references polisci

Institutions are contrains that structure political, economic and social interaction. They consist of formal and informal structures.

North

Institutions consist of the formal structures of government and the structures surrounding them (education systems, police)

Moe

- The expression of individual preferences (preference-induced equilibrium) is thus mediated (if not bounded) by the institutional structure (structure-induced equilibrium): institutions create the observable stability of political decisions by mediating competing views

Shepsle

"dynamic political configurations that affect the mobilization of interests and their adjudication in politics" (’new’ institutionalism)

Immergut

Standard economic theory of competition (4 factors and 5 limitations/differences)

Stigler

‘Minimal’ conception of democracy - the “democratic method” as an institutional arrangement “for arriving at political decision in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle”

Schumpeter

 competitive-elitist conception

Schumpeter

Arrow’s impossibility theorem (1951)

no way to aggregate individual preferences into collective choices without violating some democratic principles at the individual level

Four main features of ideology

Newton and van Deth

‘end of ideology’

Wolfe

causal role of ideas (not ideology!), independent of material factors - "Ideas provide the point of mediation between actors and their environment"

Hay

Keynesianism to Monetarism (try to explain)

Hall

 the role played by the ideological state apparatus in maintaining the capitalist system

Althusser

"Power exists [. . .] in the broad formal authority to direct the behaviour of others"

Carpenter

"intuitive idea" of power : "A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do"

Dahl

The stress here is on the study of concrete, observable behaviour in an attempt at identifying who prevails in decision-making

Lukes

"A focus on behaviour in the making of decisions on issues over which there is an observable conflict of (subjective) interests, seen as express policy preferences, revealed by political participation"

Lukes

Elitist tradition of power

C. Wright Mills

pluralist tradition - Studying urban renewal, school desegregation and party nominations in New Heaver, shows that different actors and different interest groups prevail in different issue-areas, there is no overall "ruling elite" and power is distributed pluralistically

Dahl’s response in Who Governs?

The three faces of power

Bachrach & Baratz

Social construction of ignorance

Pinto

’to define the terms and concepts in which human agents think, experiment, and infer’.

Carpenter

Power is not just about punishing individuals

Gordon

high "probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons"

◃ Domination is only effective when it is recognized by those subject to it

Max Weber

"Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms")

Foucault

"The concept of a political regime refers to the formal and informal structure and nature of political power in a country, including the method of determining office holders and the relations between the office holders and the society at large"

Siaroff

Ancient Greece identifying regimes - ‘good’ and ‘deviant’

Plato and Aristotle

Contestation

Schumpeter

Separation of powers

Montesquieu

distinguishes between ’autonomy’ (where norms are made by those to whom they apply) and ’heteronomy’ systems in which the legislators are distinct from those subject to laws

Kelsen

Most contemporary classifications of political regimes start with a basic distinction between democratic and non-democratic regimes

Siaroff

The simple distinction of democracy however suffers from an important limitation, as it does not account for the important differences between liberal and electoral democracies

Diamond

most contemporary classifications of political regimes rely on a continua

Diamond

Free and fair elections + Freedom of rights and rule of law — topology

Møller