Foundations of Comparative Politics Part 2

6. Interest Articulation

• the method through which citizens and social groups can express their needs, demands, requests, and pleas to the government for policy changes

Interest groups tend be the primary means of promoting political interests. But, as societies have grown and become more complex, different methods have developed to articulate public interests.

Citizen Action: One dimension of interest articulation: What might you do as an individual citizen?

• Voting in an election is the most common form of activity

• Working with others in their community/typically very policy focused

• Direct contact with government

• Protests or other forms of contentious action

• Political consumerism

  Also referred to as a personal interest contact

• Cross-national research shows that better-educated and higher social class individuals are more likely to use various opportunities for participation.

Interest Groups:

• Can occur through the action of social or political groups that represent groups of people

  • Anomic groups– spontaneous groups that form suddenly when many individuals respond similarly to frustration, disappointment, or other strong emotions

  • Non-associational groups– groups based on common interests and identities of ethnicity, region, religion, occupation, or perhaps kinship; rarely well organized, activity is episodic, but are more continuous than anomic groups, temporary, loosely organized, most times the argument is easily lost

  • Associational groups– groups formed specifically to represent the interests of a particular group; these groups are generally very active in representing the interests of its members in the policy process; long-lasting, brings people together, permanent, well-organized, elected office holders

  • Institutional groups– such groups express their own interests or represent the interests of other groups in the society either as corporate bodies or as smaller groups within these bodies (legislative blocs, officer cliques, groups in the clergy, or ideological cliques in bureaucracies); non-adversarial, no political conflict

Civil society: a society in which people are involved in social and political interactions free of state control or regulation

Interest Group Systems: The three types of interest group systems all express a unique relationship between the interest groups and government policymaking institutions.

• Pluralist

  • Multiple groups may represent a single societal interest.

  • Group membership is voluntary and limited.

  • Groups often have a loose or decentralized organizational structure.

  • There is a clear separation between interest groups and the government.

• Corporatist

  • A single peak association normally represents each societal interest.

  • Membership in the peak association is often compulsory and nearly universal.

  • Peak associations are centrally organized and direct the actions of their members.

  • Groups are often systematically involved in making and implementing policy.

  • In such a system, tripartite decision-making often controls policymaking: labor, business, & government

• Controlled

  • There is a single group for each social sector.

  • Membership is often compulsory.

  • Each group is normally hierarchically organized.

  • Groups are controlled by the government or its agents in order to mobilize support for government policy.

*To be effective, interest groups must be able to reach key policymakers through channels of political access.

• Legitimate and constitutional channels of access

  • Personal connections

    • Face-to-face contact is one of the most effective means of shaping attitudes and conveying messages.

  • Mass media

  • Political parties

  • Legislatures

  • Government bureaucracies

• Illegitimate, coercive access channels and tactics

  • Feelings of relative deprivation motivate people to act aggressively.

    • Source of frustration, discontent, and anger

    • Greater discontent/anger yields greater probability of collective violence

      • Riots (often spontaneous)

      • Strikes/obstructions (coordinated)

      • Political terror tactics

        • Assassination, armed attacks, mass bloodshed

          • More likely to produce negative consequences

Interest Group Development:

• Varied possibilities for legitimate and coercive interest articulation exist in each country.

• Successful democratic development leads to the emergence of complex interest group systems.

  • Not an automatic process

  • Many problems involved

    • Level of trust shared among members of society

    • Authoritarian parties/bureaucracies may suppress autonomous interest groups

    • Bias within the interest group system

7. Interest Aggregation & the Role of Political Parties

Interest Aggregation

The activity in which the political demands of individuals and groups are combined into policy programs

• How interests are aggregated is a key feature of the political process.

  • In a democratic system, two or more parties compete to gain support for their alternative policy programs.

  • In an authoritarian system, a single party or institution may try to mobilize citizens’ support for its policies.

    • Covert and controlled

    • Process is top-down rather than bottom-up

• Parties

  • The distinctive and defining goal of a political party - its mobilization of support for policies and candidates - is especially related to interest aggregation.

What is a Patron-Client Network?

• a structure in which a central officeholder, authority figure, or group provides benefits (patronage) to supporters in exchange for their loyalty

  • Defining principle of feudalism

• Primitive structure out of which larger and more complicated political structures are composed

• When interest aggregation is performed mainly within patron-client networks, it is difficult to mobilize political resources behind unified policies of social change or to respond to crises.

In many contemporary political systems, parties are the primary structures of interest aggregation.

• Political parties are groups or organizations that seek to place candidates in office under their label.

  • Party systems

    • Competitive party system: seeks to build electoral support

    • Authoritarian party system (noncompetitive): seeks to control society

Elections

In democracies, elections are very important to parties.

• Determine whether they survive

• The act of voting is one of the simplest and most frequently performed political acts.

• By aggregating these votes, citizens can make collective decisions about their future leaders and public policies.

• Elections are one of the few devices through which diverse interests can be expressed equally and comprehensively.

Parties

• Often caught between the demands of voters and activists

• Do parties need to be internally democratic?

  • Some say yes, others argue that vigorous competition between parties is what matters for a healthy democracy and that democracy within parties is irrelevant or even harmful.

Competitive Parties in Government

Ability to implement policies is determined by the nature of the electoral outcome

• Winning control of legislature and executive

• Question of level of support: system produces majority outcome without a majority of voter support

• Coalition governments

• The aggregation of interests at the executive rather than electoral level can have both costs and benefits.

• Minority interests

Cooperation & Conflict in Competitive Party Systems

Majoritarian Two Party System:

• A system that is dominated by either just two parties, like in the United States, or that have two substantial parties and election laws that usually create legislative majorities for one of them, as in the UK

Majority-coalition System:

• Establish pre-electoral coalitions so that voters know which parties will attempt to work together to form government

Multiparty System:

• A system that has a combination of parties, voter support, and election laws that virtually ensure that no single party wins a legislative majority and no tradition of pre-election coalitions

Consensual Party Systems:

• a system in which the parties commanding most of the legislative seats are not too far apart on policies and have a reasonable amount of trust in each other and in the political system

Conflictual Party Systems:

• a system in which the legislature is dominated by parties that are far apart on issues or are highly antagonistic toward each other and the political system, such as the Russian party system

  • Not the US

Consociational Party Systems (accommodative)

• a system that allows for the introduction of a coalition agreement which guarantees group representation in government; this form of government can enable a deeply divided nation to find a way to peaceful democratic development (referred to as power-sharing)

  • Northern Ireland (part of UK)

Authoritarian Party System

• a specialized interest aggregation structure in which aggregation takes place within the ranks of the party or in interactions with business groups, landowners, and institutional groups in the bureaucracy or military; the citizens have no real opportunity to shape aggregation by choosing between party alternatives, although controlled elections are often organized

  • Exclusive Governing Party

    • an authoritarian Party System which insists on control over political resources by the party leadership; it recognizes no legitimate interest aggregation by groups within the party nor does it permit any free activity by social groups, citizens, or other government agencies

    • Totalitarian governments in its more intensive form

    • Examples of such systems include:

      • the Communist parties of the USSR before 1985, of Eastern Europe before 1989, of North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba today.

    • Interest articulation by individuals, within bounds, may be permitted; BUT the mobilization of wide support before the top elite has decided on policy is not permitted.

    • Parties penetrate & organize most social structures in the name of that ideology and in accordance with centralized policies.

    • On the other side though, the exclusive governing party has been used by many leaders who were committed to massive social change.

  • Inclusive Governing Party

    • an authoritarian Party System which recognizes and attempts to coordinate various social groups in the society; it accepts and aggregates certain autonomous interests, while repressing others and forbidding any serious challenges to its own control

    • Recognize the autonomy of social, cultural, and economic groups and try to incorporate them or bargain with them, rather than control/remake them

    • Examples of such systems include:

      • the successful one-party systems in the African nations of Kenya and Tanzania; aggregation around personalistic, factional, and ethnic-based groups was permitted within decentralized organizations of the parties of these states.

    • Independent protest and political activity outside of official channels are suppressed.

    • The party leaders permit only limited autonomous demands within the ranks of the party and by groups associated with it.

Significance of Interest Aggregation

• how interests are aggregated is an important determinant of what a country's government does for and to its citizens

• in democratic countries, competitive party systems narrow down and combine policy preferences

• In noncompetitive party systems, military governments, and monarchies, aggregation works differently, but with the similar effect of narrowing policy options.

• Interest aggregation can alter the polarization that the political culture projects into policy-making.

• Aggregation ultimately affects the government’s adaptability and stability.

8. Government & Policy-making

Policy-making: the pivotal stage in the political process; the point at which bills become law, or edicts are issued by the rulers

Public Policy

• Government agencies are at the core of policy-making

• Two-way process

  • upward flow of influence and demands from society

  • downward flow of decisions from government

Constitutions

• the basic rules concerning decision making, rights, and the distribution of authority in apolitical system

• most constitutions are formed as a result of some break, often violent, with the past → war, revolution, or rebellion against colonial rule

• the UK does not have a formal written constitution

  • it has a long-accepted and highly developed set of customs and conventions, buttressed by important ordinary statutes: reflects the British record of gradual, incremental, and, on the whole, peaceful political change

Definitions

rule of law: a government cannot take action that has not been authorized by law AND citizens can be punished only for actions that violate an existing law

decision rules: the basic rules governing how decisions are made, setting up agencies and offices with specific powers, assigning them territorial and functional jurisdiction, and the like

egalitarian: each member has the same voting power )though presiding officers, such as the Speaker of the British House of Commons, may have the power to break a tie vote); simply speaking: 1 person, 1 vote

hierarchical: in voting and decision making, everybody is supposed to defer to his or her superior; in a pure hierarchy, only the vote of the person at the very top (for example, the minister) counts

constitutional Regimes: systems in which the powers of various government units are defined and limited by written constitution, statues, and custom

• UK is considered a constitutional regime even without a constitution

Democracy & Authoritarianism

• The basic decision rules of political systems - both democratic and authoritarian - differ along three important dimensions:

  1. the separation of powers between different branches of government;

  2. the geographic distribution of authority between the central (national) government and lower levels, such as states, provinces, or municipalities; and

  3. limitations on government authority

Parliaments & the Confidence Relationship

• the trust factor in a parliamentary system through which the prime minister and his or her cabinet must at all times enjoy the confidence of the parliamentary majority;

• whenever the parliamentary ,majority for whatever reason expresses its lack of confidence (through a no-confidence vote), the prime minister and all the other cabinet members have to resign

• on the other hand, the prime minister typically has the power to dissolve Parliament and call new elections at any time; (UK: 2011 - removed this power of the PM; 2022 - reinstated this power for the PM)

• these two powers, the parliamentary majority’s dismissal power and prime minister;s dissolution power, make the two branches mutually dependent

• it induces agreements between them by forcing the executive branch to be acceptable to the parliamentary majority

• thus parliamentary democracies do not experience the form of divided government that is common under presidential ism, when he party that controls the presidency does not control the legislature

Semi-Presidential

• not all democracies fit neatly into the presidential or parliamentary category some are semi-presidential, or hybrid parliamentary-presidential systems

  • a type of mixed democracy that incorporates aspects of both the presidential and parliamentary systems;

  • in some, the presidency and the legislature are separately elected (as in presidential systems), but the president has the power to dissolve the legislature (as in parliamentary systems);

  • the cabinet may be appointed by the president (as in presidential systems), but subject to dismissal by the legislature (as in parliamentary systems)

Government Institutions

Three types of government institutions involved in policy-making

• the legislative assembly,

• the chief executive, and

• the higher levels of bureaucracy

challenge: controlling the excess of the top political leaders

• authoritarian systems: problematic

• democracies: procedures vary between types of systems

  • parliamentary system: removed virtually at any time

  • presidential system: impeachment

    • Associated with constitutions having powerful presidencies with fixed terms of office

  • Ultimate control of democratic order is periodic and competitive elections.

Almost all contemporary political systems have assemblies.

• More than 80% of the countries belonging to the U.N.

• Vary in structure; bicameralism is common

• Differ in their internal organization

• All have a committee structure

Assembly Functions

• Deliberate, debate, and vote on policies that come before them.

• Typically also control public spending decisions

• Some have important appointment powers.

• Some may serve as a court of appeals.

• Range in terms of their role as policymaking agencies: U.S. - highly active role; National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China, rubberstamp function

• Assemblies should not be viewed only as legislative bodies.

Political Executives

• In modern states, the executive branch is by far the largest, the most complex, and typically the most powerful branch of government.

  • Chief executives

    • Single or split

      • Divided between effective power over policy, purely ceremonial roles or both

    • Presidents and Prime Ministers

    • Chairman of the Communist Party in China

    • Monarchs

• Functions of Chief Executive

  • Typically the most important structure in policymaking

    • The executive normally initiates new policies.

    • May have role in adoption

    • Typically has veto powers

    • Oversees policy implementation

    • Recruitment function

    • Conduct affects trust and confidence in the political system

    • Central role in communication, in explaining and building support for new policies

    • Improving the performance in various sectors of society and economy

The Cabinet

• In many political systems, the Cabinet is the most important collective decision-making body.

  • Very powerful in parliamentary systems

• Selection

  • Presidential systems: presidential prerogative with legislative approval; President can dismiss Cabinet members; legislature severely limited in this area

  • Parliamentary systems: formation depends on the result of parliamentary elections and on the composition of Parliament

    • Majority single-party cabinet vs. Coalition cabinet

The bureaucracy

• Large organizations in charge of implementing public policy

  • Size has increased in many governments across the globe

  • Civil service

• Functions

  • Almost alone in implementing and enforcing laws and regulations

  • May articulate and aggregate interests

  • Adjudication

  • Involved in communication

• Features

  • Decision making is based on fixed and official jurisdictions, rules and regulations;

  • There are formal and specialized educational or training requirements for each position;

  • There is a hierarchical command structure

    • a firmly ordered system of super- and subordination, in which information flows upward and decisions downward;

  • Decisions are made on the basis of SOPs (standard operating procedures), which include extensive written records; and

  • Officials hold career positions, are appointed and promoted on the basis of merit, and have protection against political interference, notably in the form of permanent job tenure

Policy-making

1. Recognize the problem (interest articulation)

2. Create a policy agenda (interest aggregation)

3. Formulate policy (policymaking)

4. Adopt the policy (policymaking again)

5. Implement the policy (outputs)

6. Evaluate the policy (look at outcomes)

7. Potentially recognize new problems…if so, start all over again!!!

8. Public Policy

Public policy consists of all those authoritative public decisions that governments make.

• The outputs of the political system

Governments engage in various forms of public policy

Many are directed at the major challenges facing contemporary states:

• Building community

• Fostering development

• Securing democracy and rights

Outputs

Public policies may be summarized and compared according to outputs classified into four headings:

• Distribution

  • Of money, goods, and services - to citizens, residents and clients of the state

  • “Who gets what, when, and how”

  • Distributive policy profiles

    • Health, education, and national defense consume the largest proportion of government spending across the world.

    • Developed countries: generally allocate from one half to two thirds of their central government expenditures to education, health, and welfare

• Extraction

  • Direct extraction of services

    • Compulsory military service, jury duty, or compulsory labor imposed on those convicted of crime

  • Direct resource extraction

    • Taxation

      • Direct taxes (i.e. Income taxes); indirect taxes (i.e. Sales tax)

    • Progressive tax structure

      • The relative tax rate or burden increases as an individual's ability to pay increases

    • Regressive tax structure

      • The relative tax rate or burden decreases as an individual's ability to pay increases

  • The tax profiles of different countries vary both in their overall tax burdens and in their reliance on different types of taxes.

  • Differ in how they collect their revenues

• Regulation

  • How do we describe and explain the differences between political systems in the area of regulation? We ask:

    • What aspects of human behavior and interaction are regulated and to what degree?

    • What social groups are regulated, with what procedural limitations on enforcement and what rights?

    • What sanctions are used to compel or induce citizens to comply

  • One aspect of regulation is particularly important politically: government control over political participation and communication

    • Political rights and civil liberties

• Symbolic outputs

  • Intended to enhance people’s national identity, civic pride, or trust in government

  • Enhance other areas of performance:

    • Make people pay their taxes more readily and honestly

    • Comply with law more faithfully

    • Accept sacrifice, danger, and hardship

Policy Outcomes

How do extractive, distributive, regulative, and symbolic policies affect the lives of citizens?

• Sometimes policies have unintended and undesirable consequences (negative externalities).

• To estimate the effectiveness of public policy, we have to examine actual policy outcomes as well as governmental policies and their implementation.

  • Health outcomes

  • Education and information technologies

  • Crime rates

  • Military action

  • Economic costs of policies, such as warfare, universal healthcare, etc.

Political Goods & Values

If we are to compare and evaluate public policy in different political systems, we need to consider the political goods that motivate different policies, such as:

• Stability, transparency, and predictability will often lead to policies where citizens are most free and most able to act purposefully.

• Allowing for greater citizen participation and free political participation, as well as democratic procedures and various rights of due process will often lead to citizens complying with public law and policies.

There are two important criteria that most of us would agree that government policy should meet:

• Fairness

• Promotion and preservation of freedom

Trade-offs & Opportunity Costs

• Hard fact about political goods: we cannot always have them all simultaneously.

• A political system often has to trade off one value to obtain another.

• Opportunity costs are what you lose in one area by committing your resources to a different good (the next best alternative that you sacrifice).

• One of the important tasks of social science is to discover the conditions under which positive and negative trade-offs occur.