Majoriatarian Politics

I. The theory of democratic government

A. One fundamental distinction among governments is the number of people who participate in important decision making.

1. Rule by one: AUTOCRACY (or monarchy)

2. Rule by few: OLIGARCHY (or aristocracy)

3. Rule by many: DEMOCRACY (or polyarchy)

B. Democracy has a symbolic value that overshadows its meaning.

1. Like "justice" and "decency," democracy has become the apple pie and motherhood buzzword of political discourse.

a. The names of more than 20 percent of the world's political parties contain some variation of "democracy."

b. North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea even though by our standards it is one of the most undemocratic nations on earth.

2. It is not enough to know that "the people" govern; one needs to understand how they govern in a democracy.

C. There are two schools of thought about what constitutes a democracy.

1. The PROCEDURAL VIEW of democracy prescribes a set of normative principles for democratic decision making. 

a. Three principles derive from answers to three questions about decision making in any group:

(1) Who should participate? Everyone--which leads to the principle of UNIVERSAL PARTICIPATION.

(2) How much should individual preferences count? Equally--which leads to POLITICAL EQUALITY.

(3) How many votes are needed to reach a decision? A majority--which leads to MAJORITY RULE. [To illustrate the participation of voters, show segments from Chapter A-1 of the videodisc: "Parties and Campaigns," especially footage of Perot supporters in the segment "1992 Elections: Campaigning Through Election Day."]

b. These principles, however, apply only to government in a direct democracy, in which all members of the group meet to make decisions themselves.

(1) In an INDIRECT democracy, also commonly called REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY, citizens choose officials to make decisions for them.

(2) Given the fact of representative government in all modern nations, a fourth principle is needed.

c. RESPONSIVENESS states that elected representatives should respond to public opinion.

(1) They should do what a majority of the citizens want, no matter what that is.

(2) This principle is unsettling to some people, who fear the enactment of "undemocratic" decisions as a response to majority rule.

2. The SUBSTANTIVE VIEW evaluates democracy on the basis of the substance of government policies.

a. Most substantive theorists require that democratic government must guarantee civil rights and liberties.

b. Some would add social and economic rights to the list of substantive outcomes a democracy ensures.

D. Procedural and substantive views of democracy are at odds with each other.

1. The unlimited majority rule of proceduralism may result in policies that are unfavorable to minorities.

2. The imprecise standards of the substantive perspective cannot adequately resolve whether policies are truly democratic.

3. On the whole, we favor the PROCEDURAL conception of democracy in this book because it more clearly approaches the classical definition of democracy as government by the people.

4. We also believe that compromise is necessary. Pure procedural democracy should be diluted to protect minority rights by guaranteeing that civil liberties and civil rights are part of the structure of government.

II. Understanding democratic government through institutional models

A. Representative democracy requires some means by which decision makers can determine what people want.

1. Democratic government requires INSTITUTIONAL MECHANISMS--established procedures and organizations--to promote government responsiveness.

2. Examples are elections, political parties, legislatures, and interest groups.

3. Democratic theorists differ over the extent to which decision makers should respond to mass public opinion.

B. The MAJORITARIAN MODEL of democracy relies on the classic textbook theory of democracy.

1. It interprets government "by the people" as government by the majority of the people.

2. It assumes that mass participation in politics is required to ensure government accountability.

3. It assumes that the people will be well informed on political issues and make thoughtful voting decisions.

4. It also encourages citizens to participate directly in decision making through the institutional mechanisms of the REFERENDUM and the INITIATIVE.

C. The PLURALIST MODEL of democracy was developed to accommodate the reality of mass political behavior, which assumes that citizens are uninformed about their government.

1. It is based on the idea of PLURALISM, which assumes that people in modern society often form groupings along economic, religious, ethnic, or cultural lines.

2. People with similar interest form INTEREST GROUPS to try to influence government policymakers.

3. The pluralist model of democracy interprets government "by the people" to mean government by people operating through competing interest groups.

4. The plural model favors a decentralized and organizationally complex governmental structure that provides these groups open access to public officials who consider their views.

D. An undemocratic model of American government comes from ELITE THEORY.

1. Elite theory assumes that important government decisions are made by a small but powerful group of people who have great wealth and business connections.

2. These people make decisions in the interest of the financial, communications, industrial, and government institutions they represent rather than in the interest of the populace.

3. Elite theory differs from pluralist theory mainly in its identification of the ruling minority.

a. Elite theory holds that it is a small, distinct, and durable group.

b. Pluralist theory does not assume that a single minority rules but that many different minorities win on different issues.

c. Research suggests that an identifiable elite does not regularly win on government issues.

4. Although American democracy can be better described by pluralism than by elitism, it must be recognized that all groups are not equally represented in the political system.

III. Evaluating democratic government

A. Various scholars have proposed tests for democratic government in countries across the world.

1. G. Bingham Powell established five criteria for democratic government:

a. The government bases its legitimacy on representing the desires of its citizens.

b. Leaders are chosen in free elections, contested by at least two viable political parties.

c. Most adults can participate in the electoral process.

d. Citizens' votes are secret and are not coerced.

e. Citizens, leaders, and party officials enjoy basic freedoms of speech, press, assembly, religion, and organization.

2. According to the criteria of five different scholars, only nineteen of nearly a hundred of the world's largest nations qualify as democracies in all five ratings.

B. The establishment of democracies

1. Democratization is occurring in numerous countries today.

a. Technology makes it difficult for governments to retain total control.

b. New democracies are fragile and susceptible to attack by opponents.

c. Ethnic and religious conflicts aggravate the difficulties of democratization.

C. The United States qualifies as a democracy, according to each of the five scholars.

1. How can our government qualify as a democracy if its citizens do not participate regularly in politics and if the government sometimes does not do what a majority of the people want?

2. Although the United States does not rate very highly according to the criteria of Majoritarian democracy, its decentralized and open structure fulfills the pluralist model very well.

3. If the pluralist model makes the United States look more democratic than the Majoritarian model, you should ask yourself these questions:

a. Is the pluralist model really an adequate expression of democracy, or is it a perversion of the classical ideal designed to portray America as more democratic than it really is?

b. Does the Majoritarian model result in a more desirable type of democracy?

c. If so, is it possible to devise new mechanisms of government to produce the mix of majority rule and minority rights that we desire?

MODELS OF DEMOCRACY

This lecture focuses on the pluralist and Majoritarian models of democracy. Compared to the parallel lecture, it provides more detail about both models, but it treats pluralist theory more thoroughly on the assumption that it is more difficult to explain.

I. Review of concepts in various views of democratic theory

A. The PROCEDURAL VIEW of democracy established three normative principles for a direct democracy in response to three questions:

1. Who participates? Everyone--POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY.

2. How much? Equality--POLITICAL EQUALITY.

3. What rule for making decisions? MAJORITY RULE.

B. Given an INDIRECT democracy or REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT, a fourth principle is needed.

1. Representatives should do what the people want--RESPONSIVENESS.

2. This implies that representatives do WHATEVER the people want.

C. Incorporating these value principles in two alternative models of democracy:

1. MAJORITARIANISM favors "unlimited" implementation of the procedural values.

2. PLURALISM is consistent with a "limited government" implementation of procedural values.

II. The MAJORITARIAN model of democracy is the "textbook" model of democracy.

A. Governmental responsiveness to popular demands comes about through mass citizen participation in politics.

B. Institutional mechanisms can and should be constructed to enable citizens to make their preferences known directly in the political system and to control the behavior of public officials directly.

1. Electoral arrangements are the main institutional mechanisms to accomplish this popular control.

2. Given sufficient institutional mechanisms for popular participation, the citizenry can hold the government accountable.

3. Assumptions of the Majoritarian model include

a. A high degree of knowledge about politics on the part of the citizenry.

b. A great deal of political participation by the citizenry.

c. "Rational" behavior from citizens.

C. Institutional mechanisms other than elections of representatives that have been established to serve the purposes of Majoritarian democracy.

1. REFERENDUM--popular voting on policy issues.

2. INITIATIVE--proposing policy issues to the legislature.

3. RECALL--a procedure for citizens to gather signatures on a petition to dismiss an elected official before his or her term of office expires. (The recall procedure is not mentioned in the textbook.)

D. The Majoritarian model, which tries to approximate decision making by the sovereign majority, emphasizes MAJORITY RULE over MINORITY RIGHTS.

III. The PLURALIST model of democracy was developed to counter survey studies that revealed a low level of citizen knowledge about
government and a low level of citizen participation.

A. This conception of democracy had been favored by many American political scientists who

1. Despaired of fulfilling the demanding conditions of Majoritarian democracy, and

2. Noted that American policy was often unresponsive to majority sentiment as recorded in public opinion polls.

3. Pluralist democracy replaced the idea of responsiveness to majority opinion with responsiveness to the competing claims of different interests in society, as reflected in the pluralist nature of society.

B. The concept of pluralism

1. Means many (plural) interests. It views modern society as made up of heterogeneous institutions and organizations that have diverse religious, economic, ethnic, and cultural interests.

2. Politically, these diverse organizations manifest themselves in "pressure groups" that advance and protect their members' interests in public policy.

C. The value basis of pluralism lies in three areas:

1. Whereas the liberal values EQUALITY and the conservative values FREEDOM, the pluralist tends to be a value relativist, admitting the validity of conflicting value claims by interested groups.

2. Pluralism, however, values the openness of the political system to the clash of claims among competing groups.

3. Pluralism also values INDIVIDUALISM--free speech, freedom of choice, civil rights, and civil liberties, the characteristics of a "liberal democracy."

D. The institutional mechanisms for PLURALIST democracy differ from those for Majoritarian democracy.

1. Pluralism divides governmental authority among numerous institutions that have competing, even overlapping, authority.

2. Divided authority prevents governmental responsiveness to mass opinion.

a. Mass opinion is probably misinformed about the issue anyway.

b. If not misinformed, mass opinion does not necessarily reflect the public interest, for it doesn't take into account the rights of minorities--both civil rights and economic rights.

3. Given institutional mechanism with divided authority, these mechanisms must be kept open to provide social interests with many points of access to government to argue their interests.

4. As long as the system is kept open to the interplay of these diverse interests, the "public interest" is eventually served through the interplay of the conflicting interests in policymaking.

5. The watchwords of pluralist democracy are therefore partitioned authority, decentralization, and open access.

6. To compare PLURALIST DEMOCRACY with MAJORITARIAN DEMOCRACY:

a. In majoritarianism, the building blocks are individual citizens rather than groups or organized interests.

b. In majoritarianism, citizens themselves assert their preferences directly into the system through mechanisms for mass participation.

c. In majoritarianism, there is no place for partitioned authority--the government should be structured to provide for immediate expression of public opinion.

d. In majoritarianism, elected representatives are expected to respond quickly to the wishes of the people.

E. Pluralism as "minorities' rule" views governmental conflict not in terms of a majority versus a minority but of many minorities in conflict with one another.

1. Professor Robert Dahl, the political scientist who is most closely associated with pluralist democracy, adopted the Greek polyarchy to characterize minorities' rule.

a. In polyarchy many different groups conflict with one another over any given policy question. (Example: logging interests v. manufacturers v. consumers.)

b. Perhaps there is some mix of these conflicting interests that can be identified as the PUBLIC INTEREST, serving the greatest number of people while harming the fewest number of people.

c. Admittedly, the public interest is a vague concept, but it can be distinguished from any PRIVATE interest served at the expense of many other private interests.

2. Because pluralism sees society in terms of a conflicting struggle among minorities with different interests, it does not stress governmental responsiveness to majority demands but rather governmental action on behalf of the public interest.

3. The pursuit of this public interest comes not so much from mass citizen participation in politics but from the interplay of contending groups--the public interest is eventually served if the governmental structure is open in the sense that it allows for different groups to have their claims heard in competition with one another.

4. In PLURALIST DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967, p. 67), Robert Dahl advanced the FUNDAMENTAL AXIOM of pluralism: "Instead of a single center of sovereign power, there must be multiple centers of power, none of
which is or can be wholly sovereign."

5. Under pluralism, democracy comes about through the openness of the system to group interests but not necessarily as a result of mass citizen participation.

THE ELITIST VIEW

There are two competing models of the underlying political dynamics of the United States. Yet majoritarianism and pluralism are not the only models of American government that are used by political scientists. In this lecture we explore elitism, a critical view of the political process.

I. The power elite

A. The elitist view of America is a relatively simple notion: a small group of wealthy and powerful individuals rule America. Important public policies adopted by our government will reflect the class interests of this stratum of America.

1. This is not a particularly new view of American. In AN ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF THE CONSTITUTION published in 1913, historian Charles Beard claimed that the Constitution was designed to protect the financial interests of the framers. Because the framers were property owners and had substantial financial investments, Beard reasoned that they would ensure that they would be protected by the
Constitution.

2. Community power studies, like MIDDLETOWN IN TRANSITION (1937), found typical American cities dominated by a small cadre of local elites.

3. Marxist critiques of American politics have viewed class dynamics as the dominant explanatory variable. The wealthy, capitalist class is seen subjugating the working class. 

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B. The view that America is not a real democracy but a country ruled by the upper stratum is often identified with several key elite theorists.

C. Mills argued that the power elite came from corporations, government, and the military. They were not competing sets of elites, but an interlocking directorate. They moved back and forth among sectors, pursuing their class interests regardless of which of the three sectors they found themselves in at any one time.

1. Mills defined his power elite this way: "The people of the higher circles may also be conceived as members of a top social stratum, as a set of groups whose members know one another, see one another socially and at business, and so, in making decisions, take one another into account. The
elite, according to this conception, feel themselves to be, and are felt by others to be, the inner circle of `the upper social classes.'"

2. Mills was saying that this top stratum is different not just because it has much more in the way of resources than the rest of the population, but because it acts in a coherent and unified way to protect its interest. 

II. Mills' critics

A. Mill's powerful critique of American society produced a predictable wave of criticism. He had said, quite bluntly, that America was not a real democracy. Most social scientists could not accept this view. They were willing to acknowledge that our democracy was not perfect, but not that democracy was an illusion perpetrated on the masses by a small, all-powerful elite.

1. Mill's work was easy to attack. It was a theoretical work and offered little in the way of empirical research to back up its wide-ranging assertions.

2. To the skeptic, the power elite comes across as being a rather amorphous, ill-defined group. Who was in the inner circle and who wasn't? Did class interests always unite the elite politically? Why couldn't there be competing sets of elites?

B. One critically important refutation of Mill's thesis came from Robert Dahl's masterful WHO GOVERNS? (1961). This study of local politics in New Haven, Connecticut, brought the pluralist school to its height of influence.

1. Dahl looked at three separate areas of New Haven politics: school policy, downtown redevelopment, and political party nominations. If a power elite ruled New Haven, then it should control each of these three important areas. Yet Dahl found that separate sets of elites were active in each area;
there was little overlap. What's more, elites competed actively for the support of groups concerned about policymaking in a particular area. Politicians tried to pyramid their resources by building coalitions with various groups.

2. Dahl concluded that New Haven--and by implication the United States--was a pluralist democracy. Interest groups were active in influencing public policy on issues that affected their constituents. Citizens were not controlled by elites. Rather, public policy was made through interaction of elites with groups of citizens.

3. Dahl's work, in turn, was attacked just as vociferously as was Mill's. Those who criticized Dahl did not necessarily agree with Mills. Many political scientists took issue with Dahl because they found his methodology inadequate to the task.

III. Mill's disciples

A. Just as critics rose to take on Mills, so did defenders who wanted to prove that his theory was correct. Many scholars produced works that provided evidence to show the various assertions made by Mills were true.

B. One major approach is to document the ties between those in the inner circle of the upper stratum. Numerous studies present statistical evidence showing that the background of government officials is compatible with Mill's thesis of an interchangeable elite. Others show how the social interaction of top elites lends credence to his argument.

C. One work in this tradition is John Gaventa's POWER AND POWERLESSNESS, a study of a poor coal mining area in central Appalachia.

1. Gaventa pursues Dahl's line of criticism that power may not always be directly observable. He tries to understand how values, beliefs, social myths, and symbols influence political outcomes. Thus, he goes far beyond looking at elections and lobbying campaigns to seek the source of
political power.

2. Gaventa finds that the miners of Clear Fork Valley are thoroughly dominated by the coal companies. Poor miners are largely quiescent because they have been socialized into accepting the relationship between the powerless and powerful as the natural order of things.

D. Michael Parenti documents the role of the elite in controlling media in two books, INVENTING REALITY and MAKE-BELIEVE MEDIA.

1. In both books, Parenti explains the hidden biases of both entertainment media and news media. He evaluates the relationships between owners of media and media outputs.

2. Parenti concludes that a rich oligarchy controls the visions and images that dominate American social and political thought.

IV. American democracy?

A. What are we to make of this? Is America ruled by a power elite? Most social scientists regard this position as too extreme. The mainstream point of view holds that some sectors of society may be more powerful than others, but there is no small, interlocking elite that controls American politics.

1. Despite the enormous resources available to business, evidence of an inner circle dominating American politics remains unconvincing. The ties among the members of this inner circle cannot be taken as evidence of the exercise of power.

2. Membership in the power elite remains vague. Simply specifying who is at the top of our most important institutions of government and society does not prove that they operate as an elite. A unified class interest is assumed, not proven.

3. The competition and conflict between large American corporations is not adequately addressed in this literature. If giant American corporations are frequently fighting each other in policy disputes, what kind of unity do they have?

4. Gaventa's case study of Clear Fork Valley is not easily dismissed on methodological grounds. The evidence is very persuasive. Still, generalizing from an isolated coal mining area to the rest of the country is problematic.

B. The controversy will continue. Those sympathetic to Mill's view will produce new studies trying to demonstrate the power of the inner circle. Critics will focus on the methodology of most of these studies. Ultimately, each of us has to decide the question, "How democratic is America?" Social scientists will never agree on a single answer.