POG 100: Introduction to Politics and

Governance, Section 1/2/3/4

F2007

September 25 2007
 September 25 2007
• Review: Political Power
• Political regimes
• Approaches to the Study of Politics
• Ideas and ideologies
• Film: The Bottom Line: Privatizing
the World
 Review: Power and Politics
• Power as the ability to bring about desired outcome
• Power as the ability to influence the actions of others
• Power as coercion - using fear or threats to achieve outcomes
• Power as the ability to impose one group’s interests on
others - or to define them as the public interest
• Power as the capacity to make decisions
• Power to act - citizens
• Power over others - subjects
• Power as ubiquitous – Michel Foucault
– Power runs through all social relations
– Knowledge as power
– Power and resistance
 Review: Power to and Power
over
Power understood as:
Power to act:
– Being empowered to do something about events
around you, achieve collective goals
– People power - Gandhi and India, Philippines,Civil
rights movements, feminist movement, social
movements
• Power over others:
– Being subject to constraints imposed by others
– Citizen as subject
– Oppressions - imperialism, patriarchy, colonialism
 The struggle over India
The case study of India in “A force more powerful”
• Represents the biggest colonial revolt in human
history
• Demonstrates the limits of imperial power or power
over and the possibilities of people power to act
• Anti-colonial movement, like other social movements
arise out of compelling ideas that address specific
material conditions
• Politics is about conflict and struggle
• Governance is possible only with the consent of the
governed
 Consent as basis for governance
• Consent to govern derives from the People
• People can give or withdraw consent
• Governance depends on the tacit consent of
the governed
• Political and social orders are sustained by
dominant orders that use power to generate the
consent of the governed
 Consent and hegemony
Antonio Gramsci: How is consent achieved?
• Consent is achieved through proceses of hegemony making.
• Hegemony represents a dominant political, social and
economic order with ideological and material dimensions, in
which one group in society achieves and maintains ‘control’
through processes of coercion and consent
• Political society - institutions of the state and their agents are
central to that process
• Civil society – institutions outside government such as
churches and social movements sometimes collaborate and at
other times struggle against dominant structures and ideologies
that are the basis for consent
 Hegemony
• An order in which dominant ideas about the organization of
society and way of life are considered normal or natural
• These ideas become normalized through processes that inform
the commonsense notions of how a society should be run.
• They represent the dominance of one world view and a single
way to explain human actions and what is good and evil
• A hegemonic order uses ideologies to explain the way the
world works, these eventually becoming the common sense
way of thinking. In turn, they then influence political consent
and public policy outcomes.
• Its logic is diffused throughout society – through all its
institutional and private manifestations, informing its tastes,
morality, customs, religious and political principles, and all
social relations, intellectual and moral connotations.
 Political Authority
• Authority represents the ‘right to make decisions’ for a
political community.
• Political authority guarantees legitimacy – meaning that
the governed accept the process and decisions of those
in authority

Max Weber (1864-1920)

• Traditional –authority invested in individuals by custom or heredity
• Charismatic – authority derives from extraordinary personal qualities
of a leader and the ability to inspire a following
• Legal rationalism – authority defined by bureaucratic, procedural
structures
– Modern liberal democratic institutions
– the emphasis is on expert knowledge
– corporatism
 Legitimacy
• Legitimate authority is central to governance
• Politics is often about maintaining legitimate authority
• Effective governance depends on the legitimacy of those
with power to get the people to act in ways that achieve
their objectives
• Legitimacy involves both consent and the
acknowledgement of coercive force
• All governments depend on the inclination of the
population to obey the laws they pass but also rely on
coercion to a certain extent
• Question: Should individuals fight in an unpopular war?
 Citizen as sovereign
• Citizen as the source of legitimacy for government
• Socrates: Human beings become central to governance when
they can give direction to their lives
– No longer instruments of Gods and deities but self-determining
– This was the great escape that made human civilization possible
– The autonomy of the individual citizen to make decisions that affect
his/her life
• Citizen as an individual and a persistent critic of society
because of concern about the common good
• Citizen should question received truths from power and
authority
• Citizen as the primary client or customer of government
• Government as the citizens’ instrument to address power
imbalances in society
 Political regimes
• Human beings are organized in groupings to ensure
survival, to reproduce and to develop and transmit
culture
• There are discernable patterns of authority which
direct the process of decision making about these
social objectives
• They involve politics, power and forms of
governance - representing the organized process by
which the capacity to make decisions is actualized
• The study of politics involves categorizing the
various forms governance takes - as regimes
 Political regimes
• Regime can be defined as a form of rule
• Brodie (Text, 2005:90) refers to regimes also as ‘a mode
of governance over the organized activity of a social
formation within and across a particular
configuration of society, state, market and global
insertion’
• Regime contains four spheres, all of which are
interrelated and interlocking:
– State
– Society
– Market
– Globalization
 Spheres of regimes: State
• State: A country is often referred to as a nation-state
because it represents a form of social organization
sustained by a defined territory, population, shared
history and a central authority often called government
• The government has sovereign control and the exclusive
capacity to make decisions and to use coercive power to
enforce them.
• There are over 184 such entities in the world today.
• The state represents a key unit of analysis in political
science. It is the realm which has preoccupied political
inquiry the most because of its institutions and relations.
• States affect the daily lives of peoples in many ways
 Spheres of regimes: Society
• The state is related to and in many cases determined by the values
of a society - a system of interrelated groups and structures.
• According to Webber, a society dominated by traditional values
and peasants would likely have a feudal form of governance and a
monarchy while a society with more urban values and
industrialization and a working class (proletariat) would likely be
a liberal democracy
• According to Marx’s approach called political economy, the most
fundamental activity human beings engage in is economic
production of means for life - hunting, gathering, agriculture,
industry. So the organization of labour determines the values and
type of society.
• The relationship between social classes such as slaves, serfs,
peasants, landlords, workers, capitalists, are determined by their
role in production and their control over the means of production.
The state is the political expression of those social relationships and
their guarantor - the executive committee of the ruling class
 Spheres of regimes: Market
• Market: Over three or more centuries of capitalist organization of national
and global economies have entrenched the processes of production,
exchange and distribution associated with that mode of economic
organization as a dominant sphere of regimes.
• The market includes relations of property ownership and production, as
well as its political orders and identity
• Key market principles include: private ownership of the means of
production, price mechanism, income, and the invisible hand that
organizes the market through its control over supply and demand.
• Because the market is where production and accumulation occur, wealth
and power are determined within this sphere
• Some theorists use the concept of ‘regimes of accumulation’ to capture
the social, economic, political dimensions of the market sphere
• Increasingly, market decisions have come to supercede political decisions
leading some to refer to the current period in history - the period of
globalization, as market civilization
 Spheres of regimes: Globalization
• Brodie (text, 2005:89) refers to this sphere as one of Global
insertion.
• It defines the interrelationships of societies and states through the
process of the global market or global economy and the
international state system.
• It covers international relations - the domain of states dominated by
‘great powers’ as well as the global economy, the domain of
transnational corporations and other non-state actors
• Foreign policy, international trade, war and peace, international
organizations such as the United Nations Organization, IMF, World
Bank, WTO
• Wallerstein (1984) argues that these constitute a world system. It
is one that is hierarchical, with a core (around which it revolves) and
a periphery. These unequal divisions once translated into the First,
second and Third World. Today they appear as the Global North
and South arising out of a history of colonialism and imperialism
 Regime Typologies
• The study of regimes has been enhanced by the use of
typologies to categorize the various forms of
governance in history and around the world
• The differences derive from different histories,
various processes of nation-state formation -
nationalism, imperialism, colonialism
• They also derive from different ways of organizing
production - feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism,
socialism, communism, and more recently
globalization
 Typologies and Ideal-types
• To construct typologies, we lean heavily on an idea
popularized by Max Webber (1864-1920).
• Webber advocated the use of what is known as ideal-types to
distinguish between social or political orders.
• Ideal-types are artificially constructed or abstract concepts
used to describe the most ideal form of social organization.
• The characteristics attributed to ideal-types are often not fully
realized in actual life examples but approximate them – social
democracy, communism, capitalism, liberal democracy,
market economy as examples of ideal-types
• The use of ideal-types in the social sciences is similar to the
use of experiments in the natural sciences. Its application is
aimed at generalizing social behaviour
Ideal-types and social formations
• Critique: Ideal types suggest a static form of order. However,
human beings are dynamic and the organization of human
societies changes with time
• Karl Marx (1818-1883), building on Webber’s ideas
developed the concept of social formations which suggests
that society is organized through flexible social, economical,
political and cultural processes that allow it to achieve
coherence over time
• Social formations are systems with interlocking and
interacting dimensions
• This approach speaks to the ability of social organizations to
change while also maintaining stability
 Regime typology
• The classic regime typology includes three forms:
– Authoritarian
– Democratic
– Revolutionary
• More recently, the questions raised about the extent to
which regimes are subject to the power of institutions
such as corporations
• Others argue that not all democratic regimes are the
same – they show significant variation and diversity
• Theorists have suggested a new formulations that seek
to address the influence of corporations on modern
governments/societies
– Corporatist regime
 Authoritarian regimes
• Characterized by rule by the few
• Force or threat of use of force used implicitly or explicitly
to maintain order
• There is a continuum of authoritarian regimes that runs
from benevolent dictatorships to totalitarian and
governed by adherence to strict ideological or religious
beliefs - theocracy, communism, fascism
• Bureaucratic-authoritarianism describes military
dictatorships whose project was nation building and state
led development in post-colonial periods in Latin
America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East
• Many were able to survive because of support from
super powers who used them a satellite states
 Democratic Regimes
• Characterized as rule by the people (as self-determining citizens)
• Majority consent is the basis for legitimacy
• Majority benefit from and support the political order
• Include representative, social democratic, socialist, oligarchic, dependent,
limited democracies
• In reality, these regimes are more representative and pluralist, than
participatory – procedures exist to facilitate participation but other
structures limit participation to small majorities
• Individuals have rights of citizenship and civic responsibilities, chief
among them is the electoral process that determines who governs
• They are said to be the form of government most closely identified with the
capitalist mode of production.
• Some have suggested that they represent the interests of ruling elites -
oligarchies dominate decision making at the expense of the masses
• Examples: Canada, USA, Sweden, France, Great Britain, Chile, Brazil
 Revolutionary regimes
• Characterized by the overthrow of the preceding socio-
political and economic order by a few or many (class or
vanguard rule).
• Most are born out of violence and tend to have a disciplinary
dimension to them
• Rarely are they pluralist and they often become totalitarian
• Founded on ideologies that represent radical idea of how to
organize society - radical transformation of the society, its
social relations and the state
• Marxists, communist, Anti-colonialist, nationalist, Islamic
• Examples include: Russia, China, Vietnam, Iran
• People power in Philippines, Bolivia, South Africa
demonstrate that they are not necessarily violent overthrows.
 Corporatist regimes
• Decision making is state directed, with the cooperation of
key institutions – e.g: business and labour in Europe
• Decision making is directed by powerful national or
transnational interests representing
• Has its roots in the C18th with the writing of such
theorists as Emile Durkheim
• Argued for the most efficient form of governance
• Lead to an over reliance on expert class or technocracy
for ‘rational’ decision making and implementation
• Public accountability is limited because most decisions
are not subject to political debate
• Potential for alienation of citizens over time
• Historical examples include fascist Italy under Mussolini
 Corporatism
Corporatist movement in the 1920s –France, Italy,
Germany
Emile Durkheim (C19th):
• The corporation was to become the elementary division
of the state, its fundamental political unit
• Obliterates the distinction between public and private
• Challenges the idea of the public interest
• Through the corporation, scientific rationality achieves its
rightful place as the creator of collective reality
• Philippe Schmitter (1970)
– Neo-Corporatism: A form of benign dictatorship
– Interest representation seen as a form of corporatism
 Critique of Corporatism
• Corporate rule undermines the role of the
individual in liberal democracy
• Leads to worship of self-interest and denies the
public good
• Claims rationality as the virtue that directs its
form of governance
• Imposes conformity and passivity on individuals
• Corporate rule secures for the state the
deference of citizens