this sense, for instance, that it is possible to talk about ‘rolling forward’ or ‘rolling back’ the state, by which is meant expanding or contracting the responsibilities of state institutions and, in the process, enlarging or reducing the machinery of the state. However, such an institutional definition fails to take account of the fact that, in their capacity as citizens, individuals are also part of the political community, members of the state. Moreover, the state has a vital territorial component, its authority being confined to a precise geogra- phical area. This is why the state is best thought of not just as a set of institutions but as a particular kind of political association, specifically one that establishes sovereign jurisdiction within defined territorial borders. In that sense, its institutional apparatus merely gives expression to state authority. The defining feature of the state is sovereignty, its absolute and unrest- ricted power, discussed at greater length in Chapter 4. The state commands supreme power in that it stands above all other associations and groups in society; its laws demand the compliance of all those who live within the territory. Thomas Hobbes conveyed this image of the state as the supreme power by portraying it as a ‘Leviathan’, a gigantic monster, usually represented as a sea creature. It is precisely its sovereignty which distinguishes the modern state from earlier forms of political association. In medieval times, for instance, rulers exercised power but only alongside a range of other bodies, notably the church, the nobility, and the feudal guilds. Indeed, it was widely accepted that religious authority, centring upon the pope, stood above the temporal authority of any earthly ruler. The modern state, however, which first emerged in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, took the form of a system of centralized rule that succeeded in subordinating all other institutions and groups, spiritual and temporal. Although such a state is now the most common form of political community worldwide, usually taking the form of the nation- state, there are still examples of stateless societies. Traditional societies, for instance, found amongst semi-nomadic peoples and sometimes settled tribes, may be said to be stateless in that they lack a central and sovereign authority, even though they may possess mechanisms of social control that may be described as government. Furthermore, a state can break down when its claim to exercise sovereign power is successfully challenged by another group or body, as occurs at times of civil war. In this way, Lebanon in the 1980s, racked by war among rival militias and invaded by Israeli and Syrian armies, and the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, can both be described as stateless societies. In addition to sovereignty, states can be distinguished by the particular form of authority that they exercise. In the first place, state authority is territorially limited: states claim sovereignty only within their own borders 76 Political Theory and thus regulate the flow of persons and goods across these borders. In most cases these are land borders, but they may also extend several miles into the sea. Second, the jurisdiction of the state within its borders is universal, that is, everyone living within a state is subject to its authority. This is usually expressed through citizenship, literally membership of the state, which entails both rights and duties. Non-citizens resident in a state may not be entitled to certain rights, like the right to vote or hold public office, and may be exempt from particular obligations, such as jury service or military service, but they are nevertheless still subject to the law of the land. Third, states exercise compulsory jurisdiction. Those living within a state rarely exercise choice about whether or not to accept its authority. Most people become subject to the authority of a state by virtue of being born within its borders; in other cases this may be a result of conquest. Immigrants and naturalized citizens are here exceptions since they alone can be said to have voluntarily accepted the authority of a state. Finally, state authority is backed up by coercion: the state must have the capacity to ensure that its laws are obeyed, which in practice means that it must possess the ability to punish transgressors. Max Weber (1864–1920) suggested in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1948) that ‘the state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. By this he meant not only that the state had the ability to ensure the obedience of its citizens but also the acknowledged right to do so. A monopoly of ‘legitimate violence’ is therefore the practical expression of state sovereignty. The link between coercion and the state is also underlined by Philip Bobbitt’s (2002) portrayal of the state as essentially a ‘warmaking institution’. Nevertheless, the relationship between the state and government re- mains complex. The state is an inclusive association, which in a sense embraces the entire community and encompasses those institutions that constitute the public sphere. Government can thus be seen as merely part of the state. Moreover, the state is a continuing, even permanent, entity. By contrast, government is temporary: governments come and go and systems of government are remodelled. On the other hand, although government may be possible without a state, the state is inconceivable in the absence of government. As a mechanism through which collective decisions are enacted, government is responsible for making and implementing state policy. Government is, in effect, ‘the brains’ of the state: it gives authoritative expression to the state. In this way, government is usually thought to dictate to and control other state bodies, the police and military, educational and welfare systems and the like. By implementing the various state functions, government serves to maintain the state itself in existence. Politics, Government and the State 77 The distinction between state and government is not, however, simply an academic refinement; it goes to the very heart of constitutional rule. Government power can only be held in check when the government of the day is prevented from encroaching upon the absolute and unlimited authority of the state. This is particularly important given the conflicting interests which the state and the government represent. The state suppo- sedly reflects the permanent interests of society – the maintenance of public order, social stability, long-term prosperity and national security – while government is inevitably influenced by the partisan sympathies and ideological preferences of the politicians who happen to be in power. If government succeeds in harnessing the sovereign power of the state to its own partisan goals, dictatorship is the likely result. Liberal-democratic regimes have sought to counter this possibility by creating a clear divide between the personnel and machinery of government on the one hand, and the personnel and machinery of the state on the other. Thus the personnel of state institutions, like the civil service, the courts and the military, are recruited and trained in a bureaucratic manner, and are expected to observe strict political neutrality, enabling them to resist the ideological enthusiasms of the government of the day. However, such are the powers of patronage possessed by modern chief executives like the US president and the UK prime minister that this apparently clear division is often blurred in practice. Theories of the state In most Western industrialized countries the state possesses clear liberal- democratic features. Liberal-democratic states are, for instance, character- ized by constitutional government, a system of checks and balances amongst major institutions, fair and regular elections, a democratic franchise, a competitive party system, the protection of individual rights and civil liberties and so forth. Although there is broad agreement about the characteristic features of the liberal-democratic state, there is far less agreement about the nature of state power and the interests that it represents. Controversy about the nature of the state has, in fact, increasingly dominated modern political analysis and goes to the very heart of ideological and theoretical disagreements. In this sense, the state is an ‘essentially contested’ concept: there is a number of rival theories of the state, each offering a different account of its origins, development and impact. Mainstream political analysis is dominated by the liberal theory of the state. This dates back to the emergence of modern political theory in the writings of social-contract theorists such as Hobbes and Locke. These thinkers argued that the state had risen out of a voluntary agreement, or 78 Political Theory social contract, made by individuals who recognized that only the establishment of a sovereign power could safeguard them from the insecurity, disorder and brutality of the ‘state of nature’. In liberal theory, the state is thus a neutral arbiter among competing groups and individuals in society; it is an ‘umpire’ or ‘referee’, capable of protecting each citizen from the encroachment of his or her fellow citizens. The state is therefore a neutral entity, acting in the interests of all and representing what can be called the ‘common good’ or ‘public interest’. This basic theory has been elaborated by modern writers into a pluralist theory of the state. Pluralism is, at heart, the theory that political power is dispersed amongst a wide variety of social groups rather than an elite or ruling class. It is related to what Robert Dahl (see p. 223) termed ‘polyarchy’, rule by the many. Although distinct from the classical conception of democracy as popular self-government, this nevertheless accepts that democratic processes are at work within the modern state: electoral choice ensures that government must respond to public opinion, and organized interests offer all citizens a voice in political life. Above all, pluralists believe that a rough equality exists among organized groups and interests in that each enjoys some measure of access to government and government is prepared to listen impartially to all. At the hub of the liberal-democratic state stand elected politicians who are publicly accoun- table because they operate within an open and competitive system. Non- elected state bodies like the civil service, judiciary, police, army and so on, carry out their responsibilities with strict impartiality, and are anyway subordinate to their elected political masters. An alternative, neo-pluralist theory of the state has been developed by writers such as J.K. Galbraith and Charles Lindblom. They argue that the modern industrialized state is both more complex and less responsive to popular pressures than the classical pluralist model suggests. While not dispensing altogether with the notion of the state as an umpire acting in the public interest or common good, they insist that this picture needs qualifying. It is commonly argued by neo-pluralists, for instance, that it is impossible to portray all organized interests as equally powerful since in a capitalist economy business enjoys advantages which other groups clearly cannot rival. In The Affluent Society ([1962] 1985), Galbraith emphasized the ability of business to shape public tastes and wants through the power of advertising, and drew attention to the domination of major corporations over small firms and, in some cases, government bodies. Lindblom, in Politics and Markets (1977), pointed out that, as the major investor and largest employer in society, business is bound to exercise considerable sway over any government, whatever its ideological leanings or manifesto promises. Although neo-pluralists do not describe business as an ‘elite group’, capable of dictating to government in all areas, Politics, Government and the State 79 still less as a ‘ruling class’, they nevertheless accept that a liberal democracy is a ‘deformed polyarchy’ in which business usually exerts pre-eminent influence, especially over the economic agenda. New Right ideas and theories became increasingly influential from the 1970s onwards. Like neo-pluralism, they built upon traditional liberal foundations but now constitute a major rival to classical pluralism. The New Right, or at least its neo-liberal or libertarian wing, is distinguished by strong antipathy towards government intervention in economic and social life, born of the belief that the state is a parasitic growth which threatens both individual liberty and economic security. The state is no longer an impartial referee but has become a self-serving monster, a ‘nanny’ or ‘leviathan’ state, interfering in every aspect of life. New Right thinkers have tried, in particular, to highlight the forces that have led to the growth of state intervention and which, in their view, must be countered. Criticism has, for instance, focused upon the process of party competition, or what Samuel Britten (1977) called ‘the economic consequences of democracy’. In this view, the democratic process encourages politicians to outbid one another by making vote-winning promises to the electorate, and encourages electors to vote according to short-term self-interest rather than long-term well-being. Equally, closer links between government and major economic interests, business and trade unions in particular, has greatly increased pressure for subsidies, grants, public investment, higher wages, welfare benefits and so forth, so leading to the problem of ‘government overload’. Public choice theorists such as William Niskanen (1971) have also suggested that ‘big’ government has been generated from within the machinery of the state itself by the problem of ‘bureaucratic over-supply’. Pressure for the expansion of the state comes from civil servants and other public employees, who recognize that it will bring them job security, higher pay and improved promotion prospects. Pluralism has been more radically rejected by elitist thinkers who believe that behind the fac¸ade of liberal democracy there lies the permanent power of a ‘ruling elite’. Classical elitists such as Gaetano Mosca (1857–1941), Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) and Robert Michels (1876–1936) were con- cerned to demonstrate that political power always lies in the hands of a small elite and that egalitarian ideas, such as socialism and democracy, are a myth. Modern elitists, by contrast, have put forward strictly empirical theories about the distribution of power in particular societies, but have nevertheless drawn the conclusion that political power is concentrated in the hands of the few. An example of this was Joseph Schumpeter (see p. 223), whose Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy ([1944] 1976) suggested the theory of democratic elitism. Schumpeter described democ- racy as ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive 80 Political Theory struggle for the people’s vote’. The electorate can decide which elite rules, but cannot change the fact that the power is always exercised by an elite. Radical elite theorists have gone further and decried the importance of elections altogether. In The Managerial Revolution (1941), James Burn- ham suggested that a ‘managerial class’ dominated all industrial societies, both capitalist and communist, by virtue of its technical and scientific knowledge and its administrative skills. Perhaps the most influential of modern elite theorists, C. Wright Mills, argued in The Power Elite (1956) that US politics is dominated by big business and the military, commonly referred to as the ‘military-industrial complex’, which dictated government policy, largely immune from electoral pressure. Marxism offers an analysis of state power that fundamentally challenges the liberal image of the state as a neutral arbiter or umpire. Marxists argue that the state cannot be understood separate from the economic structure of society: the state emerges out of the class system, its function being to maintain and defend class domination and exploitation. The classical Marxist view is expressed in Marx and Engels’ often-quoted dictum from The Communist Manifesto ([1848] 1976): ‘the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. This view was stated still more starkly by Lenin (see p. 83) in The State and Revolution ([1917] 1973), who referred to the state simply as ‘an instrument for the oppression of the exploited class’. Whereas classical Marxists stressed the coercive role of the state, modern Marxists have been forced to take account of the apparent legitimacy of the ‘bourgeois’ state, Download 1.87 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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