Politics

A Unified Introduction to How Democracy Works

Ian Budge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429678318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This comprehensive introduction to politics provides an essential template for assessing the health and workings of present day democracy by exploring how democratic processes bring public policy into line with popular preferences. Incorporating the latest findings from Big Data across the world, it provides a crucial framework showing students how to deploy these for themselves, providing straightforward, practical orientation to the scope and methods of modern political science.

Key features:

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• Everyday politics is explained through concrete applications to democracies across the world;

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• Predictive theories illuminate what goes on at various levels of democracy;

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• Outlines - in easy to understand terms - the basic statistical approaches that enable empirically-informed analysis;

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• Rich textual features include chapter summaries, reviews, key points, illustrative briefings, key concepts, project and essay suggestions, relevant reading all clearly explained in 'How to Use This Book';

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• Provides a firm basis for institutional and normative approaches to democratic politics;

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• Concluding section reviews other approaches to explaining politics, assessing their strengths and weaknesses.

Politics is an essential resource for students of political science and of key interest to economics, public policy analysis and more broadly the social sciences.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Politics and policy – what do we want to explain and how?

What do we want to explain?

Politics covers everything to do with the management of countries, regions or states, including the bodies (electorates, political parties and interest groups) seeking to influence this – going down to local levels and up to the organizations and alliances that states form with other states. (Examples are the EU, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations (UN)). The terms ‘nation’, ‘country’ and ‘state’ are used interchangeably in ordinary conversation and media commentary, though they focus attention on different aspects of the territorial units into which our world is divided – population, land and institutions respectively.

States

Governments recognized as initiating or regulating some or all activities within a particular territory.

Electorates

The body of citizens registered to vote in state elections.

Political parties

Organizations which run blocs of candidates for election to public office based on a policy programme and organize them to continuously support it.

Interest groups

Organizations which seek to promote policies without running candidates in elections.

The government is the body that ultimately manages and co-ordinates the activities going on within its state boundaries and which deals with other governments. Sometimes the government simply authorizes other bodies (e.g. businesses) to perform certain activities. In other cases, it performs them itself.

A government’s decisions about what it will do or allow others to do and how this is to be carried out, are termed policies. Individual citizens are generally less concerned with the policies themselves than their end products, from jobs and food to roads, transport, policing and cleaning. The effect of particular policies on the various types of goods and services produced, however, is more in the sphere of economics than of political science. From our point of view, the major outputs of governments come in the shape of policies. These constitute the main focus of this book, although to explain them, we have to detail the institutions and processes producing them and the way these work.

Governments always keep the ultimate authorization and control of public policy in their own hands, however, much they may delegate. This is particularly true about enforcing the rules they lay down or the decisions they make. Enforcement may involve the use of force by soldiers or police, imprisoning people or imposing fines or penalties.

If a government has to resort to these actions too often, it is probably failing and may have to give way to an alternative government. Nevertheless, the ability to take extreme measures or to authorize their use by others within the territory is what marks out a government and distinguishes it from other political actors. A major basis for a government’s ability to initiate or authorize policies and other activities is its recognition by other governments as the established government in its own territory. Occasionally part of the territory may break away and set up its own government and state organization. This is rare because such breakaways are not readily recognized by other states, which fear for their own territorial integrity.

The traditional function of the state is to provide internal and external security for its own population and, by extension, to organize (and pay for) collective works vital to the population, such as flood defences or irrigation. In practice most contemporary states originate from conquests in which a ruler – whether native or foreign – imposed themselves on the inhabitants of a given territory and levied taxes in return for protection. The ruler also regulated them in other ways that supported the ruler’s power (e.g. in terms of religion). Boundaries were fixed when the rulers in two or more adjoining territories could not defeat the other(s) and so agreed on mutual boundary recognition. Sometimes such agreements were and are broken, resulting in wars.

The need to control and defend territory makes the army the most basic state institution. Armies, however, ‘march on their stomachs’. They need to be efficiently fed, housed, transported and equipped. This creates the need for a supporting organization which can do this. In an established territorial unit, this commissariat rapidly turns into a bureaucracy which can organize production and raise taxes for the central government. These activities in turn require regularity and certainty – at a basic level, peasants need to know how much of the crop to put aside for taxes and have to be allowed to keep enough for survival. If everything is extorted from them, they flee or die, undermining the tax base for the next year. General policies and rules have to be established to avoid this – and where they are disputed, adjudicated. This gives rise to courts and tribunals separate from the regular bureaucracy, as well as police to enforce their decisions.

Bureaucracy

Government advisors and administrators, often organized in specialized bodies, who formulate policy proposals and implement them when authorized by government to do so.

Courts and tribunals

Organizations staffed by legal and administrative specialists formally independent of government and bureaucracy, which settle disputes by reference to established laws and policies.

Force is most effective where it is accepted as justified by (most of) the population. Governments traditionally relied on religion, often organized and controlled through a territorial church, to justify their actions. This presented state and government as part of the divinely established order which people should support and submit to.

In the nineteenth century, religious appeals were supplemented by nationalism. This set of beliefs presented the people (or the dominant majority) within the state territory as a nation (i.e. a grouping bound together by a unique language, culture and destiny), which could be fully realized only through their own government and political institutions. To the traditional trinity of state institutions – army, bureaucracy and church – were added schools and media assimilating the whole population to the dominant language and culture.

States joined with other states in international alliances to expand or defend these, by force if necessary. With the growth of world communications, dissident movements within states united internationally to oppose or change existing policies – often supported by other states which saw benefits to themselves, territorial or otherwise, in disturbing the established order elsewhere.

Politics today thus has a strong international dimension, with states having become so interdependent in terms of trade, social and economic well-being and above all through easy, long-distance communication (the continued developments known as globalization) that politics inside any one state will be strongly affected by what is going on elsewhere. Nevertheless, states remain the most cohesive political unit in the world today, particularly in terms of how day-to-day politics are organized and the type of policies they produce. Differences in the type of political regime – particularly between democracy and other forms of rule – run mostly between states.

That is the reason why our discussion focuses on politics inside states, though we come back to interstate or ‘international’ relations in Part IV. We begin, however, with internal politics. Here a multitude of institutions and other bodies play a part, shaping political processes and state policies by their interactions.

It follows from what has been said that modern states have all developed the traditional institutions – army, bureaucracy, law courts, police – without which they could not function. The most basic distinction between states, however, is whether politics is handled exclusively by these traditional institutions – alone and apart from the mass of the population – or whether other institutions have been added to express and impose popular policy preferences upon them. Such institutions include political parties and mass media not wholly directed by the state; regular competitive elections, parliaments determined by election results; and governments responsive to such parliaments. Other refinements include independent courts and judiciary with some control over the police; autonomous interest groups and unions; and possibly also local and regional governments and legislatures with devolved powers. There might also be direct votes on policy in referendums and initiatives.

Political parties

Organizations which run blocs of candidates for election to public office based on a policy programme and organize them to continuously support it.

Mass media

Ways of communicating messages to a large population through printed words, electronic transmissions or other means.

Unions

Bodies of workers in particular areas of the economy with welfare and political functions.

All of these democratic institutions result from a second wave of institution building within states, in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century. The prime stimulus was the invention of mass political parties by social groups (workers, farmers, minorities) which felt ignored under the existing setup. By asserting their claim to direct state policy in line with the views of their supporters and then competing in free elections for control of policymaking, mass parties rendered the population proactive in making the political decisions which affected them, rather than simply having to submit to policies made by their rulers.

The mass party transformed the political situation in three ways. In contrast to earlier factions – which opposed each other only at elite level, often covertly and exclusively within the traditional institutions – mass parties created state-wide organizations which grouped supporters into local branches. Such branches collected money to finance party activities – giving the party a financial base independent of state subsidies. They also rallied and organized supporters in elections contested between parties, in order to get the maximum number of party candidates elected to the legislature and thus empowered to push party policy there.

Originally intended as a way of deciding on state policy independently of the mass of the population, legislatures were subverted by requirements for candidates to openly support the party’s policy programme in the election and to vote for it in the legislature when elected to it. Mass parties thus instituted a direct link between popular voting in the election and the choice of government and policy. Moreover, they ‘framed’ policy for voters, who might otherwise have been confused by a variety of vague possibilities. Parties helped produce a clear, popular decision by presenting voters with relatively well-defined policy choices in elections.

Framing

Defining the possible courses of action to be considered on an issue.

Democracy can thus be defined as a state which guarantees a necessary connection between public policy and popular preferences for it. This distinguishes democratic states from others where a benevolent dictator may well decide to give the people what they want – but with no guarantee that this will continue. The institutional mechanisms of democracy – competing parties, free and controlling elections, responsive parliaments and governments – all guarantee this link. Democracies, to exist as democracies at all, have to follow these essential practices. This makes it easier to generalize about political processes across the majority of countries in the world which are democracies (roughly 115 out of 177, or 65%).

Elections

Regular events where most or all the adult population choose between competing candidates who will se...