Showing papers on "Legitimacy published in 1976"

Social limits to growth

Abstract: Forward by Tibor Scitovsky. 1. Introduction Part I. The Neglected Realm of Social Scarcity 2. A Duality in the Growth Potential 3. The Material Economy and the Positional Economy 4. The Ambiguity of Economic Output Part II. The Commercialization Bias 5. The Economics of Bad Neighbours 6. The New Commodity Fetishism 7. A First Summary: The Hole in the Affluent Society Part III. The Depleting Moral Legacy 8. An Overload on the Mixed Economy 9. Political Keynesianism and the Managed Market 10. The Moral Re-entry 11. The Lost Legitimacy and the Distributional Compulsion Part IV. Perspective and Conclusions 12. The Liberal Market as a Transition Case 13. Inferences for Policy

The enforcement of morals: nontherapeutic research on children.

Abstract: In the fall of 1974, Richard McCormick proposed a novel interpretation of the meaning of valid proxy consent in the case of children. Addressed as it was to a perplexing problem in medical ethics, the legitimacy of nontherapeutic experimentation on children, McCormick's article, "Proxy Consent in the Experimental Situation,"' has had a wide influence. It is my contention, however, that McCormick's ethical analysis is incorrect, that it suffers from a moralistic quality, and that it is bound to weaken the protection of children in this age of research medicine. Indeed, it may have already done so. One can surely describe McCormick's position as novel. By insisting on a voluntary consent of the human subject for all experimentation, the Nuremberg Code seemed to rule out altogether nontherapeutic experimentation on children or the incompetent. Other medical codes adopted since then have allowed parents and guardians to enter children and incompetent persons into nontherapeutic research, but this right was ascribed simply by stipulation. No attempt was made to argue that the validity of the proxy consent could be grounded in the subject's presumable consent. That is what McCormick does, with far-reaching consequences. McCormick begins his argument with a review of the medical codes and the views of professional ethicians. Not surprisingly, he finds "profoundly diverging views" in this literature. Nonetheless, "the ethician who has discussed this problem at greatest length," writes McCormick, is "Princeton's Paul Ramsey"; and it is against my views that McCormick develops several of his arguments. "Ramsey," he writes, "denies the validity of proxy consent in nonbeneficial (to the child) experiments simply and without qualification" (p. 8). As evidence he submits the following passage from my book The Patient as Person: "To attempt to consent for a child to be made an experimental subject is to treat a child as not a child. It is to treat him as if he were an adult person who has consented to become a joint adventurer in the common cause of medical research. If the grounds for this are alleged to be the presumptive or implied consent of the child, that must simply be characterized as a violent and a false presumption."2 This, in fact, remains my view of the matter; I have read nothing that persuades me that this, my original position, is incorrect. Nonetheless, in view of the necessity sometimes claimed for nontherapeutic research with uncomprehending subjects, several years ago I did explore, by way of a "thought experiment," an alternative position. If today we mean to give such weight to the research imperative, I argued, then we should not seek to give a principled justification of what we are doing with children. It is better to leave the research imperative in incorrigible conflict with the principle that protects the individual human person from being used for research purposes without either his expressed or correctly construed consent. Some sorts of human experimentation should, in this alternative, be acknowledged to be "borderline situations" in which moral agents are under the necessity of doing wrong for the sake of the public good. Either way they do wrong. It is immoral not to do the research. It is also immoral to use children who cannot

Perceived legitimacy of decision making and academic governance patterns in higher education: A comparative analysis

Abstract: This report relates the findings of two parallel studies of campus governance in Pennsylvania institutions. Patterns of decision making were described at six institutions in one study and perceived legitimacy of governance on the part of faculty was assessed on the same campuses. The findings of the studies are related for the purpose of exploring effects of decision issue, institution, and type of institution upon each pattern as well as upon ways in which governance patterns and perceived legitimacy covary. The conclusions suggest modifications in theory and research strategies for future work on the dynamics of campus governance.

Revitalization and Decay: Looking Toward the Third Century of American Electoral Politics

Abstract: AS THE CALENDAR POINTS toward the bicentennial of American independence, the United States finds itself in the grip of a pervasive and remarkably long-lived political crisis. Signs of this crisis are everywhere to be seen. They have appeared in a variety of forms: in George Wallace's campaigns, in and out of the Democratic party, since the spring of 1964; in Barry Goldwater's nomination by the Republicans that year; in the assassinations, riots and protest demonstrations of 1967-1972; in the failure of the Democratic conventions of 1968 and 1972 to achieve either legitimacy or consensus; in Richard Nixon's rise from the politically dead in 1968, and in his richly deserved reinterment in 1974; and in much else besides. So far from being exhaustive, such a list of pathological symptoms could be extended almost indefinitely. They add up to a syndrome; and it seems very likely that 1976 will make its own contributions to that list. Conventional wisdom, such as it now exists, stresses the importance of two chief proximate causes of this state of affairs: the Vietnam disaster in foreign policy and the mix of poverty and civilrights programs in the domestic arena. One implication of this argument is that, with Vietnam now in the past and with a general discrediting in public and elite opinion of the kind of experiment in positive federal action associated with the "Great Society," things

Consolidating Power in Revolutionary America: The Case of New York, 1775-1783

Abstract: Consolidating Power in Revolutionary America: The Case of New York, 1775-1783 Between October 2, 1777 and February 7, 1778 the newly founded state assembly of New York took votes on the state supreme court, on prohibiting the sale of scarce grain to customers out of the state, and on an extraconstitutional convention that had seized power in the face of a military crisis in the late autumn of 1777 and that held it until the legislature could reassemble.I There is no reason, on the face of it, to expect any relationship among these divisions; none of them was a party issue and none of them was identified with the governor, George Clinton. Yet these votes-there were five in all-formed a single Guttman scale.2 In other words, voting patterns showed that the votes turned on a single basic issue: the existence and powers of the extralegal convention and other bodies like it. The problem with the court was the refusal of its judges, named to their posts by an earlier extralegal convention, to carry out their duties until reappointed constitutionally. The debate over the embargo bill asked whether the assembly should merely continue a prohibition already imposed by the convention or whether it should impose a new one, without mentioning the convention at all. The issue, in short, was legitimacy: should New York's constitutional republican institutions recognize the power that revolutionary bodies had exercised in the state since the collapse of the colonial government ? And if they did, would that betoken an abandonment of their own claim to be the sole legitimate political power in the state ? Conventional wisdom says that such a problem should not have existed in revolutionary America. Ever since its French counterpart provided a first basis for comparison, students of the American Revolution have remarked on the ease and smoothness with which that event

Waves from Watergate: Evidence Concerning the Impact of the Watergate Scandal upon Political Legitimacy and Social Control

Abstract: Thus spoke an unnamed psychologist during an interview in 1973 as the Watergate revelations began to unfold with increasingly scandalous impact. While he was apparently speaking to some extent from a professional point of view, he was also expressing the conventional wisdom of the period according to nearly all of the news commentators and political pundits as well: namely, that the Watergate episode had disastrously undermined public respect and confidence in government leaders, especially, but not only, those in the White House, and had demoralized and disillusioned the youth, in particular, whose commitment to "the system" could only have been

Who Shall Rule at Home: The American Revolution as a Crisis of Legitimacy for the Colonial Elite

Abstract: Emotions, historians are well aware, had much to do with the coming of the American Revolution. Bailyn has recently suggested that the impact of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in 1776 was partly due to the way in which it expressed and crystallized American anger. Furthermore, many scholars have long suspected-as Wood put it ten years ago-that the "revolutionary character of the Americans' ideas... indicates that something profoundly unsettling was going on in the society...." With a few notable exceptions, however, most students of the Revolution have taken the emotional element for granted, and that oversight has accentuated some artificial divisions among them. For the difficulty of disentangling the complex relationships between socioeconomic developments and ideology has created an "either-or" situation in which individuals have been drawn into studying-and consequently emphasizing the primacy of-one element or the other. The resulting debate has been fruitful in the past, but it probably cannot be resolved.' The time has come therefore to give more attention to the emotional matrix through which contemporary ideas were linked to social phenomena. Clearly, as two scholars who have studied the emotional roots of rebellion note, Americans were "boiling mad" on the eve of the Revolution, and there was a myriad of reasons for their anger. But an examination of the situation in South Carolina, which will be the focus for much of the present discussion, indicates that the precarious

Political Competence and Mass Media Use

Abstract: Relationships are examined between feelings of political competence and cumulative media usage in five Western nations. Wide differentiation among the nations studied is found, suggesting that multivariate analysis is needed to establish whether media usage makes a unique contribution to feelings of political competence, or acts as a surrogate for other background variables. Frank B. Feigert is Professor of Political Science, State University of New York, Brockport, New York. Data for this study were supplied through the facilities of the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research, which bears no responsibility for the analysis and interpretations which follow. POQ 40 (1976) 234-238 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.138 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 06:03:45 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms POLITICAL COMPETENCE AND MASS MEDIA 235 Contrary to this hypothesis is the view that media actually serve to deprive a system of legitimacy. If "political news is drunk up by the public as drama,"3 the "drama" of politics may "contribute to a widespread and chronic distrust" of political institutions and actors.4 Passive participation and the impersonality of the media may also reinforce feelings of futility or apathy as regards the possibility of citizen control-by-elections.5 Thus, increasing alienation may be a consequence of media usage. Which of these two hypotheses best describes the impact of mass media on feelings of political competence? The Almond and Verba study contains several variables that permit us to examine this relationship. Almond and Verba defined political or citizen competence as an ability to exert influence in the decision-making process. Subjective competence is one's belief in this ability, and in turn consists of (1) administrative competence (the belief that government officials and police would be responsive); and (2) subject competence, a belief that these officials would mete out equal treatment.6 In their study, Almond and Verba provide some information about media usage in the five nations under study (U.S., Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Mexico).7 However, they do not relate such usage to the varieties of competence as defined. In the following analysis we hypothesize a positive relationship between the extent of mass media exposure to politics and several attitudinal variables. Media exposure is defined as the number of media used to follow public affairs, regardless of the frequency with which each medium is used. The attitudinal variables include the varieties of subjective competence, as operationalized by Almond and Verba; political information; and more generalized attitudes toward government and the electoral process.

Locke on "Voluntary Agreement" and Political Power:

Abstract: JT SEEMS to be the case that in his political writings John Locke was trying to find an equilibrium between consent, natural law, and natural rights, such that no one of these (taken by itself) constitutes his complete concept of right, and such that in Lockean politics one sets up, by voluntary consent and contract, a political order which guarantees the natural rights which one has in virtue of natural law.1 In all of Locke's mature works, certainly, consent, contractarianism, voluntarily produced polities and obligations, have a great deal of weight, even if these do not displace or replace natural laws and rights.2 This is true not only of the Second Treatise (though it is the best example), but of such works as the Third Letter for Toleration (1692)-a work in which Locke, exasperated with an opponent's claim that "civil societies are instituted [by God] for the attaining all the benefits which civil society or political government can yield" (including salvation), finally exclaims: "If you will say, that commonwealths are not voluntary societies constituted by men, and by men freely entered into... that commonwealths are constituted by God for ends which he has appointed, without the consent and contrivance of men... I shall desire you to prove it."3 Locke's view, as is well known, was that even though God has "appointed" moral and political "ends" in the form of natural laws and rights,4 the "consent and contrivance" of men is necessary if those "ends" are to be effective on earth because men must voluntarily set up a "known and indifferent judge" who will require men to conform their conduct to God's appointed ends: "The law of nature would ... be in vain, if there were nobody... [that]... had a power to execute that law."5 And the "power" which "executes" that law must be set up by consent and contract, since there is no natural political authority. Now Locke's most familiar contractarian arguments are of course to be found in the Second Treatise. Sometimes -indeed, repeatedlyhe contents himself with the bare claim that consent creates political right, as in section 102 ("politic societies all began from a voluntary union, and the mutual agreement of men freely acting in the choice of their governors, and forms of government"),6 and in section 192 (rulers must put the people "under such a frame of government, as they willingly, and of choice, consent to").7 Occasionally, however, Locke provides a more elaborate argument,

Intellectuals and Their Discontents.

Abstract: is a peculiar paradox in the politics of large numbers of contemporary American intellectuals. They are "agin" the government. They have not, despite their momentary love affair with the dignity of the legislative branch during the investigations arising from the Watergate incident, become any more reconciled to politicians than they were in the time of H. L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson or than they have been ever since Henry Adams. They distrust the executive branch, too. They support every effort to force its activities into the light of day because they have no confidence in what it would do in secrecy. They deny its right to the obedience of its citizenry. The theory of sovereignty has practically disappeared from the popular subject of political philosophy, and legitimacy is spoken about mainly when it is said that the government has lost it. Even those who are more measured usually think that the government is doing the wrong thing; when it does the right thing, it does it in the wrong way. They denounce "bureaucratization," which they see as a manifestation of the wrong course taken by modern civilization. Few university graduates think of the civil service as a career on the level with the law, or medicine, or scientific research, or university and college teaching or even private business. Most of these attitudes are carried along by an old tradition; attitudes expressed in a more recent idiom are no more than variations on an old theme.

Violence and Social Change in the Yugoslav Revolution: Lessons for the Third World?

Abstract: The Yugoslav Revolution represents a particularly interesting type of violent change. By and large, it is a case where the tasks of modernization and development were primarily undertaken by native Communist forces which, having consolidated political power by the end of World War II, had to enter upon at least two new campaigns to redefine the basis of their political legitimacy. The first, of course, was the result of the break with the Soviet bloc. This forced the Yugoslav Communists to develop their own national ideological variant of Communism, in counterposition not only to the bloc but to the entire course of their own history, and to all of the political instincts developed in the party over the formative years. The second and, in my opinion, even more profound break occurred over a longer period-roughly from 1958 to the present-when the Yugoslav Communists addressed themselves to the task of developing mass-based participatory institutions as a substitute for the existing models of social and political institutions both under capitalism and state socialism.1 Thus, the Yugoslav revolution can be considered in three stages: (1) the consolidation of power, characterized by a bitter guerrilla war which contained within it a war of liberation and a civil war; (2) the struggle for national independence and development of a specific socialist identity (in which the Yugoslav experience is probably most analogous to that of the Chinese Communists in the equivalent period); and (3) the creation of a social and political system based on the institution of workers' self-management. In examining the consolidation and institutionalization of this revolution, we enter an area relatively neglected by political sociologists as compared to historians and political scientists. The changes that occurred in Yugoslavia represented a sharp discontinuity with the past social organizations and institutions. They were revolutionary rather than incremental. It is my argument that it was precisely the mass mobilization of previously uninvolved strata during the first stage that made possible the successful completion of the second, and the

In search of Egypt

Abstract: R. Hrair Dekmejian, Egypt under Nasir: A Study in Political Dynamics, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1971, 368 pp.. $10.00. Iliya F. Harik, The Political Mobilization of Peasants: A Study of an Egyptian Community, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1974, 309 pp., $12.50. James B. Mayfield, Rural Politics in Nasser's Egypt: A Quest for Legitimacy, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1971, 288 pp., $10.00. Amos Perlmutter, Egypt: The Preatorian State, New Brunswick, Transaction Books, 1974, 234 pp., $9.95.

Conservative Revolution and Liberal Rhetoric: The Declaration of Independence

Abstract: I T IS A COMMON CHARACTERISTIC of modern political systems that their legitimatizing myths are derived from the rhetoric of their founding revolutions. Nations born out of revolutions turn back to their revolutions for their statement of political principles, as though the revolutions themselves had placed the stamp of a national imprimatur upon their political ideology. In the United States to return to the principles of the Revolution is to return to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. We have no formidable treatises on philosophical systems such as Marx and Engels brought forth for later revolutionaries; we have neither Rousseaus nor Condorcets to fire us with broad sweeps of intuited anthropology and history and future prospects; nor do we have Hobbeses or Harringtons or Lockes (though much diluted we inherited all three); what we have as a revolutionary philosophy is a short, elegantly phrased paragraph, simple enough to be commonplace and whose ultimate significance rests upon its being accepted as commonplace. For only commonplace statements can be called self-evident truths. This ideology of political legitimacy, this revolutionary creed, is found in one paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.

Bureaucratization of the Meiji State: The Problem of Succession in the Meiji Restoration, 1868–1900

Abstract: Analyses of Japanese political development during the period 1868–1900 have for the most part obscured the fact that the kind of problems faced by the Restoration leaders played a major role in shaping the governing structure they created. Perhaps the most significant of these problems in the years immediately following the restoration of the emperor in 1868 was that of leadership succession. The total replacement of Bakuhan leadership in the decade 1868–78 raised serious practical questions as to how the new leadership could insure their authority and legitimacy. Such questions were not peculiar to the Japanese situation; they are questions all organizations face when they undergo total or partial replacement of leadership. However, the application of such conceptual categories as “tradition” and “modernization” has made it difficult to distinguish between those features of political development that were the consequence of being forced to deal with problems that arise in all organizations as a consequence of leadership succession and those that can be attributed to continuing social and cultural patterns.

Challenges to Legitimacy: Dilemmas and Directions.

Abstract: Even in those parts of the world where the cultural revolution has not been formalized, established institutions are under siege, including the once sacrosanct institutions of higher learning The ultimate destinies of the latter, no less than of other major social institutions, are subject now to large and global forces Their future must thus be examined in that context rather than in the barometric ups and downs of public skepticism and support There are elemental forces at work, and to understand the major underlying causes of the growing divergence of public sentiment and our colleges and universities is also to begin determining some appropriate institutional responses Without them, the central institutional purpose may not long survive

The English Catholic Press and the Second Spanish Republic, 1931–1936

Abstract: The sympathy of most English Catholics during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 lay with General Francisco Franco and the other generals who had rebelled against the Second Spanish Republic. If there was any doubt of this, the spate of literature which then appeared, much of it polemical, and the journalistic views presented could leave little doubt on the matter. The adoption of an anti-Republican stance in English Catholic circles, while not complete, nevertheless implied an adverse judgment upon the viability and legitimacy of the Republic, if not its legality, from 1936 onward. The Republic had failed in its primary obligation—to rule justly—and the military revolt had been necessary to forestall anarchy or communism. The judgment that the Republic had failed, however, was not an a priori one, nor was it enthusiastically reached so much as accepted.

Sponsorship, self presentation, and legitimacy

Abstract: This study examined the influence of organizational sponsorship and a representative's style of self presentation on the legitimacy of a request, compliance with a request, and endorsement of a sponsor Social serving sponsorship produced greater legitimacy, compliance and endorsement than profit‐making sponsorship; and a self disclosing representative produced greater legitimacy, endorsement and compliance than a non‐self disclosing representative under the condition of profit‐making sponsorship Results are interpreted from a social exchange perspective