Politics & International Relations
Pluralist Democracy
Pluralist democracy is a political system where power is dispersed among various groups and organizations, allowing for multiple voices and interests to influence decision-making. It emphasizes the existence of diverse and competing interest groups, and the government acts as a mediator among them. Pluralist democracies aim to ensure that no single group dominates the political process.
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10 Key excerpts on "Pluralist Democracy"
eBook - PDF- Brian Smith(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Red Globe Press(Publisher)
Groups may not have the same degree of politi-cal influence, but none is completely powerless. All can hope to win some of the time. Policy issues tend to be resolved in ways generally compati-ble with the preferences of the majority of the public. Fourth, the state in a Pluralist Democracy is regarded as a neutral set of institutions for adjudicating between conflicting interests. In pluralist interpretations of politics, it is clear that the state is thought of as an ‘umpire’, rather than a set of institutions which defends a particular class and its privileges, or exhibits a marked bias towards particular interests, or has interests of its own (for example, within its bureaucracy) to defend. Thus pluralism implies a theory of the state which differs significantly from other conceptualizations. Political Pluralism 131 Finally, while it is recognized that all political systems are to some degree elitist, the pluralist political system is characterized by a plurality of elites . In mass democracy power may inevitably be concentrated in the hands of political leaders rather than the electorate or even the rank-and-file members of political organizations. Under pluralism, positions within the elite are open to people recruited on the basis of merit or open politi-cal competition. Elites do not form a cohesive social stratum by the restriction of access to membership of a ruling class. Different social, economic, political, professional, administrative and other elites lack the social cohesion to turn them into a ruling class. Elites recruit from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. Competition between political parties is further evidence of elite plurality. Political parties Political associations constitute the foundation of Pluralist Democracy, whether for interest aggregation (political parties) or interest articulation (civil society acting as pressure groups).
eBook - PDF- W.N. Coxall(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The powers of government are limited by institutional checks and balances, a legitimate political opposition, a free media, a pluralist tolerance of a wide range of groups and interests and an individualistic political culture. ‘Representative democracy encourages the formulation and representation of group demands and it also makes government responsive to those demands .., the mechanisms through which these ends are achieved [are] -the electoral sensitivity of parties to intense minorities and the everyday activity of pressure groups’ (Lively and Lively, 1994, p. 115). IBl iMlM Lively and Lively (1994) say pluralism is now the major defence of political practice in Western democracies: 1. Society is and must be an arena of diverse and conflicting interests. 2. All legitimate groups have a claim to be heard and taken into account in the formulation of policy. 3. Government’s role is to accommodate and reconcile these group claims. Articulation and reconciliation of group demands enhances democracy by making government responsive to the demands of the electorate and diffusing power within society. Pluralism is both an integral aspect of liberal democratic theory and the dominant theory developed by political science to explain the distribution of political power. Whilst the main concern of this chapter is pluralism as a theory of the distribution of power and with criticisms and changes in this theory, its initial concern is with the way in which liberal democracy may also be termed Pluralist Democracy. Liberal democracy involves a theory of society, government and the state in which groups play a key role.
eBook - PDFThe Challenge of Democracy
American Government in Global Politics
- Kenneth Janda, Jeffrey Berry, Jerry Goldman, Deborah Deborah(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
The two major mechanisms in a Pluralist Democracy are interest groups and a decentralized structure of government that provides ready access to public officials and is open to hearing the groups’ arguments for or against government policies. In a cen -tralized structure, decisions are made at one point: the top of the hierarchy. The few decision makers at the top are too busy to hear the claims of competing interest groups or consider those claims in making their decisions. But a decentralized, complex gov -ernment structure offers the access and openness necessary for Pluralist Democracy. For pluralists, the ideal system is one that divides government authority among numer -ous institutions with overlapping authority. Under such a system, competing interest groups have alternative points of access for presenting and arguing their claims. Although many scholars have contributed to the model, Pluralist Democracy is most closely identified with political scientist Robert Dahl. According to Dahl, the pluralist model of democracy An interpretation of democracy in which government by the people is taken to mean government by people operating through competing interest groups. Generations differ considerably, in fashion, music, lifestyle choices, and career aspirations, among other things. The differences in political values are strik -ing too. One recent survey of Americans who were at least 18 years of age demonstrated just how sizable the value divide can be. The pollsters asked respon -dents if they felt that the government’s anti-terrorism policies “have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties, or that they have not gone far enough to adequately protect the country?” Civil liber -ties are personal freedoms, and some believe that the government may become too aggressive in monitoring Americans (through their phone records, for example).
eBook - PDF- David Ciepley(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
Similar crystalliza-tions would follow, some as extensions of their work, others as new depar-tures. For more than two decades, these emphases set the parameters of the leading paradigm of postwar political science—pluralism. Envisioning Interest Group Pluralism 205 Pluralism Pluralism, as a theory of governance, comes in a variety of flavors. But as this designation has come to be applied, what they all have in common is a claim that political power, or influence, is dispersed among a multiplicity of actors, each representing (formally or informally) a different social group or interest group. If populist democracy means majority rule, and oligop-oly and dictatorship mean minority rule, then pluralism (or “polyarchy,” in the idiolect of one leading pluralist, Robert Dahl) means “minorities rule.” 37 The overwhelming tendency of pluralists has been to see this ar-rangement as good—a system that is adaptive, because it is open to emerg-ing social demands, yet stable, because group membership is multiple and overlapping; a system in which inequalities are quite real, yet largely be-nign, since most every group finds some form of representation in the halls of power, and since the influence of individual groups varies from time to time and from issue to issue. David Truman and the Governmental Process As this minimalist definition makes clear, interest groups are quite central to pluralist theories. The most elaborate account of interest group politics came early on from David Truman. In his own words, The Governmental Process (1951) “is an effort to take the concept of group, especially the in-terest or ‘pressure’ group, as a primary unit of analysis, and to examine patterns of action on the governmental scene in such terms.” 38 Like many other leading pluralists, Truman had been a student of Charles Merriam at the University of Chicago. But the continuity between Merriam and his students is more modest than usually imagined.
eBook - PDF- Mark Bevir(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
Manley, J. F. (1983). Neo-pluralism: A class analysis of pluralism I and pluralism II. The American Political Science Review, 77 (2), 368–383. McLennan, G. (1995). Pluralism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rawls, J. (1985). Justice as fairness: Political not metaphysical. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (3), 223–231, 234–239, 245–248. Runciman, D. (1997). Pluralism and the personality of the state. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Seidman, H. (1970). Politics, position and power. New York: Oxford University Press. Simpson, J. C. (1995). Pluralism: The evolution of a nebulous concept. American Behavioral Scientist, 38, 459–477. Truman, D. (1951). The governmental process. New York: Knopf. P LURALIST D EMOCRACY As a concept, Pluralist Democracy is highly relativis-tic, ranging from a potentially broadly defined condi-tion to a narrowly defined, nearly corporatist model. Arguably, both conditions or states could be said to be pluralist within an overarching democratic political system. In theory, the United States’ model of Pluralist Democracy is built on the founders’ desire to simulta-neously promote the rights of citizens to organize into factional interests while also preventing individual cit-izen liberty from falling prey to factional influence; in essence, an attempt to find a middle ground between the absolutism of monarchy and what was seen as potentially deleterious and chaotic majoritarianism. Nevertheless, the existence of faction, and hence plu-ralist democracy, was seen as a natural and essential element in free society, consistent with human nature and the desire to express differences. Scholars have repeatedly addressed the human tendency to promote group interests, at times at the expense of individual rights and liberties. Diversity of perspective was looked upon as being an important element in the maintenance of democratic pluralism and one that required constant monitoring and consid-eration.
eBook - PDFThe Garden of Democratic Delights
For a Psycho-Emotional Reading of Pluralist Systems
- Philippe Braud, Jeffrey Reid(Authors)
- 1998(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
Finally, for all those whom Lester Milbrath calls active participants, the pleasure of politics is linked to the desire for power, legitimized even while remaining hidden, which fuels the competitions that enrich political pluralism. The central hypothesis of this book is therefore the following. The virtually unquestioned superiority of today's pluralist democracies over authoritarian and totalitarian systems of government is not due to the triumph of ideological principles. If institutional consolidation (indeed remarkable) has occurred, it is because of Pluralist Democracy's superior ability to manage the emotional dynamics that run through society, without drowning them out. 4 Introduction However, such dynamics remain potentially threatening. The market economy introduces the permanent stress of competition among businesses, with daunting consequences for employment. Also, since it is easier to produce than to sell, the desire to consume must be continually stimulated without allowing real satisfac- tion. The constant imperative to modernize and progress (the price paid for the ec- onomic system's material performances) fosters a feeling of insecurity, even fear of the future, throughout large layers of society. Finally, state interventionism in every area of social life increases the risk of growing discontent being directed at the state itself. Faced with these threats, Pluralist Democracy proves remarkably effective in anesthetizing social aggression, regulating frustrations to an acceptable level, pro- viding outlets (real or imaginary) for the expectations of those governed, as well as for the ambitions of those in power. A political system is not so much defined by its formal institutional mechanisms as by its specific way of dealing with three chal- lenges: • How to mobilize the support that legitimizes government authority, while guard- ing against the twofold threat of indifference and excessive politicization.
eBook - PDFModern Pluralism
Anglo-American Debates since 1880
- Mark Bevir(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
214 10 Beyond pluralism? Corporatism, globalization, and the dilemmas of democratic governance Robert Adcock and Mark Vail Introduction “Pluralism” was thoroughly Americanized in the course of its diffusion into empirical political science. 1 As Marc Stears explores in Chapter 3, the concept had initially referred to the varied arguments of British socialist intellectuals who called up visions of a lost past, or a hoped- for future, in order to criticize statist British politics after World War I. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, it came, how- ever, to denote the arguments of American political scientists who refashioned democratic theory to accommodate the existing realities of American politics. For this new breed of pluralists, analysis of the activ- ity of groups in American politics was the key starting point for devel- oping an empirical theory of how the conflicting interests of a modern society can be represented and conciliated within a stable democratic political system. This period of evolution was succeeded, however, by a half-century of stasis. Among political scientists in the United States and Britain, the meaning of “pluralism” got stuck as denoting the liberal interest-group pluralism of the 1950s to 1960s. It remains to this day primarily associ- ated with American scholarship of the post-World War II decades, espe- cially works by David Truman, Robert Dahl, and Gabriel Almond. This inertial association offers a ripe target for historical revisionism. John Gunnell shows in his chapter and elsewhere that pluralism first crystal- lized as an empirical theory of democracy among American political sci- entists in the decades after World War I, rather than after World War II. 2 1 Our thanks to Mark Bevir, Henry Farrell, Harvey Feigenbaum, Llewelyn Hughes, Ben Jackson, and Martyn Thompson for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, and to Tristan Volpe for research assistance.
eBook - PDFRepublic at Risk
An Introduction to American Politics
- Walter J. Stone, James A. McCann(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
The purpose of this chapter is to spell out pluralist theory and to highlight some of its problems in understanding the place of interest groups in American politics. Keep in mind that plural- ists agree that Brian is not politically self-interested in the way Madison expected of citizens in the Republic. Nonetheless, pluralist theory is remark- ably close to the argument found in the Republic. It must modify the expectations about self-interest, and elections are not seen as the only (or even the principal) way citizen interests are linked to government activity. 88 But pluralists do not believe these modifications to the Republic undermine its central conclusions. THE CLASSIC PLURALIST THEORY OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY The central insight of the classic pluralist theory, based on the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, David Truman, Robert Dahl, and others (de Tocqueville [1835] 2002, Bentley 1908, Dahl 1961, Truman 1971), is that American society is pluralistic, composed of many diverse interests. Therefore, a complex, pluralistic government is necessary. Just as Madison argued in Federalist 10 that society contains many factions that check one another, so pluralists argue there are many “interest groups” clamoring for attention, making claims, and influencing policy and one another. Just as Madison asserted in Federalist 10 that the “spirit of party and faction” must be involved in the “necessary and ordinary operations of Government,” pluralists agree that the multitude of interests in society must be represented. Just as Madison maintains in Federalist 51 that the govern- ment must be complex, with many competing and overlapping centers of power, each responsive to offsetting interests, pluralists agree that govern- ment power must be dispersed with “multiple points of access” for groups to press their claims. The language has changed, but the ideas are similar.
eBook - PDF- F. Inglis(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
To be sure, Pluralist Democracy demands a certain amount of consensus, but such a consensus concerns only its constitutive ethico-political and educationally formative principles. Since those ethico-political prin- ciples, however, can only exist through many different and conflicting Chantal Mouffe 47 interpretations, such a consensus is bound to be a ‘conflictual consensus’. This is why a Pluralist Democracy needs to make room for dissent and for the institutions through which it can be manifested. Its survival depends on collective identities forming around clearly differentiated positions, as well as on the possibility of choosing between real alterna- tives. To borrow a term from system theory, we could say that pluralist politics should be envisaged as a ‘mixed-game’, that is, in part collab- orative and in part conflictual and not as a wholly co-operative game as most liberal pluralists would have it. When the agonistic dynamic of the pluralist system is hindered because of a lack of democratic identities with which one could identify, there is a risk that this will multiply confrontations over essentialist identities and non-negotiable moral values. The current disaffection with politics which we witness in many liberal democratic societies stems in my view from the fact that the role played by the political public sphere is becoming increasingly irrelevant. With the unchallenged hegemony of neo-liberalism, politics has been replaced by ethics and morality, and the leitmotiv is the need for consensus, family values and ‘good causes’. In many countries this has been accompanied by the growing dominance of the juridical level. Political decisions are taken to be of a technical nature and better resolved by judges or manage- ment technocrats as bearers of a supposed impartiality.
eBook - PDFThe Social Construction of Diversity
Recasting the Master Narrative of Industrial Nations
- Christiane Harzig, Danielle Juteau(Authors)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Berghahn Books(Publisher)
In my conclusion, I put some open questions onto the research agenda for the further elaboration of associative democracy, the most promising version of DIP. 132 | Veit Bader Varieties of Institutional Pluralism and Four Ideal Types of Democratic Incorporation Varieties of Institutional Pluralism Institutional pluralism (IP), broadly understood, is defined by two core characteristics. Firstly, the existing plurality of categories, groups, organiza-tions, or political units has not only to be more or less formally recognized , it also has to be integrated into the political process of problem definition, deliberation, decision-alternatives and decision making, implementation, and control. 1 Secondly, this recognition and integration has to be combined with a fair amount of actual decentralization . If institutionally pluralist designs contain some hierarchical subordination of the units, these units should have a fair amount of de facto autonomy or self-determination to decide specific issues. All institutionally pluralist arrangements can thus be characterized as power-sharing systems. Power (of states, of private prop-erty, of management) has to be divided, delegated, and limited. This re-quires a conceptual break with concepts of absolute, unlimited, undivided sovereignty and property, and a theoretical break with monistic, unitarian, or simply majoritarian normative strategies. 2 The vast and complex range of practices of IP can be divided into three basic types, according to three major, analytically distinct arenas of representation: (1) Political/territorial pluralism : power-sharing systems in territorially bounded units, under the hypothetical condition that ethnoreligious or national pluralism and social/functional pluralism are absent.
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