Showing papers in "Political Studies in 1989"

The Internal Politics of Parties: The Law of Curvilinear Disparity Revisited

Abstract: One of the few efforts to link systemic and organizational determinants of party strategies is provided by what John May dubbed the ‘law of curvilinear disparity’. According to this law, voters, party activists and leaders have necessarily divergent political ideologies. These systematic differences are attributable to the activists' motivations and the constraints of party competition. This paper argues that the law is empirically valid only under distinctive behavioural, organizational and institutional conditions which are not specified in its general formulation. Thus, the law is only a special case in a broader theory reconstructing the interaction between constituencies, intra-party politics and party competition. This alternative theory is partially tested with survey data from party activists in the Belgian ecology parties Agalev and Ecolo.

Green Politics and the New Class: Selfishness or Virtue?

Abstract: The predominantly new middle-class social composition of the green movement has become a matter of increasing interest in the wake of the success of green parties and the growth of an international green movement. This paper considers the concept of the ‘new class' in relation to two explanations for the social composition of the green movement. The class-interest argument seeks to show that green politics is a means of furthering either middle-class or new-class interests while the ‘new childhood’ argument claims that the development of the green movement is the result of the spread of post-material values, the main bearers of which are the new class. Against these arguments a more comprehensive explanation is presented, which focuses on the education of the new class and its relative structural autonomy from the production process.

Citizenship and Government: The Challenge for Management in the Public Domain

Abstract: The domains of the public and private are different. Analysis of management which obscures their distinctive characteristics will miss the significance of each domain. This paper seeks to analyse the values, institutional conditions and management tasks which are unique to the public domain. It is argued that the distinctive challenge for the public domain derives from the duality of publicness: the need to enable citizens in their plurality to express their contribution to the life of the community and out of that plurality, to enable a process of collective choice and the government of action in the public interest to take place.

The Limits to Coercive Consociationalism in Northern Ireland

Abstract: The merits of consociation as a means of solving the Northern Ireland conflict are presented through contrasting it with other ways of stabilizing highly divided political systems. Why voluntary consociation has been unsuccessful in Northern Ireland and unfortunately is likely to remain so is explained. The signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) must be understood against the background of the failure of previous consociational experiments. The AIA partly represented a shift in British strategy from voluntary to coercive consociationalism. The prospects for this coercive consociational strategy and variants on it are evaluated.Irish history is something Irishmen should never remember, and Englishmen should never forget.

The Normative Frameworks of Public Policy

Abstract: This article suggests some tools for the analysis of social conceptions that shape the policy-making process. It defines the three dimensions of policy frameworks and their links with the related notions of paradigm and myth. It analyses the institutionalization of policy framework building and its impact on power relations within the French policy-making process.

Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom

Abstract: The sense in which Foucault’s work functions as criticism has long been a source of puzzlement to his readers and the concept of power a focal point for their concern. His apparently neutral accounts of techniques of power lead to complaints that he is normatively confused or that he deprives himself of any basis for criticism of the social phenomena he describes.’ For most critics, power is an irreducibly evaluative notion and moreover one which is negatively valued. Since it sets limits to the free activity and self-expression of the individual, power is that which must be opposed. This humanist consensus is neatly summed up in David Hoy’s remark that ‘the antithesis to power is usually thought to be freedom’. * The argument of this paper is that Foucault uses concepts of both power and freedom which do not conform to this view: his descriptive analyses are based upon a concept of power which is neither evaluative nor antithetical to freedom. To show this, I take as a basis for comparative discussion Charles Taylor’s article, ‘Foucault on freedom and t r ~ t h ’ . ~ This provides a useful point of comparison because Taylor is such a strong exponent of the humanist ‘approach which Foucault eschews. He also goes further than most critics in turning the differences between Foucault’s approach and his own into criticisms, charging him with an incoherent theory of power. Others have argued that Taylor’s criticisms do not always fully address Foucault’s po~i t ion.~ In what follows, I try to advance this argument by bringing to the surface some of the underlying differences in their respective concepts of power, freedom and subjectivity. My aim in doing so is not only to refute the charge of incoherence but also to restore

From Authoritarianism to Democracy in South Korea

Abstract: The South Korean case supports the contention that popular demands for political participation and the willingness of elites to recognize them are the likely consequences of modernization. The continuing transformation of the political system suggests that neither the corporatist nor the bureaucratic authoritarian models are applicable to Korea. Its non-democratic past is best seen as a response to specific factors, including Korea's position in the prevailing world system, the absence of countervailing elites as a result of war and rapid social transformation and the development of a strong and relatively independent state. The recent domestic and international impact of modernization has been to reverse the influence of these factors, though elements of the political culture and the contentious legacy of the past pose difficulties for the new democracy. Roh Tae-woo will need to be seen to be making a new beginning if the perennial legitimacy crisis of the Korean republic is to be overcome.

The State in Environmental Management: The Ecological Dimension

Abstract: A focus on ‘modern’ industrialized societies obscures both the great antiquity of the state and the powerful selective pressures that have led to the dominance of interstate competition, especially warfare. In pursuit of power, elites encouraged population growth and intensified the exploitation of the natural resource base, with progressively more severe ecological impacts. Modern technology has vastly amplified the problem. Though it makes possible sophisticated environmental management, that has been neglected for the demands of the military–industrial system. These ill-effects are reinforced by ignorance of ecology and inadequacy of traditional political thought. A major adaptive challenge faces modern states: to use their knowledge and resources for more humane, environmentally sensitive management and perhaps achieve a novel kind of steady state, or to renew emphasis on short-term competitive considerations.

The German Greens in the 1980s: Short-term Cyclical Protest or Indicator of Transformation?

Abstract: In the West German general election of 1983 the newly formed Green Party received 5.6 per cent of the popular vote and was (at only its second attempt) able to send 27 delegates to the federal Parliament (Bundestag). It was the first time since the 1950s that a new party had joined the three major parties (SPD, CDU-CSU, FDP) in the federal Parliament. In the 1987 federal election the Green Party achieved an even better result: it received 8.3 per cent of the popular vote and 42 seats in the federal Parliament. Because of this remarkable success the analysis of the Green Party in Germany has become a major research object in political science.Several studies have described the development of the Green Party, its social bases, its organizational structure and its ideology.1 However, these findings have not been related to the role as well as the function of the Green Party in the West German party system. This research note represents such an attempt. The debate on ‘realignment’ and ‘dealignment’ of West Eu...

The Thin Theory of Community: The Communitarians and their Critics

Abstract: Where communitarian theorists were once voices crying in the wilderness of political philosophy, now they camp near the centre of the discipline. This paper appraises the success of the new communal stirrings, particularly the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer and Benjamin Barber. It also evaluates and finds wanting the liberal critics of the new communitarian turn, who defend the ‘thin’ theory of the self against the ‘thicker’, embedded theories of self advanced by the communitarians. The critics* contention that liberal tolerance and human rights depend on a ‘thin’ theory of the self is not persuasive. Yet the theories of community submitted as remedies for ‘thin’ theories of the self are themselves too thin. First, consideration of individual elements of community is too narrow. Character, for example, is mentioned by many of the communitarians but not explored in depth. Secondly, even those theorists who examine some essentials in depth neglect the range of requirements, particularly authority, loyalty and commitment. The communitarian line of argument, however, may very well help to move theoretical and political debate beyond the sterile confines of regnant ideologies.

Politics in a Cold Climate: The Conservative Decline in Scotland

Abstract: An important feature over the last 30 years has been the increasing shortfall in the Conservative vote in Scotland compared with England. The Conservative Party, despite social structural disadvantages in terms of housing tenure and social class, did unusually well until the mid-1950s, particularly among Unionists and Protestants. After considering the historical and religious factors explaining earlier Conservative political strength, it is argued that two factors help to explain the changing politics of the state in Scotland: the establishment of Scotland as a separate unit of economic management in popular perception and the greater dependence on direct state involvement. The Scottish economic dimension has made Scotland an ideological category largely incompatible with Conservative English/British national rhetoric as employed by Mrs Thatcher.

Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom: a Reply

Abstract: I found, as I read Paul Patton’s very interesting paper, that I agreed with much in his interpretation of Foucault. The difference seemed to lie mainly in how we respectively wanted to formulate it, and I am still unsure how important an issue this is. My own tentative view, to put it bluntly, is this: 1 think we can agree, because Foucault towards the end of his life began to make his own moral position fairly clear. I think there is some unease on each side about how the other frames this position, because Foucault had an ambiguous stance towards what we are all tempted to identify as his moral position. This came out in the indirectness and sometimes evasion which marked his writing, and even more the bewildering range of seemingly contradictory interviews he gave. Foucault had a tendency to cover his tracks, but this was not just out of a spirit of mischief. There is something in the position itself which pushes towards this ambiguity. I suspect that the main difference between Patton and myself is that he tends to value this element, whereas I find that it merely obfuscates. It adds a patina of false consciousness, which has the effect of making the position look deeper and less challengeable than it really is. Patton helps to advance the debate very considerably in distinguishing different kinds of power. I have no doubt that he is right and that Foucault in fact related more than one in his complex theory of power. What I am still not entirely convinced of is that he related them in a coherent fashion. Patton distinguishes, following Berlin, between negative and positive freedom. There is one obvious relation of one kind of power to negative freedom, the one which receives most of the attention by people who propound theories of power, particularly political scientists. This is the interpersonal relation, whereby the power of A over B restricts B’s freedom. A gets what he wants by restricting E’s options. When B avoids such constraints, he increases his negative freedom. But besides this freedom from interference, there is also the dimension of ‘positive’ freedom, which is concerned with our capacity to act. We can be incapacitated from action by all sorts of things. These can include ‘internal’ factors, neuroses, ‘hang-ups’, which at first sight may not seem to involve others at all. But since we acquire our whole language of self-understanding from our family and society and we in a sense ‘negotiate’ its application to ourselves, there is obviously a complex relationship between interpersonal relations and positive freedom. This is the area in which Foucault’s theory falls. Writers like Fanon have explored one kind of relation between domination and the interiorization of

Bringing the Constitution Back In: Political Science and the State

Abstract: At one time the study of politics centred on the state but for much of this century the emphasis has been on political behaviour and policy-making with governmental decisions explained as a response to societal forces. In the last decade or so, state-centric theorists have sought to bring the state back, arguing that it is more autonomous than society-centred theorists have suggested. I record the retreat of the state in the Anglo-American study of politics and the related rise of a particular kind of political science, going on to outline the more recent growth of a ‘new institutionalism’ which places the state at the very centre of political science. Bringing the state back in to the study of British politics must necessarily involve bringing the constitution back in but in ways that avoid the limitations of the constitutional approach and a narrow legalism.

Political Parties: Towards a New Theoretical Synthesis

Abstract: Three conceptions of the political party can be distinguished. They are Seiler's sociocultural cleavage approach; Lawson's notion of the linkage party, based upon participatory, policy-responsive, clientele reward and government directive linkages; and Offerle's conception of parties as political enterprises concentrating upon partisan supply to the political market. After suggesting that, whatever their partial merits, none of these approaches provides the basis for a comprehensive theory of political parties, a dual party approach is prepared. Every party exists in and for itself as well as interacting with a constraining environment. A dialectical model, based upon relations between internal decision-making and external competition within the context of the rules of the game, offers the best prospect of further advance in the study of political parties.

Understanding the British Parliament

Abstract: Fifteen years ago, I was asked to write an essay evaluating the state of research on the British House of Commons. In that essay, I assessed the then-existing literature in terms of ‘(1) its status as research, (2) its theoretical richness, (3) its descriptive adequacy, (4) its comparative utility and (5) its methodological stance and sophistication’.’ I argued that studies of the House of Commons were excessively devoted to discussion about reform and speculation about change, and too little concerned to establish answers to disciplined research questions. I pointed out that British parliamentary studies, much like analyses of legislative politics in the United States, were theoretically limited, and not contributing much to the cumulation of knowledge about parliamentary life in general. I advocated more descriptive studies of Parliament ‘how leaders operate, how Members interact, how House and party committees function, what contacts Members have with constitutents, party activists or leaders . . .’.2 I complained that in Britain, as in the United States, students of parliamentary behaviour were ethnocentric, failing to conduct research with a comparative perspective. Finally, I alleged that British parliamentary research was methodologically primitive. The assessment was hard-nosed; a ‘stinging but justified a t t a ~ k ‘ . ~ In the last decade and a half, important new research has been conducted on Parliament. The recent work illuminates the structure and process of parliamentary politics in Britain and contributes to understanding the remarkable changes in Parliament since the late 1960s. The new studies make at least four distinctive kinds of contributions. First, there is significant research on linkages between MPs and their constituents. The vicissitudes of constituency representation have been well described before. Today, nurturing a constituency remains much the same job it was when Sir Courtenay P. Ilbert characterized it three-quarters of a century ago.4 But we now enjoy a rapidly growing, rich and probing line of research about the extent and impact of MPs’ constituency activities. Secondly, there are a number of studies of the orientations of members, measured separately from the votes they cast by trooping through the division

The National and International Context of French Policy Communities

Abstract: There are numerous, well-organized policy communities in France, based upon specialized corps of senior administrative officials in symbiosis with the environment they are responsible for regulating and managing. They also derive their strength from the integration of the groups concerned in the policy process, allowing them to compensate for the weakness of their organization and social base by the privileged access and legitimacy they acquire. Nevertheless, the traditional way in which the policy process is structured is modified by the territorial shift (both local and international) in the arenas in which public policies are made.

Insider Lobbying: The British Version:

Abstract: While the Shorter Oxford has a bland definition of ‘the lobby’ which limits the meaning to the neutral exerting of influence, it does cite a more hostile source of as long ago as 1884 which ran: ‘The lobby and corruption are legitimate subjects for satire’. Current use of the term like the dictionary definitions -smuggles in a suspicion in the small print. It might be worth noting that this slight undercurrent of sharp practice is not entirely harmful for the industry; after all in attracting clients it is useful if they think that it is only decorum that stops the lobbyist from claiming that they can provide an unfair advantage.

Change and Permanence in Political Parties

Abstract: Incessant changes alter political parties in their organization, structure, recruitment and all other characteristics. Nevertheless, they are usually credited with stable features by which they are identified, and which enable them to be classified. If we consider French political parties, it is possible to demonstrate that both change and apparent stability arise from interaction within each party as well as between them and between the social organizations to which they are linked. These interactions and their effects must be related to general processes, such as social and cultural transformation; they cannot be solely explained by specifically political competition.

Comparative Analysis in Political Science: Requiem or Resurrection?:

Abstract: Comparative method in political science is currently going through a critical time, particularly after the failure of developmentalism, and of the classical paradigm of comparative government This

Reassessing Kautsky's Marxism

Abstract: Kautsky has been thwarted by the very thing he worshipped: history. His pacific, evolutionary Marxism, for so long ascendent within the Marxist camp, lost its persuasive potency in the turbulent years of the first world war and its aftermath. In Germany, the SPD ‘centre’, the living embodiment of his theory, did not hold. And the Bolshevik success in October 191 7 decisively moved the magnetic field of Marxism from Germany to Russia. Lenin’s Marxism replaced Kautsky’s as the new orthodoxy. Kautsky spent the two remaining decades of his life in the political wilderness, having to endure the soubriquet ‘renegade’. He has been one of history’s losers, unable to turn tables by winning posterity’s sympathy through posthumous martyrdom. And the final snub: just when his ideas appeared on the brink of rehabilitation in Eurocommunist practice, legitimation and inspiration has been sought not in his abundant texts. Rather, Eurocommunists have looked to Gramsci, who rejected almost everything for which Kautsky stood. He has remained consigned, along with his friend Bernstein, to the rogues’ gallery of Marxism, his works more reviled than read.’ To Lenin’s sketch of him as a pacific parliamentarist and panderer to national chauvinism was added the gloss of the Neo-Hegelian Marxists Lukacs, Korsch and indirectly Gramsci.

Commune Democracy and Gorbachev's Reforms

Abstract: The process of democratic restructuring in the Soviet Union since 1986 can be understood in terms of a revival of the democratic ideal of a participatory and self-managing society The concept of commune democracy espoused by Marx and Lenin, however, is problematical, not least because of ambiguities in its relationship to the state, the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dirigisme of the party Gorbachev's reforms are developing within the context of an attempt to regenerate commune democracy, and some of the hesitancies of the reform process can be attributed to the contradictions in the theory The scope for a reconstituted civil society is limited by the inclusive tendencies of traditional commune democracy The reform process may ultimately be able to exploit the ambiguities in commune democracy sufficiently to allow the development of a law-governed state

The 1689 Bill of Rights

Abstract: Following the disastrous reign of James II, the Bill of Rights was introduced to curb future arbitrary behaviour by the Crown. Five of the thirteen Articles are still active and cases illustrating their use in the courts are described. The courts have enforced the requirement for parliamentary consent to taxation and the ban on the executive's power to suspend statutes but have been less strict over the dispensing power. Article 9, on parliamentary freedom of speech, is in active use, and developments in Australia and Canada are reviewed. Scotland's own legislation – the Claim of Right – is discussed briefly. Most of the Bill probably does not apply to Northern Ireland. Opinions vary on the Bill's importance but in the author's view it is still a potent force.

The Radical Sources of the Crisis in West European Communist Parties

Abstract: The wave of radicalism that swept through Europe from the late 1960s did not pass the communist parties by but struck them with particular force. Evidence of this impact can be found in a study of the social composition of congress delegates, and from recent accounts of the experiences of the communist parties during the 1970s. The story of this trauma over one decade requires us to rethink the notion of Eurocommunism. What emerges from such a reconsideration is a distinction between a process of modernization on which many communist parties have embarked in the post-war period, and particularly since 1956, and a ‘new member’ factor which characterized the radical surge of the 1970s. This ‘new member’ factor brought a new style of militancy into the communist parties which challenged their traditional norms. This radicalism raised the fortunes of the communist parties during the 1970s, but it also brought about the crisis of the end of the decade. Whilst it has been responsible for the destruction of the crisis period, it has also provided the ideas and the forces for possible new strategies.

The Annual Review: The Emergence of a Corporatist Institution?

Abstract: Of the many theories of corporatism the most adequate is that which sees the relationship as a form of interest group intermediation and policy implementation. It has been argued that the Annual Re...

The Liberal Justification for Local Government: Values and Administrative Expediency

Abstract: There are several important justifications for autonomous units of local government, derived from the writings of J. S. Mill and later theories concerning the value of pluralism. These arguments fail to show that local government is a morally necessary, as opposed to expedient, adjunct to liberal-democratic government. The paper develops from J. S. Mill's ideas on liberty a more substantive justification for local government based on the principle that local government can be a means for ensuring that the determination of collective decisions are made solely by those people affected by the decision.

Gramsci: Marxism's Saviour or False Prophet?:

Abstract: In the more fashionable Marxist circles, speaking ill of Antonio Gramsci is just not done. Otherwise disputatious scholars genuflect in ritual obeisance to his memory, and some even elevate him to the status of seer.’ How the martyred Sardinian, a prophet without honour in his own time, would have responded to this posthumous adulation can safely be surmised. For what makes him so attractive as a thinker is his keen awareness of his own (and Marxism’s) intellectual fallibility, his willingness to subject every hallowed axiom and piety to continual and rigorous scrutiny and to discard it where necessary. Most fundamentally, he scorned economic reductionism in favour of a more complex analysis, focusing on the ‘ethico-political realm’ a term he borrowed from Benedetto Croce, Italy’s most influential idealist philosopher. Gramsci was preoccupied with the category of ‘will’ and emphasized culture as a means of both domination and liberation. Unusually for a Marxist of his day, he refused to see human actors as mere place-holders in the relations of production, programmed to think certain thoughts and behave in certain ways. In his heterodox view, man’s spirit, not brute economic fact, reigns supreme in history. Herein lies the basis of his characterization of revolution at least in the west as a struggle for spiritual ascendancy, or ‘hegemony’, as he styled it. Throughout the past decade or so, a steady stream of publications has provided the English-language audience with a fairly comprehensive and subtle understanding of what Gramsci actually said. So the question inevitably arises: do we need still more books on this charismatic thinker/politician? In two recent, and very different, studies,* Teodros Kiros and John Hoffman answer this question by avoiding stale exegetical puzzles and instead examining the contemporary relevance of Gramsci’s analysis and prescriptions. Does Gramsci, as his admirers aver, offer a ray of hope to frustrated and disillusioned Marxists, weary of being spurned by the masses and mocked by history? Kiros’s response is an unqualified ‘yes’. In a work often bordering on hagiography, he argues that Gramsci’s belief in human subjectivity implied ‘a theory of political action’, paving the way for a genuinely democratic and popular form of Marxism. That

Restructuring the State in South Africa: New Strategies of Incorporation and Control

Abstract: Although it is now widely conceded that there have been many changes in South Africa in recent years, not least in the political sphere, the nature and significance of these changes remain hotly contested. After sketching the pre-reform system, this article presents a broad and comprehensive account of the institutional reorganization of the South African state and the official justification for it. Acknowledging that at the moment only tentative interpretations of these developments are possible, it poses questions about the adequacy of official explanations and suggests that a deeper motivation for the changes lies in a commitment to both order and reform, the outlines of which are much clearer at the local than at the national level.

Clausewitz's Political and Ethical World View:

Abstract: This article challenges the accepted view that Clausewitz did not deal with the ethical status of war. It attempts to show that his views on this matter are well documented in his works; that they were part and parcel of a comprehensive outlook regarding the nature of both international relations and the state; and that this outlook reflected the emerging world view in the Germany of national awakening.

Television Election News Analysis: Use and Abuse ‐ A Reply

Abstract: One feature of recent British general election campaigns on which all observers would surely agree is the ever-increasing extent to which they have been designed to capture favourable attention from television. Labour’s 1987 campaign was proof, if proof was still needed, that the last bastions of resistance to ‘modern’ techniques had crumbled. Even the Greens, ostensible exponents of an ‘alternative’ approach to politics, have shown in their broadcasts that they are prepared to be as unsentimentally (and as sentimentally) manipulative as the oldstyle politicians they seek to displace. The parties’ efforts focus most intensely on obtaining favourable news coverage on television. As they see it, TV news is watched by more people, particularly among the less politically minded, than any other election programming. It is also trusted more than most other sources. Moreover, programmes like ‘Newsnight’ or ‘Today’ take many of the cues shaping their coverage from the main news, as to some extent does the press. Perceptions about how well or badly a party is doing on televison may also affect its morale, directly and by way of the small army of commentators who analyse campaigns in print or on the air. It is therefore surprising that the behaviour of television news during election periods has received such limited academic scrutiny. The Nuffield series has discussed it since coverage began in 1959, as more recently have the Political Communication and American Enterprise Institute volumes.’ Useful though these may be, all are limited by the genre within which they are produced or by imperative resource constraints. The Nuffield chapters, for example, are produced single-handed inside four months, at minimal cost and within tightly limited space. By contrast, Miller and his team enjoyed substantially greater resources, which provided an opportunity to investigate underexplored dimensions of television’s handling of elections and test earlier findings. Unfortunately the outcome is profoundly unsatisfactory. Following the paper from the confident simplicity of its title to the no less confident conclusions about ‘television’, one must remind oneself repeatedly how

The Errors of an Evolutionist: a Reply to Ellen Frankel Paul

Abstract: As the late Sir Peter Medawar once remarked, the numerous volumes of Herbert Spencer’s Synrhetic Philosophy have ‘acquired with age a reptilian colour and texture, so putting one in mind of some great extinct monster of philosophic learning’. Indeed, despite the current revival of interest in classical liberalism, few political philosophers have attempted to sift through the fossilized remains of Spencer’s thought, and it is against this background of general neglect that Ellen Frankel Paul’s recent paper ‘Liberalism, unintended orders, and evolutionism’ stands out as a rare and welcome exception.2 Paul’s paper repeats two criticisms first made in her earlier discussion ‘Herbert Spencer: the historicist as a failed p r~phe t ’ .~ In the first place, she argues, Spencer failed to realize that individualism is incompatible with the organic conception of ~ociety.~ Secondly, SpenceYs theory of social evolution cannot account for the rise of socialism in the late Victorian period, even though this was a phenomenon which Spencer himself recognized and denounced. My objective is to establish that both these criticisms are founded on important misunderstandings of Spencer’s political thought. And although the call of ‘unfair to dinosaurs’ is never likely to be a popular rallying cry, the misconceptions on which Paul’s case rests have gained sufficient currency to warrant refutation.