American Government and Civic Engagement Notes
What is Government?
Government: the means by which a society organizes itself and allocates authority to achieve collective goals and provide needed benefits.
Goals include:
Economic prosperity.
Secure national borders.
Citizen safety and well-being.
Benefits provided:
Education.
Healthcare.
Infrastructure for transportation.
Politics: gaining and exercising control within a government to set and achieve particular goals, especially regarding resource division.
Governmental systems are sometimes confused with economic systems because certain political thoughts or governmental organizations closely relate to certain economic systems
Capitalism, democratic republics, self-government, and natural rights developed together.
John Locke: all people have natural rights to life, liberty, and property.
People should consent to being governed.
People should govern themselves through elected representatives.
Adam Smith: people should be free to acquire property as they wish; competition ensures low prices and quality goods.
Ideas formed the basis for industrial capitalism.
Discussed in The Wealth of Nations (1776).
Democracy: a political system in which people govern themselves, with individualism and freedom.
Capitalism relies on individualism and prefers political systems with influence to maintain liberty.
Capitalism may negatively impact democracy due to wealth gaps.
Great wealth may give a very small minority greater influence over the government than the majority of the population.
Socialism is an alternative economic system.
Means of generating wealth are owned by the government, which redistributes it to citizens through social programs (healthcare, education, childcare).
Government controls utilities (electricity, transportation, telecommunications).
Can be oligarchic (China) or democratic (Sweden).
In the U.S., the democratic government works closely with its capitalist economic system. This affects the way in which goods and services are distributed.
Private goods: provided by private businesses for profit; people purchase what they need.
Those in poverty cannot always afford ample food and clothing of superior quality.
Adequate housing in desirable neighborhoods is often too expensive.
The market cannot provide everything to meet everyone’s needs.
Public goods: available to all without charge; provided by the government.
Examples: national security and education.
Only government can protect the nation due to its ability to tax, draw upon resources, and compel compliance.
Public schools provide education for all children, regardless of religion, race, socioeconomic class, or academic ability.
Toll goods: available to many, but only if they can pay the price; between public and private goods.
Private schools.
Everyone benefits from the educated voters and workers produced by the public school system.
Other public goods provided by the government:
Stability and security (military, police, fire departments).
Public education.
Public transportation.
Mail service.
Food, housing, and healthcare for the poor.
Funded by citizens paying into the general tax base.
Common goods: goods that all people may use free of charge but that are of limited supply.
Governments protect to prevent overuse.
Examples: fish in the sea, clean drinking water.
Fishing Regulations
Government regulates public access to common goods like natural resources.
Ensures species are not fished into extinction (sustainability).
Environmentalists want strict fishing limits.
Commercial fishers resist, claiming limits are unnecessary and would hurt their business.
Fishing limits are set by scientists, politicians, local resource managers, and fishers.
Government provides stability, goods, and services, and creates a structure for goods and services to be available.
Elected representatives make laws and raise money through taxes.
Governments draft budgets to allocate revenue for services.
Local: education, police, fire departments, public parks.
State: colleges, roads, bridges, wildlife management.
National: defense, Social Security, veteran pensions, federal courts, national parks.
Government agencies receive funds to provide services to the public.
Governments make laws to maintain order and ensure the efficient functioning of society and the business marketplace.
Regulate banking, toxic emissions, food purity, and toy/automobile safety.
Checks the actions of business.
Governments provide a means for citizens to participate and make their opinions known.
Western democracies protect freedom of speech and the press and allow citizens to vote.
Politics: choices regarding resource allocation and economic/social policies.
Process of who gets what and how.
Involves choosing which values government will support.
If government supports individualism, it may loosen regulations on business and industry or cut taxes.
If it supports egalitarianism, it may raise taxes to spend more on public education, transportation, housing, and care for the elderly.
If government is more concerned with national security than with individual liberty, it may authorize the tapping of people’s phones and restrict what newspapers may publish.
Civic engagement: participation that connects citizens to government.
Citizens influence policies, values, initiatives, and who makes decisions.
Forms: reading about politics, listening to news, discussing politics, attending debates, donating to campaigns, handing out flyers, voting, protest marches, and writing letters.
Different Types of Government
U.S. government: a republic, or representative democracy.
Democracy: political power rests in the hands of the people.
Representative democracy: citizens elect representatives to make decisions and pass laws.
U.S. citizens vote for members of Congress, the president and vice president, members of state legislatures, governors, mayors, and members of town councils and school boards to act on their behalf.
Majority rule: opinions of the majority have more influence.
Minority rights are protected.
Direct democracy: people participate directly in making government decisions.
Ancient Athens: all male citizens attended meetings of the Assembly to debate and vote on laws.
Some elements exist in the U.S., such as referendums and New England town meetings.
Elite-driven forms of government:
Monarchy: one ruler, usually hereditary, holds political power.
Power may be limited by law or unrestricted (absolute monarchs).
Oligarchy: a handful of elite members of society hold all political power.
In Cuba and China, only members of the Communist Party can vote or hold public office.
Totalitarianism: government controls all aspects of citizens’ lives; rights are limited, and political criticism is not allowed.
Fairly rare; North Korea is an example.
Elitism vs. Pluralism
Elite theory of government: a set of elite citizens controls the government.
Pluralist theory of government: political power rests with competing interest groups who share influence in government.
U.S. system has many access points for people and groups to engage the government.
C. Wright Mills: government is controlled by business, military, and political elites.
Wealthy use their power to control the nation’s economy and secure important positions in politics.
Politicians do the bidding of the wealthy, and order is maintained by force.
Those who favor government by the elite believe the elite are better fit to govern and that average citizens are content to allow them to do so.
Members of Congress also tend to resemble one another in terms of income and level of education.
Pluralist theory rejects this approach, arguing that although there are elite members of society they do not control government. Instead, political power is distributed throughout society.
Instead, pluralists argue, political power is distributed throughout society.
A variety of organized groups, with some groups having more influence on certain issues than others.
Thousands of interest groups exist in the United States, with 70–90% of Americans belonging to at least one group.
People with shared interests form groups to make their desires known to politicians.
Government policy is shaped from the bottom up.
Robert Dahl: politicians seeking an “electoral payoff” are attentive to the concerns of politically active citizens and, through them, become acquainted with the needs of ordinary people. They will attempt to give people what they want in exchange for their votes.
Tradeoffs Perspective
Government action and public policy are influenced by a series of tradeoffs or compromises.
Actions that meet the needs of large numbers of people may not be favored by the elite members of society, and vice versa.
Public policy is created as a result of competition among groups.
The interests of both the elite and the people likely influence government action, and compromises will often attempt to please them both.
Since the framing of the U.S. Constitution, tradeoffs have been made between those who favor the supremacy of the central government and those who believe that state governments should be more powerful.
Many of the tradeoffs made by government are about freedom of speech.
The First Amendment gives Americans the right to express their opinions, but governments cannot allow free expression to interfere with others’ rights.
Tradeoffs occur as a result of conflict between groups representing the competing interests of citizens.
Those who want to provide jobs and inexpensive natural gas are in conflict with those who wish to protect the natural environment and human health.
Tradeoffs are common in the U.S. Congress.
Members of the Senate and the House of Representatives usually vote according to the concerns of people who live in their districts.
House members and senators in Congress may ignore the voters in their home states and the groups that represent them in order to follow the dictates of the leaders of the political party to which they belong.
The government may attempt to resolve conflicting concerns within the nation as a whole through tradeoffs.
State governments have attempted to balance the interests of both groups by placing restrictions on such things as who can sell guns, where gun sales may take place, or requirements for background checks, but they have not attempted to ban gun sales altogether.
Why Get Involved?
Civic engagement can increase the power of ordinary people to influence government actions.
People can achieve many goals and improve their lives through civic engagement.
Even if the elite make political decisions, participation in government through the act of voting can change who the members of the elite are.
Robert Putnam argued that civic engagement is declining.
Social capital and willingness to engage in representative government has been hurt.
Becoming active in government and community organizations is important.
Pathways to Engagement
People can become civically engaged in many ways, either as individuals or as members of groups.
Individual engagement: stay informed, write/email representatives, file complaints, respond to polls, contribute to blogs, vote.
Group activities: host book clubs, work for political campaigns, join interest groups.
Political activity is not the only form of engagement.
Community action: tending a community garden, building a house for Habitat for Humanity, cleaning up trash, volunteering to deliver meals, and tutoring children.
More active forms of engagement: protest marches and demonstrations, including civil disobedience.
Successful tactics used in the civil rights movement are still used today.
Boycotts and “buycotts”.
Ritchie Torres
In 2013, at the age of twenty-five, Ritchie Torres became the youngest member of the New York City Council and the first gay council member to represent the Bronx.
Torres remains committed to improving housing for the poor.
Factors of Engagement
Americans aged 18–29 were less likely to become involved in traditional forms of political activity than older Americans.
One-third reported that they had voluntarily engaged in some form of community service in the past year.
As American politics become more partisan in nature, young people turn away.
Young Americans are particularly likely to be put off by partisan politics.
The likelihood that people will become active in politics also depends not only on age but on such factors as wealth and education.
Political involvement also depends on how strongly people feel about current political issues.
Public opinion polls capture people’s latent preferences or beliefs.
People with intense preferences tend to become more engaged in politics.
The more money that one has and the more highly educated one is, the more likely that he or she will form intense preferences and take political action.