C
Cabinet
A cabinet is a small body of senior politicians responsible for directing the administration of a country which has the form of government known as cabinet government. Subgroups or committees often exist within a cabinet for the direction of specific affairs. An inner cabinet will typically consist of members responsible for the economy, home and foreign affairs, defence and justice, and a war cabinet of members responsible for departments directly involved or affected by a state of war in the country.
In some countries, notably France, and in the Commission of the European Union, the term âcabinetâ is also applied to the small group of politicians and civil servants who act as the personal advisers to a minister. A group of advisers to the head of the executive who are not members of the cabinet is sometimes known as the âkitchen cabinetâ: the term was apparently first applied to advisers of Andrew Jackson, US president from 1829â37, and more recently to confidants of the former British prime minister, Harold Wilson.
Cabinet Government
A cabinet government system exists where responsibility for directing the policies of a country (see executive) lies in the hands of a small group of senior politicians. Cabinet government originated in Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries, where the cabinet developed from the inner core of privy counsellors on whom the monarch relied for advice. As the monarch lost power and party government replaced personal authority, the cabinet came to be formed not from the monarchâs most trusted advisers but from the most senior members of the dominant political party.
The essence of cabinet government is that it is collective government by a committee of individuals who are theoretically equal and bound by their collective decisions. Fundamental to the way cabinet government operated in Britain until the early 1960s were the dual notions of collective responsibility and secrecy. The proceedings of a cabinet debate were secret and it was not permissible for a minister to publicize personal dissent from any decision of the cabinet and to remain a member of the cabinet thereafter. Collective responsibility also meant that if Parliament wished to remove a government from office it had to remove the whole administration; it could not remove part of it or pick ministers off one by one, although individual ministers have resigned for political and personal reasons.
The concept of cabinet government implies that power and responsibility will be shared equally between all members of the cabinet. In fact the prime minister, as chairman of the cabinet and, in most systems which have cabinet governments, the person who appoints the other cabinet ministers, wields a power which is generally seen as superior to that of other members of the cabinet individually and even to that of the cabinet as a whole. In the last few years of Margaret Thatcherâs prime ministership, however, it was increasingly felt that the idea of âfirst among equalsâ, which restricts prime ministerial power, had been largely abandoned. Her successors in office may have initiated a return to a traditional form of cabinet government, but the dominant force in British politics is now indisputably the prime minister. In the British system of cabinet government, a great deal of decision-making and policy preparation is undertaken not by the full cabinet, but by cabinet committees which cover specialized areas of policy; membership of the most important of these committees, particularly the economic committee, is greatly prized among cabinet members. One of the reasons for the prime ministerâs influence over the cabinet is indeed that he or she is the only member who is likely to be on all the important committees.
Britainâs system of cabinet government has been exported to other countries, notably those of the Commonwealth. However, the norms and practices of cabinet government may vary considerably from one country to another. When the Labor Party comes to power in Australia, for example, it elects the members of the cabinet, thus denying the prime minister one important source of power and patronage. Although there is a body in the US political system called the cabinet, which consists of the politically appointed heads of departments, it has no decision-making power and exists only to advise the president when the latter wants to be advised.
Capitalism
At its most simple and value-free, the term capitalism is used to describe any economic system where there is a combination of private property, a relatively free and competitive market, and a general assumption that the bulk of the work-force will be engaged in employment by private (non-governmental) employers engaged in producing whatever goods they can sell at a profit. Capitalism has its own ideology and economic theory, like all politico-economic systems. The original theory of capitalism was essentially that an entirely free market of small-scale entrepreneurs, hiring individual labourers at the minimum possible cost, would produce the maximum output, at the cheapest possible price given the cost of the other inputs necessary for production. This is often called the âperfect competition modelâ of economics. One aspect of this model is to require government neither to own any productive enterprise, nor to regulate or control the economy in any way.
However valid or otherwise this simple model might be, current understanding of capitalism focuses on two ideas; production for profit, and the existence of private property which is only partially controlled by the state. To believers in capitalism (which, with some reservations, means all the major parties of the United Kingdom and USA, most parties in Western Europe and the Old Commonwealth, and, since the downfall of the communist governments between 1989 and 1991, most political movements in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union), this form of economic organization provides the greater likelihood of maximizing economic performance and defending political liberty while securing something approaching equality of opportunity.
In fact there are no pure capitalist economies, and the functioning of modern economies is more a matter of a sliding scale from minimum to maximum private property and regulation. In many economies, Britainâs being a prime example, the government, including local government and other public services, employs so large a proportion of the work-force as to make it impossible not to wield enormous influence. Furthermore, the 19th- and early 20th-century experience of completely unregulated economies led to such disasters, and such inequalities, that regulation has been common even in the USA, which is the country most ideologically committed to capitalism. A particular problem of capitalism is that unregulated industries often become monopolistic, with the resulting need for anti-trust legislation to maintain competitiveness. One of the principal objectives of Thatcherism was to increase the extent to which the British economy was capitalist by selling off nationalized industries and public utilities, partly in the hope of increasing the âcapitalistâ class by encouraging ordinary people to own shares. In many countries, including the UK, a process is now fashionable in which activities formerly entirely or largely conducted by the state, like education or major health facilities, are now financed and controlled by a mixture of for-profit and state bodies.
Capital Punishment
Although capital punishment has historically been universal, and although the range of crimes for which it has sometimes been seen as suitable is wide, opposition to the death penalty is not as recent as is often imagined. Some European countries abolished the death penalty, at least temporarily, as early as the late 18th century. Even in the USA, which is today the only Western liberal democracy to execute criminals, some states have very early experience of abolition, or at least restriction, of capital punishment. Michigan and Wisconsin, for example, had abolished judicial execution by the mid-19th century.
Nevertheless, until the second half of the 20th century, most states of all political types felt it legitimate to kill people who broke certain laws, even in peacetime. The most liberal of modern societies often allows capital punishment, at least theoretically, during wartime. After the Second World War, partly as a reaction of revulsion to state terror in general, the penalty was abolished in many European countries. Abolition of the death penalty is now, in fact, a requirement for membership of the Council of Europe. Thus by the early 21st century, about 90 countries had formally relinquished capital punishment, and perhaps another 20 have not executed anyone for so long that they can be considered, in practice, as having done so. In particular, states escaping from long periods of authoritarian rule after 1989 have rapidly moved to make execution illegal, as did South Africa almost immediately after the ending of apartheid.
Outside the world of developed and stable liberal democracies, the death penalty is still very widely used, and often not only for crimes against the person; for example, drug related offences continue to attract the penalty in many Asian countries. In some Islamic areas there appears to be a religious basis behind the cultural support for executions (see Shariâa) in other areas, such as some Caribbean countries, belief in the deterrent effect of execution continues strongly. To a very large extent opposition to capital punishment is Ă©lite-led. Even in Europe, public opinion is often much more favourable to the idea of restoring the penalty than those opposed would expect: in some polls as many as 70% of the British public would like to see the return of execution for some types of murder.
It is against this background that one must consider the outstanding exception to the trend away from relying on the state taking life to enforce its lawâthe USA. For a few years in the 1970s executions were halted in the USA because of the Supreme Courtâs uncertainty about the constitutionality of the death penalty. When they finally ruled in its favour, in 1976, many of the states drafted new capital punishment laws so that by the beginning of the 21st century 38 states allowed the penalty, and several hundreds of people had been executed, often despite considerable international public pressure. The enthusiasm for execution is not as widespread in the USA as this figure suggests. Several states which put capital punishment laws back on the statute book after 1976 have never used the sentence. More importantly, extensive use of the penalty is largely restricted to the conservative south. Over two-thirds of all executions since 1976 have been in Texas, Virginia, Missouri, Florida, Oklahoma and Georgia. In 2001, the Federal Government also returned to the practice, though there are relatively few federal criminal laws to which it can be applied.
Caste
Caste, along with class and status, is a system for social stratification, whereby social respect and wealth are distributed unequally. The most powerful such stratification is the Hindu caste system which dominates much of Indian life. There are four basic Hindu castes: Brahmin (priests), Raja or Kshatriya (rulers and warriors), Vaishya (artisans) and Shudra (servants). However, the system has greatly expanded to number perhaps over 3,000 castes and subcastes according to location and occupation. In addition, beneath the caste system are the so-called untouchables who perform the most menial tasks. Unlike class and status, however, it is impossible for an individual to alter their caste position, which is fixed by birth, and intercaste marriages are still extremely rare. Somewhat as in medieval Europe, once born into a particular social position, with clearly defined rights and duties, a person is expected to accept this with no ambition for betterment. Caste systems require a very powerful ideology, usually of a religious nature, to justify them and keep people, if not content, at least acquiescent. Though such ideological control is never perfect, caste systems work most effectively when those in the lower orders actually believe they deserve to be inferior to others. Thus although there have been attempts by the untouchables in Hindu society to break from tradition, even among this group large numbers accept the inevitability of their fate. Similarly, the widespread belief in racially-segregated societies that blacks were inferior to whites was not only used by whites to justify the oppression of blacks, but was at times accepted as truth by the latter, thus preventing rebellion. Caste systems cannot ultimately sustain themselves once even a moderate degree of education and exposure to alternative beliefs becomes widespread, but, as in India, they can nevertheless be very resistant to change.
Castro
Fidel Castro Ruz (1928â) is arguably the only Marxist dictator to have survivied into the 21st century, although he came to power in Cuba as a radical nationalist rather than a Marxist. Castro came from a relatively prosperous background, becoming active in student politics in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America immediately after the Second World War. He was involved in normal electoral politics before the coup dâĂ©tat which returned Gen. Fulgencio Batista y ZaldiĂ© var to power in 1952; although he immediately challenged the new regime, he did so simply by filing a complaint in court that it was unconstitutional. Only after the regime was firmly in power did he launch his revolutionary movement with an attack on a barracks on 26 July 1953. The movement, taking as its name the July 26th Movement, retreated to the mountains where the pro-government forces failed completely to deal with it. Batista gave up, rather than being defeated, leaving Cuba at the end of 1958. Thus, a mere five years of only sporadic violence launched the Castro regime. Certainly at this stage, Castro was no Marxist; he was a radical Cuban nationalist, with egalitarian aims, which led him towards the classic policy of agrarian reform. This, in turn, alienated not only the Cuban upper classes but also the USA, whose corporations had important land interests in Cuba.
To a large extent it was American intransigence which turned Castro towards the then Soviet Union as an ally; moulding Marxist analyses into his own radical nationalist orientation with ease. This alliance, however, entrenched American hostility when Castro gave the Soviet Union permission to site nuclear missiles, which could threaten mainland USA, in Cuba, a move which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cuba, in fact, benefited from the cold war, because Soviet foreign aid to such a strategically-placed ally made up for the American trade embargo. Soviet funds allowed the development of an extensive welfare state, and obviated the need for economic efficiency. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, Castro managed successfully to remain in power into the 21st century while maintaining at least the vestiges of a socialist economy and welfare society. The political power of the émigré Cubans in the USA has meant that US foreign policy still treats Cuba as it has done throughout the cold war. It is unlikely, however, that Cuba will avoid major political change once Castro dies.
Catch-All Parties
Catch-all parties are political parties which have no very clear or specific base in terms of the social and economic characteristics of the people who vote for themâunlike, for example, most socialist parties with their predominantly working-class base, or traditional European Liberal parties recruiting almost entirely from the upper middle-class professional and secular sector. The phenomenon of catch-all parties was first commented on by political scientists in the late 1950s. Their enemies see them as predominantly motivated by he desire to put together as large a voting support as possible in order to maximize their chances of winning elections. Catch-all parties are unlikely to stand far from the centre of political spectrum in which they operate, but may well espouse a set of policies which does not fit in with schematic distinctions between left and right. In practice these parties have usually been right-of-centre, standing for support of the economic and social status quo, or at least hoping not to have to modify it too much. They have, therefore, had all the more reason to deny any specific class orientation, since class politics tends to produce natural majorities of working-class voters who are likely to believe that they will gain by radical change.
Typical of parties often defined as catch-all were the Gaullist parties in postwar France, especially during the early years of the Fifth Republic, when they could attract voters of all classes and almost all political persuasions by appealing to the desire for a strong and stable government. Similarly the old Italian Christian Democrats managed to attract considerable working-class support, although they were to some extent a moderate conservative party, because they could associate support for traditional conservative and religious values with the defence of democracy, and thus âcatchâ almost anyone who felt afraid of radical social change such as might be offered by the communists. It is notable that after the end of the cold war and the collapse of both the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party none of the replacement parties managed to achieve such a catch-all status. To a lesser extent the British Conservative Par...
