Politics The soil of democracy

Document Type:Research Paper

Subject Area:Politics

Document 1

The active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life 3. Protection of the rights of the citizens 4. A rule of law in which no one is above the law and the laws and procedures apply to everyone. (diamond) For democracy to work and be successful in any nation, certain factors should be put in place. These factors are doing to be discussed in details in this research paper and their impact on democracy. Ideas of democracy are always contested, even in the established democracies such as America. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), 3 Joseph Schumpeter fortified the view that citizen partaking is not crucial to democracy and should be restricted to voting for leaders. This view is in sharp distinction with the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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In Du Contrat Social (1762), Rousseau maintained that the individual participation of each citizen in political decision-making is critical. In his view, citizens become public citizens through participation. In Dahl’s literature, too, much is made of the essential role of elections in any democratic system. A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), he presents what he feels to be a more accurate theory of democracy than the theory of populist democracy, which tells us nothing about the real world. Dahl investigated for the circumstances that would be necessary and sufficient for exploiting democracy in the real world. This could be achieved by maximizing both popular sovereignty and political equality. He termed a political system in which these conditions exist to a relatively high degree a polyarchy.

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Sartori took this dispute one step further. He feared that enormous participation of the (common) people in the political process would lead to absolutism. Hence, the political activity of the people should be lessened. The people should react, not act. In distinction to these theories that reassure only a very limited role for the participation of ordinary citizens in the political process, with the electoral race for votes being the main focus, are theories that place much more weight on participation. Starting with these theories on partaking democracy, three functions of participation can be notable. The first is the educative function: participation pays to personal growth in making citizens public citizens. In Representative Government (1861)18 John Stuart Mill, like Rousseau, frazzled the role of contribution in making people public-oriented citizens.

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The best place to learn democracy, in Mill’s view, is through participation at the local level. The second function of participatory democracy is the integrative function. It is fundamental to how we understand distributive politics under democracy. Answering the second question requires an understanding of how economic agents respond to the democratic pressures for redistribution. If the state undermines the market, as commonly assumed, how can we explain the economic success of countries that spend well over half their gross domestic products on social protection and (p. 827) redistribution? If the welfare state is built on the shoulders of an unwilling capitalist class, should we not expect capitalists to shun productive investment, stage coups, or move their money abroad? Yet the welfare state has not collapsed, democracy is spreading, and globalization has not resulted in convergence around laissez-faire capitalism.

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If we want to understand how democracy and capitalism coexist, therefore, we need a model of capitalism that goes beyond a simple dichotomy between state and market. This approach moves beyond the partisan literature by explicitly considering how economic preferences are aggregated into policies, at the same time as it avoids the chaotic world of unconstrained coalitional politics. As I argue in Section 5, this combination has produced a vibrant research program that helps answer key questions such as the conditions under which the poor are more likely to soak the rich. The modern study of capitalism as an economic system has also taken an institutionalism turn, building on transaction costs economics rather than neoclassical models. The “varieties of capitalism” approach, in particular, illuminates the relationship between redistributive politics and economic performance and helps explain why there is no necessary contradiction between state and market.

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The work also helps make sense of the observed institutional diversity of modern capitalism, and why such diversity persists in the face of global market integration. So even if the poor would ultimately be better off in a system where private property rights were suspended (itself a big if, of course), the “valley of transition” would dissuade any rational government with a limited time horizon from attempting it. Conversely, the rich might consent to democracy and redistribution because the costs of repression or the threat of revolution would otherwise be too high. “Class compromise,” in other words, could be an equilibrium. This model wiped out the notion in the Marxist literature that capitalism could only survive if the lower classes were repressed or misinformed.

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Class compromise has survived as a central concept (e. With a proportional tax and flat rate benefit, and assuming that there are efficiency costs of taxation, Downs’s median voter theorem can be applied to predict the extent of redistribution. The equilibrium is reached when the benefit to the median voter of additional spending is exactly outweighed by the efficiency costs of such spending. This implies two key comparative statics: spending is higher (a) the greater the skew in the distribution of income, and (b) the greater the number of poor people who vote. The latter suggests that an expansion of the franchise to the poor, or higher voter turnout among the poor, will shift the decisive voter to the left and therefore raise support for redistribution.

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Assuming that the median voter’s policy preference is implemented, democratization will, therefore, lead to redistribution. The resulting values of classical liberalism can be found in school designs and structures throughout the world. Like Dewey, I will argue that a democracy depends on a democratic educational system. I am arguing for the need to move beyond classical liberal democratic theory in our schools and develop a relational, pluralistic democratic educational theory that will create a place where children with diverse cultural roots can thrive. This is what I hope to do, with the help of the many students and teachers from collective cultures whom I have visited over the past several years. I begin this essay’s discussion with John Dewey’s form of liberalism.

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In order to explore how Dewey’s concept of transaction affected his own view of democracy, I turn to two key later works of his. I begin with Liberalism and Social Action, as I think Dewey offers an excellent analysis of classical liberal political theory and its further developments. Another explanation for partisanship is that political parties, to be electorally successful, have to appeal to core constituents who provide the money and activists required to run effective electoral campaigns (Hibbs 1977; Schlesinger 1984; Kitschelt 1994; Aldrich1993, 1995). Aldrich (1983) has formalized this idea in a Downsian model with party activists in which party leaders exchange policy influence to relatively extreme core constituents for unpaid work during campaigns. The logic is illustrated by the American primary system where successful presidential candidates first have to win the support of the parties’ core constituents before they can contest the general election.

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We live in times where there are great changes in political philosophy and in societies at large. These are times when key assumptions of the liberal democratic theory are being questioned and dismissed. My voice is included in the chorus of criticisms of liberal democracy’s assumptions of rationalism, universalism, and individualism. I am offering a relational, pluralistic social-political theory that moves us beyond liberal democracy. In this essay I have turned to John Dewey, one of America’s classic pragmatists, to help me show the need for change, and to help me in the development of the change I offer. Our actions are interconnected and our world is continually in a state of flux as actions cause reactions and affect us.

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We must lose our arrogance and unquestioned confidence that we know what to do to “fix things”, and gain more respect for the complexity of situations. We must move more cautiously and humbly, recognizing that those at the local level who are most directly be affected may understand the conditions necessary for change better than we, as outsiders, do, but we must also recognize that our outsider perspectives might be useful to insiders by contributing to the expansion of their thoughts about situations. While it may seem impossible to effect changes in our social institutions and improve social conditions with the transactional description of our world that I offer, it is surely impossible not to effect changes in this living, breathing world.

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If we start with a transactional view of our world, we realize that we are continually in a state of flux. Political Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Find this resource: Adolph, C. The dilemma of discretion: career ambitions and the politics of central banking. Ph. Find this resource: 1995. Why Parties? The Origins and Transformation of Party Politics in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Find this resource: Alesina, A. , Cohen, G. and Scruggs, L. Political partisanship and welfare state reform in advanced industrial societies. American Journal of Political Science, 48: 493–512. Find this resource: Alt, J. Frieden, J. M. Aoki. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Find this resource: Arrow, K. Social Choice and Individual Values. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); M.

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