Test Flashcards
Why do we want democracy? What does it do for us?
- equal opportunities to participate in decisions
- properties belonging to modern democracy has evolved through centuries, no one way process
who should govern; Locke, Montesqieu, Rousseau, Madison; influenced historical events leading to representative democratic systems - state of nature; need for collective protection; social contract; natural rights; law; factions; will of the people; securing legitimacy; through mechanisms as checks and balances and periodic elections.
- ideals of self government; equality; liberty
- a developed liberal democracy includes all three institutions; the state, rule of law, and procedural accountability
State of nature
Popular government resides from..
Rosseau; naively surrendering
In the state of nature, man was guided by two sentiments: self-interest and pity, and having no moral obligations with others, he could not be “good or bad, virtuous or vicious”; Conception is not as gloomy as Hobbes nor as optimistic as Locke`s; Uncivilized man is always “foolishly ready to obey the first proltings of humanity. It is the mob and the market-women who part the combatants, and hinder gentle-folks from cutting one another-s throat; , man is guided by instinct only, whereas in society he is inspired by justice and morality. Man loses through the social contract his natural liberty and an unlimited right ot everything he can lay his hands on, but he gains civil liberty and property rights in all he posesses. The liberty of the state of nature is no true liberty, because it is merely enslavement to uncontrolled appetites. By contrast, moral liberty, which man acquires solely in the civil state, makes him master of himself, because “obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.” In civil society, the alternative is between obeying laws in the making of which the citizens have not participated, and obeying laws in which we ourselves have participated in making. In the first case, we obey the will of others, which makes us morally unfree. In the second case we obey the will of ourselves, which condition alone can make us free.
Locke; egoistically compromising
people have human reason; Contrary to Hobbes state of nature (where there is only natural right, and now natural law) he holds a more positive view about humanity, which is an ordered whole governed by the law of nature, where people from the very beginning act according to the principle (law of nature) which is that; they are governed by reason; and not just attracted to do anything according to their own preservation or egoistic sentiments.
A community of free equal individuals all possessed of natural rights, will want to acquire goods and will come into inevitable conflict, thus natural law of morality will govern them before they enter into society; presumes people will understand that in order to best protect themselves and their property they must come into some sort of body politic and agree to adhere to standards of behaviour thus relenquish some of their natural rights (life, liberty, and property) into a social compact (the common laws of society)
Here, everyone has a right to punish an offender of the law of nature, thus not everyone is governed by the same rules, and since we differ, in interpretations, chaos may occur. If, by reason, one consent as members of society, one might reduce uncertainties and gain predictability, and all would gain more advantages than life in the original state.
Montesqieu; how should we organize government?
in the state of nature individuals were so fearful that they avoided violence and war. As soon as man enters into a state of society,” “he loses the sense of his weakness, equality ceases, and then commences the state of war, war among individuals and nations led to human laws and government; main purpose of government is to maintain law and order, political liberty, and the property of the individual. Laws are freedom. Therein, Announces the thoughts of Rousseau and Hegel: Montesquieu defines freedom, politically, as obedience to the laws.
Social contract; theorists
These social contract theorists all agreed on some matters in their arguments of how democracy ought to evolve; through a creation of a social contract, as needed from inherent features of a situation of lack of “society” called the “state of nature”. Although they saw the succession of a social contract as a natural and necessary outcome, their view of what this “state of nature” really entailed differed, so did their views on which form this “social contract” thus ought to take.
Solution to the state of nature.
Rousseau;
Rousseau is the first modern writer to attempt, not always successfullly, to synthesize good government with self-government in the key concept of the General Will: the realization of what is best for the community is not enough; it must also be willed by the community. Equality, direct democracy (small states) so that more than the will of all (sum of all wills, taking into account private interest) is nto the only thing that is considered but the General will (realization of each individual of the common good,which is best for him as well) is asserted and kept; the individual would submit himself, denying its natural liberty (slave of appetites) and achieving moral liberty (beyond civil liberty); Social contract of the people, no sovergeing king. Recognized property as a form of private domination that had to be kept under control by the General Will, the public interst of the community.
Locke;
Locke’s model consists of a civil state, built upon the natural rights common
to a people who need and welcome an executive power to protect their property and liberties;
the government exists for the people’s benefit and can be replaced or overthrown if it ceases to
function toward that primary end; in return for protection delegating authority which may enforce punishment for offenders; obedience to rule should rest on consent of the governed, and government should be overturned if rights be violated; laying the foundation of popular sovereignty in the US declaration in 1789
- spoke out for freedom of thought, speech, and religion, but believed property to be the most important natural right.
- defended a representative government such as the English Parliament, which had a hereditary House of Lords and an elected House of Commons.
- wanted representatives to be only men of property and business.
Montesqieu;
- Montesquieu did not describe a social contract as such. But he said that the state of war among individuals and nations led to human laws and government. Montesquieu wrote that the main purpose of government is to maintain law and order, political liberty, and the property of the individual.
- BUT we ought to be careful about how we organise them so that one does not corrupt the power of the others; thus we must separate branches.
- The separation of powers (legislative, executive, judicial) is the best way to reconcile the freedom of citizens and public authorities; as the remedy for abuse of power
- believed that uniting these powers, as in the monarchy of Louis XIV, would lead to despotism; opposed the absolute monarchy of France and favored the English system as the best model of government.
- americans later adopted it as the foundation of the U.S. Constitution
Three institutions of developed liberal democracy
A politically developed liberal democracy would have all three institutions; the state, rule og law and procedural accountability - in some kind of balance; a state that is powerful without checks is a dictatorship.
Law; an existing legal order limiting even the most powerful political actors in society whether kings, presidents og prime ministers, embodies in separate judicial institutions that can act autonomously fringe the executive.
State; A monopoly of legitimate coercion over a defined territory. Kinship replaced by a legal contract; feudalism.
rule of law and accountability pulls the opposite direction; constraining state power and ensuring that it is used only in a controlled and consensual manner.
Democratic accountability; procedures making the parliament responsible to consent of the governed (second treatise of government; the interests of the whole society, common good or general will (rather than ones self interest) as rights are natural and inherened in human beings and governments exist only to protect these rights; procedural accountability is periodic free fair multiparty elections that allow citizens to choose and discipline their rulers.
Ideals of democracy
Properties belonging to the modern meaning of democracy has evolved through the past centuries until the form it has taken today, most crucially traced back to thoughts to influential Enlightenment philosophers (or contract theorists) such as John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau which in this period began debating the question of who should govern a nation. As the absolute rule of kings weakened, they made arguments for different forms of democracy, i. e theories of government for which the people should govern, making a profound effect on historical events of the 16th and 17th century, American and French revolutions and the democratic systems of governments that they produced, ideas which the construction of todays constitutions relies on, parliamentarian representative governments, with an extension of the the decision-making process to a wider section of society giving every member (man regardless of income, slaves, women, and coloured) eventually also a vote in the system of governing. It was soon called collectively for a need for an extension of “protection by laws of citizen rights”, from the debated issues as factions and the state of nature “, in an optimal manner which secured legitimacy of institutions and that the “will of the people”, through mechanisms such as system checks and balances and periodic elections.
Self government;
For a collectivity to govern itself, all of its members must be able to exercise equal influence over its decisions without favorivation due to traits. All individual qualities are left at the doorstep of democratic politics; they are irrelevant to the status of citizens. Self-government is exercised through elections. The collective decision making process operates indirectly; citizens choose parties or candidates, authorizing them to make decisions on behalf of the collectivity.
;Political/procedural equality; does not include social or economic equality; although equality for the law may though function as a tool for equality in the socioeconomic realm by chances to affect collective political outcomes.
Liberty;
Laws can make us free in situations in which the pursuit of individual interests leads to an outcome that is collectively suboptimal; they make us free to cooperate with the security that we would benefit from the fruits of cooperation. Autonomy is a particular kind of liberty – because to live together we must live under laws, this is the only kind of freedom possible.
Democracies vs other forms of government
In which respects are democracies better than the alternatives?
There are a number of (non-democratic) governments in the early twenty-first century that see themselves as principled alternatives to liberal democracy.
- Iran
- The monarchies of the Persian Gulf
- Russia
- The Peoples republic of China
- Iran is seriously divided with a large middle class that contests many of the regimes claims to legitimacy.
- The gulf Monarchies have always been exceptional cases, viable in their present forms only because. of their huge energy resources.
- Putin
s Russia has emerged as a rentier state, regionally powerful largely because it sits on reserves of gas and oil, outside of the world of Russian speakers, it is no ones idea of a political system worth emulating. - China poses the most serious challenge to the idea that liberal democracy constitutes a universal evolutionary model; strong centralised government; their rich and complex tradition has substituted Confucian morality for formal procedural rules as a constraint on rulers; and their rapid growth has created new vester interests that are powerful and have influence over the party`s decision making even in the absence of a legislature and lobbyists; and the party leadership has fallen into patterns of corruption that make reform personally dangerous for many of them.
- Democracy is a system of processing conflicts in which outcomes depend on what participants do; not one nor a few. It serves to protect individual’s civil, political, economic, social, and cultural freedoms, from harm, violence, weaponry, colonialism, communism, and authoritarianism.
- Perhaps the greater developmental challenge lies not in the existence of an alternative more attractive form of political organisation but in the fact that many countries will aspire to be rich, liberal democracies never able to get there; some observers have suggested that poor countries may be “trapped” in poverty because of the intertwined dimensions of political and economic development; economic development requires certain minimal political institutions to occur; which is hard to create in conditions of extreme poverty and political fractionalisation.
Does democracy yield the best solutions to social problems,
(does “popular” mean “right”?)
or only the most popular?
Neither!
- not always the best; popular does not necessarily entail “right”;
Firstly, it lacks a grounding in an objective ideal of reason.
Secondly, it excludes the necessity for proper civic education and favorably egalitarian conditions are necessary for the deliberations of the citizens to have the rectitude they require to make the general will triumph over particular interests and the actual best solutions.
It does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally correct.
One example is climate change and people`s short-termed unenlightened thinking and course of action compared to if scientists were given mandate to choose on the behalf of the rest of us.
Another is popular elections giving mandate to crude people of power demonstrated by the actions following the German election in 32.
In stores we are allowed to buy cigarettes, yet, if healthcare professional and scientists were to decide the way for the society.. thousands of deaths every year would be prevented. - not always the most popular, but the best organised;
democracy is representative. political outcomes often do not always correspond to popular preferences, and decision are affected by organised interests lobbying their views to politicians both directly and indirectly - through media mobilising peoples attention on different causes. Groups are not equally capable of organising for collective action. The un-organized, are often the poor, poorly educated and marginalised.
BUT still, the safest as he concept of the general will also implies a proscription against despotism, preserving civil liberty and autonomy, not with giving free reign to government. We can build on education, and try to advance mechanisms for organisation.
Rousseaus general will
General will, in political theory, a collectively held will that aims at the common good or common interest.
Rousseau distinguishes the general will from the particular and often contradictory wills of individuals and groups.
*“Forcing this individual to abide by the law is thus nothing else than “forcing him to be free.”;
To partake in the general will means to reflect upon and to vote on the basis of one’s sense of justice; it demands from “each individual a pure act of understanding, which reasons while the passions are silent on what a man may demand of his neighbor and on what his neighbor has a right to demand of him
*he argues that it is intrinsically right; and assumed that all people are capable of taking the moral standpoint of aiming at the common good and that, if they did so, they would reach a unanimous decision.
*in an ideal state, laws express the general will
*preserving civil liberty and autonomy, not with giving free reign to government; a proscription against despotism; government is only legitimate insofar as it is subordinated to popular sovereignty. Government loses all legitimacy the moment it places itself above the law to pursue its own interest as a separate political body.
*inspired his followers with what they saw as a promise of revolutionary moral and political transformation; he was the first modern writer to attempt, not always successfullly, to synthesize good government with self-government in the key concept of the General Will: the realization of what is best for the community is not enough; it must also be willed by the community.
Liberal democracy is based on the concept of Rights.
What does that mean?
Where do Rights come from?
Why are they considered authoritative?
The concept of rights means;
Natural rights are rights which are “natural” in the sense of “not artificial, not man-made”, as in rights deriving from human nature or from the edicts of a god. They are universal; that is, they apply to all people, and do not derive from the laws of any specific society. Legal rights, in contrast, are based on a society’s customs, laws, statutes or actions by legislatures. An example of a legal right is the right to vote of citizens.
Come from;
*Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and his followers maintained that man’s sociability generates the need for rights, as cooperation with others can greatly improve one’s own life in the “state of nature” i.e. society without order, rules and rights would be unpredictable and precarious.
*John Locke (1632-1724) argued in his second treatise of government that rights were natural and inhered in all human beings such as life, liberty, and property in a state of nature in which they live free from outside rule;
*“All men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights valid at all times and in every place, pertaining to human nature itself.” became the basis for a nation of free individuals protected equally by the law
political equality and
popular sovereignty/consent of the governed
“no taxation without representation”
evolved to be incorporated into constitutions in the years to come
*Jefferson incorporated Locke`s ideas of natural rights and popular sovereignty in the Declaration of Independence in 1789, as was it included in the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen
*although these words did not instantly establish equal democracy the galvanisation and spread of ideas over the next centuries were significant, and laid the foundation of gradual franchise/law expansion - to all white men, genders, and of all colours, before it also inspired the creation of United Nations universal declaration of human rights.
*self-preservation has been posited by many philosophers as the ultimate source of natural rights. Vattel argued that self-interest, and self-interest alone, is the source and rationale of rights. Przeworski have argued that this self-interest was focused on private property of the wealthy and that their interest of rights laid mainly in being able to formally secure it from getting into other peoples hands.
Considered authoritative because;
transformed into laws, rights cannot be legislated away depending on the different views among rulers, nor should they be subject to the whim of an electoral majority.
American theorists of democracy locate sovereignty in ‘the People’;
German theorists place it with ‘das Volk’, and the
French with ‘le peuple’.
Are these three synonymous words referring to the population of a country? Or are they different families of the same species?
Soveregnity was essensially something that in the emerging world system belonged to the monarchies that substituted for popes and emperors. The initial conception was that the essence of sovereign power was provided by god.
Increasinly, rationalist theorists of politics, whose intellectual roots were in Aristotle and Machiavelli, began questioning the deistic foundations of autority; what defined the essence of sovereign power.
- For Hobbes, the answer began to take on a secular tone; the authoritarian leviathans power came from a fundational social contract; i.e. the concent of the governed and the body politic itself (to prevent chaos); as did Machiavellis notion of the Prince`s power and legitimacy rooted on a mixture of skill and circumstances.
- Soveregnity ceased to be an autocratic attribute of the monarch, but one of citizenship as contractual theorists as Locke and Rosseau argued the sources of soveregnity to the free will of the people, who thus formed an association to be better off.
- The new notion of contract set limits on the power of sovereigns, by making them responsible to the rule of law, the will of assemblies, constituencies, or by creating checks and balances by dividing authority among the powers of the state.
After the thirty-year war ended with a peace agreement, written an signed in Westphalia (1648), Europe saw a slow consolidation of the principle of national soveregnity.
The “people” (le peuple,das Volk” as a concept was incorporated in the late eighteenth century revolutionary political discourse as the representative of the nation and the ultimate depository of soveregnty.
“The children of the motherland” or “sons of Liberty” implied an emerging revolutionary legitimacy :a radically new vision of citizens as people in arms who took care of the business of governing by themselves for themselves, and did so by overthrowing an illegitimate government.
Since both Plato and Aristotle were admired throughout most of the modern ages, their skeptical attitude towards democracy lasted for hundreds of years.
When did democracy emerge as a ‘good’ form of government?
Where?
Who were the nestors of democratic thought?
The nestors
Plato and Aristotle both developed important ideas about government and politics. The two “fathers of political thinking” developed (through their writing the Republic, and Politics) the most crucial concepts that came to define modern democracy;
I: government for the common good, and II: the rule of law as protection from tyranny;
*Tyranny occurs when absolute power is granted to a ruler, and no outside governing power controls the tyrant’s selfish behavior. This allows the ruler to become corrupt and use his power to further his own interests instead of working for the common good.
*The rule of law is the principle that no one is exempt from the law, even those who are in a position of power. In the Republic, Plato called the law an “external authority” that functions as the “ally of the whole city” and this notion today works through mechanisms of procedural accountability constraining state power.
Although these men laid the seeds for democratic philosophy, neither of them were really in favour of democracy, either directly or indirectly. Plato argued the case of “philosopher kings” and Plato believed in a monarchy as better types of government suitably runned by those with time on their hands to “pursue virtue” and “superior abilities of judgement”; they both favoured aristocratic rule by a few privileged.
In antique Athens, decisions were made by a ‘one-man-one-vote’ system limited to a select group of free-born male Athenians. Today’s western democracy is based on equal voting by all adult members of a society: because this involves far too much people for direct democracy, we have a representational and parliamentary party-democracy.
When/Where it emerged as “a good form of government”
So while the seeds of democratic thinking revolutionised from Ancient Greek ideas,
the roots of the modern western democracy that is now globalizing and hopefully will continue to expand on a world-wide scale lies rather in Western European enlightenment philosophy from the end of the 16th century, influencing cultural revolutions of political upheaval, creating the roots for democracy as we know it today.
Rousseau with his Social Contract is the first modern writer to attempt to synthesize good government with self-government in the key concept of the General Will: the realization of what is best for the community is not enough; it must also be willed by the community. Locke was also an important influence who’s words later became echoed in the the revolutionary constitutions,
arguing that “people have the right to dissolve their government, if that government ceases to work solely in their best interest”.
The American revolution institutionalised democracy as the principle of political equality, natural rights, and popular sovereignty. And the French Revolution laid the basis for an impersonal modern state, starting with Code Napoleon - establishing institutions such as the first impersonal rule of law.
Even in the absence of democracy these constituted major advances that made government less arbitrary, more transparent, and more uniform in its treatment of citizens, cementing gains from the revolution as eliminating from law feudal distinctions of rank and privilege. All citizens henceforth were declared to have equal rights.
Although not with an immediate lasting impact, this was exported to the countries of French occupation, and
spread further as a model used by other countries.
Democracy did not really gain foothold until the the 1920s when the working-class voting gained popularity and triumphed the fear of threat to aristocratic privilige and middle-class rule. Liberal politics in the eighteenth and ninetheenth centuries, while championing elections, fundamentally excluded the non-popoerty holders, which encompassed the bulk of the working classes and the majority of the population. The same was the case with women. It took time in the Old and the New World for even republicans and liberals to use the “d” word without the radical implications of profound equalitarianism. Madisonian democracy in the US was an attempt to engineer democracy without radicalism, as an equlibrium between majority and minority rule.
Who are the main contributors to the republican tradition?
What kind of constitution is a republican constitution?
What are the main differences and similarities between the republican tradition and liberal democracies?
Kind of constitution
A country or type of government usually governed by elected representatives of people and a president, without a king or a queen is called as Republic. There is more than one type of republic, just as there is more than one type of monarchy.
Generally, republican constitutions puts greater constraints on governmental power, which includes further protections against the possible “tyranny of the majority” on rights of minorities, into constitutional limitations and in the US case, also a stricter checks on balances between the three branches which divide power as a mechanism serving the same purpose; constraining power concentration.
Contributors
The tradition mainly grew out from Machiavellian influence in the 15th century, and spread as an oppositional-movement in England in the following centuries, making its influence on the American revolution and constitution from the 17th century. In 1975 John Pococks “The Machiavellian Moment” mainly contributed to place the republican tradition on the map of political thinking.
Liberal vs republican
One of the main differences of the two traditions is that republicanism includes a third term of “freedom”; they do not agree about obstacles to freedom, but republicans claim that oppression arises independently from the existent of obstacles; to be free thus, is not dependent on someones elves will, regardless if it would correspond with ones own, opression is namely to not be able to determine for oneself (thus is the essence of republicanism; the emphasise of this independence, and it being institutionalised into the legislative (independently from the executive, not one deriving from the other; as in parliamentarism)
In the republican tradition, the purpose of representatives isn’t to reflect majoritarian will, but rather to secure the unalienable rights we all possess. “The Republican Constitution, then, provides the law that governs those who govern us ”When rights come first “individual rights retained by the people are recognized and effectively protected from the will of the majority, that polity is a true republic.”
*Constitutions are naturally taken as antidemocratic; operate as constraints on the governing ability of majorities. But constitutional provisions serve many different functions.
They may be liberal or illiberal; different constitutions, and different parts of the same constitution, may protect different interests.
*In reality, the republican emphasis on protection of rights, gives greater protection of the rigts private property owners, and hence constraints majority rule even further than the liberal constitution (as private property is protected under the constitution and may not be placed limits on by a parliamentary majority); the system gives greater guarantee for the propertyholders of safety against confiscation by the propertyless majority; and “the electorate” works as a prohibiting force of majority rule where it have the ability to turn who is granted presidencies after elections in another direction than whatever the outcome of the popular vote.
*This distinction examplified.
The U.S. Bill of Rights is a list of individual rights against the state. In contrast, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which constitutes Part II of the proposed EU constitution, includes a long list of rights to services provided by the state. Such rights, for example, include education, a free placement service, paid maternity leave, social security benefits and social services, housing assistance, preventive health care, services of general economic interest, and high levels of environmental and consumer protection.
Discuss the importance of constitutions.
Anchor your discussion in Polybius and Montesquieu;
draw examples from Fukuyama.
Significance
A constitution is an aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity.
I: Every democratic Constitution guarantees to the citizens a protection against arbitrary governmental actions.
II: It lies down of the aims, objectives, values and goals which the people want to secure; in descriptions of guarantee of the fundamental rights of citizens
III: It gives a detailed account of the organisation of the government powers, the functions of its three organs, their interrelationship, and state level authorizations.
IIII: It specifies the power and method of amendment of the Constitution.
IIII: It lays down the election system and political rights of people.
Polybius
- In the theory of mixed government dating to Aristotle and Polybius and revived by Machiavelli, each power of the government represented a different social group.
- The estate systems that gained preponderance during the eighteenth century were based on this kind of representation.Legislatures, in the theory of the time, should be based on two chambers, one representing the aristocracy and the second, if not quite the poor, some broader group.
- The modern conception of checks and balances, however, did not retain this; aiming that the entire government, all its branches, should equally represent all the people.
Montesqieu
*Montesqieu further influenced modern constitutional provisions in his defence of
division of branches of government as distinguished by their functions and their prerogatives, not by their constituencies, as to prevent the concentration of power in one person’s/groups hands/corruption of government infringement upon individual liberties
*He warned that “were the executive power not to have a right of restraining the encroachments of the legislative body, the latter would become despotic; for as it might arrogate to itself what authority it pleased, it would soon destroy all the other powers.”
Fukuyama
- In 1789, the US Constitution brought together democratic ideals of equality and fair representation in a radical way.
- The Federalists indeed broke away from the classical Whig doctrine; they considered instead every branch of the government as equal agents of the people.
- Unfortunately, the values embedded in the Constitution were ignored for much of the country’s early history, and the United States had a weak and deeply corrupt political system right up until the nineteenth century. Goods and services were bought and sold in exchange for political alliances and, unsurprisingly, it was the rich and influential who wielded the most political power.
- Democracy, and particularly Madisonian version of democracy that was enshrined in the US constitution, should theoretically mitigate the the problem of elite capture by preventing the emergence of a dominant faction that can use its political power to tyrannise the country by spreading power among branches; but while democracy provide an important check, it fails frequently to perform as advertised through powerful interest groups gaining more influence than the rest, as power and wealth is accumulating and affects abilities to mobilize.
Although constitutions are important devices for functioning modern democracies and the “general will” of the people,
, with checks and balances allocating directories of power,
at the same time they are no guarantee for a body politic to actually work according to prescriptions.
-> Newer research on constitutions shows that there is other things more significant to democratic development than constitutional designs in dictatorships
“transformsforming to democracies” as they often are ineffective for political change and do not reflect real political conditions, and do certainly not allow predictions for future democratic development in a country.
-> At the same time, they might serve as constraints on the governing ability of majorities (like in the US) and protect some interests above others, granting power to a few as the Electorate, showing that they are not merely tools of democratic control.
How does clientelism differ from patrimony?
What does Fukuyama mean when he argues that clientelism, under certain circumstances, may be considered a first step towards democracy?
Clientelism
Clientelism or patronate is phenomenon identified with corruption.
Patronage relationships are typically face to face ones between patrons and clients and exists in all regimes whether authoritarian or democratic. A patronage relationship is a reciprocal exchange of favors between two individuals of different status and power, usually involving favors given by the patron to the client in exchange for the clients loyalty and political support. The good given must be individually appropriated, like a job in the post office, or to get a relative out of prison, rather than public good or policy that applies to a broad class of people.
Distinguishes from clientelism by scale;
clientelism involves a larger-scale exchange of favors between patrons and clients, often requireing a hierarchy of intermediaries. Clientelism exists primarily in democratic countries where large numbers of voters need to be mobilized. In a clientilistic system, politicians provide individualized benefits only to political supporters in exchange for their votes. These benefits can include jobs in the public sector, cash payments, political favors or even public goods like schools and clinics that are selectively given only to political supporters.
*Compared to an elite patronage network, clientelistic networks need to be much larger because they are frequently used to get hundreds of thousands of voters to the polls. As a result these networks dispense favors not based on a direct face-to-face relationship between the patron and his or her clients but rather through a series of intermediaries who are enlisted to recruit followers. It is these campaign workers-the ward heelers and precinct captains in traditional American municipal politics-who develop personal relationships with with individual clients on behalf of the political boss.
- Clientelism is considered a bad thing and a deviation from a good democratic practice in several respects. In a modern democracy, we expect citizens to vote for politicians based on their promises of broad public policies, or what political scientists label a “programmatic” agenda. *Targeted programs (which are justified in terms of broad concepts of justice or the general good), must apply impartially not to individuals but to broad classes of people.
- Patronage and clientelism constitute substantial normative deviations from good democratic practice for all these reasons and are thus illegal in contemporary democracies as they are considered another form of political corruption.
First step towards democracy; There are a number of reasons, why clientelism should be considered an early form of democratic accountability (and be distinguished from other types of corruption or - not considered as such at all)
I: It is taking hold in very many young democracies where voting and the franchise are new and politicians face the problem of how to mobilize voters.
In societies where incomes and educational levels are low, it is often far easier to get supporters to the polls based on a promise of an individual benefit rather than a broad programmic agenda; This was nowhere more true than in the first country to establish the principle of universal male suffrage, the US which in a certain sense invented clientelism and practices it in various forms for more than a century.
II: it is based on a relationship of reciprocity and creates a degree of democratic accountability between the politician and those who vote for him or her. Even though the benefit given is individual rather than programmatic, the politician still needs to deliver something in return for support, and the client is free to vote for someone else if the benefit is not forthcoming.
III: It is quite different from purer forms of corruption as ex. when a bank official steals from the public treasury and sends the money to a Swiss bank account for the benefit of himself and his family alone.
James Madison warned against factions in ‘Federalist No. 10‘, because he thought they might cause democracy to decay.
What did he mean by ‘faction’?
Why did he think that factions would undermine democracy?
What solution did he propose to combat factions and factionalism?
Federalist 10 (1787). The tenth, and most famous, of the Federalist Papers. “The Federalist No.10,” was written by James Madison, in which he set forth an argument for a new republic constitution.
Madisons factions;
He warned against the danger of factions;
*the kind of elite/patronage relationships characterising court politics in Europe.
Those groups of people who are solely motivated by their personal goals alone, and in the process, they undermine the interest of the remaining populace.
Solutions to combat factions;
*By seperating branches of government, and spreading power among a series of competing branches as allowing competition among different interests across a large and diverse country one would automatically (instead of trying to regulate the factions) one would have instances/checks which regulated each other; if any one group obtained undue influence and abused its position, the other groups threatened by it could organise to counterbalance it.
Factions might undermine democracy;
Unfortunately, the checks of Madisonian democracy frequently fails to provide as advertised.
And currently, many US institutions have become dysfunctional
I: Elite insiders have superior access to information and resources, which they use to protect themselves; cognitive inabilities to realise prevents them from mobilising (ex.trickle down economics)
II: Different groups have different abilities to organise to defend their interests; ex. middle class groups are more able t defend their interests like preservation of the home mortgage deduction than are the poor.
III: Market economies produce winners and losers and amplifies economic inequality as economic winners convert their wealth into unequal political influence; changing institutional rules to favour themselves or lobbying in groups to legislature.
