Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy

Anthony H. Birch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781138656468
• eBook ISBN: 9781134121489
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This highly acclaimed and popular academic text is now available in a new edition, having been revised and updated to cover the analyses of the use, abuse and ambiguity of many essential concepts used in political discourse and political studies. These include basic concepts such as liberty, democracy, rights, representation, authority and political power.

New to this edition are three sections of great topical interest:

• entirely original analysis of global terrorism, which puts the recent developments of Islamic terrorism into perspective by comparing it with earlier examples of terrorist tactics by a variety of state agencies, revolutionary groups and minority nationalist movements
• extended discussion on multiculturalism, which supplements theoretical arguments with succinct summaries of the differing ways in which ethnic and cultural minorities have been dealt with in Canada, Britain, France and the Netherlands
• section on democratization that focuses on the problems, social and political and even theological, involved in turning authoritarian regimes into stable democracies in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy is a stimulating guide to current world problems as well as essential reading for foundation courses at first or second year level such as elements of politics, political concepts and ideas and fundamentals in politics.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This is a book about the concepts and theories that are invoked when people discuss politics and government in modern democracies. It examines a variety of theories, both analytical and evaluative, and approaches them by analysing some basic political concepts because ideas about politics can only be expressed by using concepts.

A concept is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘an idea of a class of objects, a general notion or idea’, and by Webster’s Dictionary as ‘an abstract or generic idea generalized from particular instances’. A political concept is an abstract idea about politics and people who discuss political matters use political concepts all the time. They cannot avoid doing so, because, as a British philosopher has said, ‘our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given for us in the language that we use. The concepts that we have settle for us the forms of the experience we have of the world’ (Winch 1958: 15). An American political theorist has said much the same with particular reference to politics, observing that in political life ‘our language is not just a neutral medium from some independent reality but instead is partly constitutive of that reality’ (Herzog 1991: 141).

The problem for all those who observe, study or participate in politics (and in modern societies that means most people) is that many political concepts are ambiguous, value-laden and subject to more than one meaning or interpretation. The object of this book is to examine some of the basic concepts of modern politics so as to clarify their meaning or meanings, to indicate the implications of using them in one sense rather than another, and to discuss their utility in political analysis.

In the course of doing this various familiar theoretical controversies will be thrown into a new light and examined from a relatively detached viewpoint. These include controversies about the power of the national state, the bases of political authority within the state, the nature of democratic ideals, the relationships between economic and political power, the case for extending popular participation in government, and the nature of minority rights. Because students of politics have varied widely in their methods of analysis, as well as in the nature of their political values, the final two chapters of the book will discuss the main methods adopted by political scientists and make suggestions about their relative utility.

An example may illustrate the nature of the conceptual problems involved in discussing politics. If it is said that George W. Bush became president of the United States in 2001, this is a simple historical statement that does not employ any concepts. If it is said that the American president wields extensive executive powers conferred on him by the constitution, this statement employs a concept with a fairly low level of generality, namely ‘executive powers’; but it does not involve any ambiguity or uncertainty as the powers in question are set out in a legal document. However, if it is said that the American president enjoys more political power than the prime minister of Britain, this statement hinges on a concept with a rather high level of generality, namely ‘political power’. There are problems about defining political power and disagreements between political analysts as to how its extent should be assessed or measured. That these problems and disagreements are serious will be clear to anyone who reflects for a moment on a further proposition sometimes advanced, namely that the industrial-military complex in the United States wields more power than the president.

There are similar problems about the terms commonly used in the classification of political systems. There is fairly general agreement about which systems can be called democratic, now that the people of eastern Europe have made it clear that they were never deceived by the term ‘people’s democracy’. However, there is endless disagreement about whether democracy should be defined in terms of institutional arrangements or in terms of the ideals which those arrangements are claimed to promote. When it is said that the United States is a pluralist democracy, this raises questions about the exact meaning of the term ‘pluralist’. If it is said that Austria or Sweden have corporatist systems of policy making, this raises questions about the definition of ‘corporatist’. If it is said that the state in capitalist society is an agent of the capitalist class, this raises problems about definition together with problems about the evidence that might be adduced to establish or refute the proposition.

It is my belief that everyone concerned with the study and analysis of politics needs to give more direct consideration than is normally given to the definition and understanding of the basic concepts involved in this field of study. Many of these concepts are commonly used without definition because they are familiar to us from general usage and we think we know what they mean. But they have ambiguities that need to be cleared up and shades of meaning that need to be distinguished if they are to form the basis of significant generalizations. Conceptual clarity is desirable in all academic disciplines, but students of politics seem to stand in special need of it. To illustrate this point, let us consider, for a moment, the differences between the study of politics and the study of history, on the one hand, and economics on the other.

Students of history have little need to make a special study of concepts, for the academic discipline developed by historians makes little use of generalizations based on concepts. The concern of historians is to provide a chronological account of the more important events in the country and period they are studying, including an account of the behaviour of the more significant political, military or economic leaders. As Gottschalk has said, the historian ‘is distinguished from other scholars most markedly by the emphasis he places upon the role of individual motives, actions, accomplishments, failures and contingencies in historical continuity and change’ (Gottschalk 1954: 279). Historians use concepts of a fairly low level of generality when they group events together and give them a collective label, such as ‘civil war’ or ‘the industrial revolution’. However, conventional historians (as distinct from Marxist or neo-Marxist historians) rarely use concepts as the basis of empirical generalizations, so that precision in defining them is not all that important. Conventional historians do not believe in laws of historical development and the study of history does not normally involve either the theorizing or the attempts to make empirical generalizations that political scientists constantly engage in. It is true that every now and again individual historians commit themselves to law-like propositions, such as that certain kinds of industrial development were bound to lead to the rise of the middle classes. But no sooner do some historians say this kind of thing than other historians jump in to point out that the middle classes have been rising ever since the end of the feudal period, whether or not the specified types of industrial development occurred. Historians as a class are sceptical about attempts to generalize and theorize, with the consequence that students of history can do quite well without getting involved in conceptual analysis.

The position of economists is very different. The whole science of classical economics has been built up on the basis of simplifying assumptions about human behaviour that have enabled scholars to develop models, theories and causal generalizations based on technical concepts that are peculiar to the discipline. They write of marginal cost, marginal utility, indifference curves, the law of diminishing marginal utility, marginal cost pricing, and so forth; all these terms being concepts that have precise meanings and will be learned by students in their first few weeks of studying the subject. The law of diminishing marginal utility, for example, holds that the marginal utility to the consumer of acquiring each extra unit of a commodity will at some point begin to diminish. If one is buying bread, diminishing marginal utility will set in early, after two or three loaves have been bought; if one is drinking beer it may not set in until later; but eventually all commodities are subject to the law. When the utility of an extra unit comes to be less than the marginal cost of the unit, demand will cease, so that the level of demand for each commodity by each consumer, or by aggregating preferences by the whole body of consumers in a market, can be determined by the intersection of curves on a graph.

Economic concepts such as these are precise, because they have been formulated by academic economists and derive their meaning from the whole body of theory that economists have constructed. Students of the subject have to be able to define and use these concepts, but they can hardly avoid doing so as they are the building blocks of the discipline. One cannot complete a diploma or degree in economics without acquiring conceptual precision.

Students of politics lie somewhere between the historian and the economist in their use of generalizations and concepts. Political scientists constantly seek to go beyond the description of institutions and events in order to generalize about them. They compare the institutions and political cultures of one country or region with those of another, using some kind of conceptual framework in the attempt to give rigour to their comparisons. They produce theories of political development and political change. However, only a few of the concepts they use are technical concepts comparable in precision to those used by economists. There are certainly a few technical concepts that have been evolved within the discipline, but the great majority of the generalizations made by political scientists are based upon concepts that are constantly used and misused by politicians, journalists and the general public. In these circumstances it takes a conscious effort for students of politics to be precise and consistent in their use of concepts.

As an example, consider one of the most fruitful generalizations ever made about politics. Alexis de Tocqueville, after studying the events leading up to the French Revolution of 1789, produced the generalization that revolutions are most likely to take place when autocratic regimes are partially liberalized. The theory is that partial liberalization awakens expectations of more rapid progress than the regime is willing or able to provide, while also creating greater opportunities for the expression of dissent and the organization of opposition. The validity of this generalization has gone virtually unchallenged and in the past few years it has been of direct relevance to events in the former Soviet Union and in the Republic of South Africa.

The concepts used in the generalization are, however, far from precise. There is, for instance, room for disagreement about the definition of the term ‘autocratic regime’. Everyone would agree that during most of the eighteenth century French government could be categorized in this way, as could the Soviet regime between 1917 and 1989. However, there is room for disagreement about the South African regime, which has been exceptionally autocratic in regard to its black population but reasonably liberal in regard to its white citizens.

The term liberalization may also lead to arguments, and there is even more room for doubt about the precise meaning of the term ‘revolution’. As John Dunn has pointed out (Dunn 1989: 337–8), before 1789 the term was applied loosely to various kinds of political disturbance, change and restoration. It was only as a consequence of the political and intellectual impact of the French Revolution that it came to be defined as a violent change of regime leading to significant social changes, and thus to be distinguished from leadership replacements known as coups d’état. In the strongest modern sense of what constitutes a revolution, there have been only a handful of revolutions in world history, such as those in France in 1789–94, in Russia in 1917, in China, Albania and Cuba (see Dunn 1972). However, the American achievement of independence in 1776 is also generally regarded as a revolution, even though it did not result in immediate social change, because it involved violent conflict with the British and set the former colonies on a new political course. There is room for difference as to whether the achievement of independence from Moscow by Ukraine and other former Soviet republics should be regarded as revolutions, attained as they were with only a minimal amount of violence but leading to extensive economic and social change. There is clearly scope for honest disagreement about when the term should be applied this way rather than that. The object of this book is first to make this kind of analysis and then to examine various normative controversies in the light of the analysis.

This conceptual vagueness does not render Tocqueville’s generalization useless, for it has been shown to have predictive value. Nor am I suggesting that political scientists should try to prescribe precise meanings for terms like revolution in the way that economists have prescribed precise meanings for terms like diminishing marginal utility. Such an attempt would be doomed to failure, for there is no way of preventing politicians and political commentators from using political terms in ways other than those favoured by academics, even if academics were able to agree. Technical concepts can sometimes be very helpful, but to stipulate special meanings for terms like liberty and democracy would be a pointless exercise. These are the terms in which political discourse is carried on. The scholar has to work with these terms, and the suggestion here is simply that academic students of politics ought to make a systematic effort to analyse the ways in which these and other basic concepts involved in the explanation of political activity are used and to understand the consequences of using them in this way rather than that. It is to this kind of analysis that this book is devoted.

THE CHOICE OF CONCEPTS

There are a very large number of political concepts in general use and it is obviously impossible to deal adequately with more than a small proportion of them in a book of reasonable length. It has therefore been decided, in the first place, to limit the analysis to concepts used in the study of the process of government in the modern democratic state. This means that we shall not deal with the concepts used in the study of international relations and defence policy, nor with those used exclusively in connection with the history of political ideas, nor with those appropriate to systems of tribal government or, for that matter, the Greek city-state.

Two further criteria of exclusion have also been adopted. First, we shall not examine constitutional and institutional concepts such as federalism, the separation of powers, the sovereignty of Parliament, ministerial responsibility and so forth. Almost all books on constitutional law and on particular systems of national government explain the meaning of these concepts and there is no reason why serious students of the subject should find them ambiguous or difficult to understand.

Second, we shall omit ideological concepts such as liberalism, conservatism and social democracy. These concepts are of crucial importance to political scientists and all students of the subject should acquire an understanding of them. To help them do so, there are some excellent texts as well as a voluminous and rewarding literature on each of the ideologies. For this reason, it is not felt necessary to include specific discussions of these concepts in this book, though a partial exception has to be made for Marxism. The reason for this partial exception is that an acceptance of Marxist or neo- Marxist assumptions by political scientists affects the way they analyse political activity in a very special fashion. Whereas liberals, conservatives and social democrats may well share similar or identical understandings of what is meant by political power or democracy, and may well engage in similar or identical styles of political analysis, Marxists and neo-Marxists see matters differently and handle their material differently. In a book devoted to conceptual analysis it would be wrong to ignore this. It is not thought necessary to give a summary of Marxist ideology as such, which would in any case require more space than is readily available, but from time to time (and particularly in Chapters 12, 14 and 16) reference will be made to Marxist approaches and concepts, such as cultural hegemony and false consciousness.

If these types of political concept are omitted, there remain a fair number of basic concepts for analysis. In Part I of the book we shall examine the concepts of nationalism and the nation-state, which logically come first because the nation-state is now the predominant unit of government in the world. This will lead into a discussion of authority in the modern state, which raises various interesting problems. Part II will contain an analysis of the concept of democracy and the various concepts associated with democratic systems of government. It is true that only a minority of the world’s states can clearly be categorized as democratic, but the number of democracies has recently increased and may be expected to increase further in the future. The extraordinary events that took place in eastern Europe in the winter of 1989–90 indicate the strength of democratic ideals, a strength which surprised many commentators and political scientists.

In Part III of the book we shall turn to an examination of the concept of political power and the conceptual questions associated with the study of policy making in the modern democratic state. The three most common models used in the analysis of policy making are the pluralist model, the Marxist model of class dominance, and the corporatist model. There are questions to be discussed about the definition of terms, about the evidence that has been adduced in support of each model, and about the utility of the models in political analysis.

Finally, in Part IV we shall discuss some of the more important concepts used to categorize styles of political analysis. All students of politics will know that political scientists vary in their methodologies and frequently argue about them. In such arguments, concepts like positivism, historicism, and hermeneutics tend to be employed without definition, in the assumption that readers will not only be familiar with them but also have a full understanding of them. In my experience this assumption is untrue in relation to the average undergraduate, and in the final two chapters of the book an attempt will be made to elucidate the origins, meanings and significance of these terms, as well as to say something about the styles of analysis themselves.

QUESTIONS ABOUT POLITICAL CONCEPTS

In analysing political concepts, it is helpful to ask four questions about them. One preliminary question is whether the concept is a purely political one or whether it is a concept in more general use that has a political application. The concepts of nationalism and corporatism are examples of concepts that are only used in a political context and have no non-political meanings. On the other hand, power and representation are concepts that have non-political as well as political applications. We talk of powerful motors, powerful waves and powerful personalities as well as of power in the political arena; of representative samples and representational art as well as of representation by election or lobbyist. Non-political usages are apt to colour or give overtones to the political usages and it is as well to be aware of this.

A second question, not quite the same as this, is whether the concept has one central meaning or several distinguishable meanings. Political participation has one central meaning whereas political representation, it will be argued in Chapter 6, has four distinguishable and logically independent meanings. Positivism has one central meaning whereas historicism has been used as a label for two different modes of thought. It is essential for the student to understand that historicism type A is logically different from historicism type B, even though they are occasionally lumped together under the same heading.

A third question was first raised by the philosopher W. B. Gallie, who argued that some concepts are ‘essentially contested’ whereas others are not (Gallie 1955–6). An essentially contested or, better, essentially contestable concept is one that is so permeated and surrounded by values that reasonable people may argue interminably without ever reaching agreement on the true meaning and implications of the concept. The utility of Gallie’s distinction has been accepted by many theorists, but has been called into question by Terence Ball on the ground that the distinction is ahistorical. Ball points out that concepts which are hotly contested in one period of history may be the subject of virtual consensus in another period, so that it would be a mistake to characterize them as ‘essentially’ contestable or noncontestable: ‘Conceptual contestation remains a permanent possibility even though it is in practice actualized only intermittently’ (Ball 1988: 14).

This is a good logical point and it draws attention to the historical fact that the meanings attributed to a number of political concepts have been modified over the centuries; a fact that has also been emphasized by Farr (1989) and Skinner (1989). In this book I am concerned only with the period of the modern democratic state, namely the past two hundred years, and readers should appreciate that some of the concepts under discussion were used in slightly different ways in earlier periods of history. It is also the case, of course, that the meanings of political concepts in the western world are not necessarily the same as their meaning in other civilizations, such as those of China or Japan or Arabia. The fact that these complexities are rarely mentioned in the chapters that follow should not be taken to imply that they are unimportant, only that, to keep the discussion within bounds, the book is confined to the problems of conceptual meaning and usage in the western world in the modern period.

Not wishing to reject Gallie’s suggestion entirely, I shall replace the term ‘essentially contested’ by the term ‘currently contestable’, and shall note in passing that some of the concepts are currently contestable whereas others are not. This distinction is different from the distinction between two or more agreed meanings that a concept may have. Even though representation has several meanings, reasonable scholars may be expected to agree on these once they are defined, and this does not appear to be the case with concepts like liberty or democracy.

A fourth question is whether the concept ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part I: Authority in the modern state
• Part II: The democratic state and the citizen
• Part III: Political power and policy making
• Part IV: Styles of political analysis
• References