Keeping the Republic. Christine Barbour

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      social democracy a hybrid system combining a capitalist economy and a government that supports equality

      Since World War II, the citizens of many Western European nations have elected social democrats to office, where they have enacted policies to bring about more equality—for instance, the elimination of poverty and unemployment, better housing, and adequate health care for all. Even where social democratic governments are voted out of office, such programs have proved so popular that it is often difficult for new leaders to alter them. Socialism and social democracy do not generally find much support in the United States, although Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2016 gained a surprising amount of traction, and many of his proposals found their way into the Democratic Party platform.

      In Your Own Words

      Describe the role that politics plays in determining how power and resources, including control of information, are distributed in a society.

      Political Systems and the Concept of Citizenship: Competing ideas about power and the social order, different models of governing

      Just as there are different kinds of economic systems on the substantive-to-procedural scale, there are many sorts of political systems, based on competing ideas about who should have power and what the social order should be—that is, how much substantive regulation there should be over individual decision making. For our purposes, we can divide political systems into two types: those in which the government has the substantive power to impose a particular social order, deciding how individuals ought to behave, and those procedural systems in which individuals exercise personal power over most of their own behavior and ultimately over government as well. These two types of systems are different not just in a theoretical sense. The differences have very real implications for the people who live in them; the notion of citizenship (or the lack of it) is tied closely to the kind of political system a nation has.

      Description

      Figure 1.2 A Comparison of Political Systems

      Figure 1.2 compares these systems, ranging from the more substantive authoritarian governments that potentially have total power over their subjects to more procedural nonauthoritarian governments that permit citizens to limit the state’s power by claiming rights that the government must protect. Figure 1.3 shows what happens when we overlie our economic and political figures, giving us a model of most of the world’s political/economic systems. Note that when we say model, we are talking about abstractions from reality used as a tool to help us understand. We don’t pretend that all the details of the world are captured in a single two-dimensional figure, but we can get a better idea of the similarities and differences by looking at them this way.

      Authoritarian Systems

      Authoritarian governments give ultimate power to the state rather than to the people to decide how they ought to live their lives. By authoritarian governments, we usually mean those in which the people cannot effectively claim rights against the state; where the state chooses to exercise its power, the people have no choice but to submit to its will. Authoritarian governments can take various forms: sovereignty can be vested in an individual (dictatorship or monarchy), in God (theocracy), in the state itself (fascism), or in a ruling class (oligarchy).

      authoritarian governments systems in which the state holds all power over the social order

      When a system combines an authoritarian government with a socialist economy, we say that the system is totalitarian. That is, as in the earlier example of the former Soviet Union, it may exercise its power over every part of society—economic, social, political, and moral—leaving little or no private realm for individuals.

      totalitarian a system in which absolute power is exercised over every aspect of life

      An authoritarian state may also limit its own power. In such cases, it may deny individuals rights in those spheres where it chooses to act, but it may leave large areas of society, such as a capitalist economy, free from government interference. Singapore is an example of this type of authoritarian capitalism; people have considerable economic freedom, but stringent social regulations limit their noneconomic behavior.

      authoritarian capitalism a system in which the state allows people economic freedom but maintains stringent social regulations to limit noneconomic behavior

      Often authoritarian governments pay lip service to the people, but when push comes to shove, as it usually does in such states, the people have no effective power against the government. Again, government does not just provide guarantees of fair processes for individuals; it guarantees a substantive vision of what life will be like—what individuals will believe, how they will act, what they will choose.

      Democracy and Nonauthoritarian Systems

      In nonauthoritarian systems, ultimate power rests with the individuals to make decisions concerning their lives. The most extreme form of nonauthoritarianism is called anarchy. Anarchists would do away with government and laws altogether. People advocate anarchy because they value the freedom to do whatever they want more than they value the order and security that governments provide by forbidding or regulating certain kinds of behavior. Few people are true anarchists, however. Anarchy may sound attractive in theory, but the inherent difficulties of the position make it hard to practice. For instance, how could you even organize a revolution to get rid of government without some rules about who is to do what and how decisions are to be made?

      anarchy the absence of government and laws

      A less extreme form of nonauthoritarian government, and one much more familiar to us, is democracy (from the Greek demos, meaning “people”). In democracies, government is not external to the people, as it is in authoritarian systems; in a fundamental sense, government is the people. Recognizing that collective life usually calls for some restrictions on what individuals may do (laws forbidding murder, for instance, or theft), democracies nevertheless try to maximize freedom for the individuals who live under them. Although they generally make decisions through some sort of majority rule, democracies still provide procedural guarantees to preserve individual rights—usually protections of due process (guarantee of a fair trial, right to a lawyer, and so on) and minority rights. This means that if individuals living in a democracy feel their rights have been violated, they have the right to ask government to remedy the situation.

      democracy a government that vests power in the people

      Democracies are based on the principle of popular sovereignty; that is, there is no power higher than the people and, in the United States, the document establishing their authority, the Constitution. The central idea here is that no government is considered legitimate unless the governed consent to it, and people are not truly free unless they live under a law of their own making. Democratic narratives vary, however, in how much active control they give to individuals:

      popular sovereignty the concept that the citizens are the ultimate source of political power

       Theorists of elite democracy propose that democracy is merely СКАЧАТЬ