A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

MECHANICAL OR ORGANIC, WHO CARES?

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

 The adoption of the political systems model as the prevailing, basic view of governance and politics in civics classrooms[1] has generated a contentious issue.  That is:  should the model’s use reflect a mechanical view, or should it reflect an organic view?  Admittedly, among civics educators, this issue does not keep them up at night.  But upon some reflection, at least by this writer, it should.

Historically, when that model first broke through during the fifties, it utilized a highly behavioral view of political activity.  That is, it narrowed its analysis of political interactions to the immediate factors of rewards and punishments at stake in any given political act or type of action.

One should keep in mind that by its very nature, political interactions have to do with vying interests competing for some asset – usually a public asset – in which the distribution of the asset is not applicable to a market process.  For example, the allocation of a highway to one community or another, would be such a competition.  Or the competition could be of an indirect nature, for example, whether a regulation should be written one way, or another, could mean millions of dollars at stake in a given industry.

So, with a purely behavioral approach, politics was more apt to be studied through the quantification of the various factors or variables relating to the questions political scientists ask.  They took on this approach to be able to develop predictable and explanatory theories of political phenomena – much like natural scientists with their studies of natural phenomena.  They were not able to accomplish that feat and this led to the realization that many political factors are not subject to the direct quantification that natural factors or variables are.   

As the sixties came and wore on, therefore, this approach was found to be wanting.  The realization was developed that a straight or pure version of behavioral studies more resembled or could be considered a “mechanical” approach to the study of politics.  Eventually, David Easton, the leading voice in the political systems school of thought, argued for a more “organic” approach.[2]

          The original model emphasized the input-conversion-output elements of the model.  Easton explained that this stimulus-response conceptualization needed to give way to a stimulus-organism-response view.  And to do this, another element needed to be emphasized, that being feedback.  Or, stated more descriptively, the model needs to take into account more aggressively how people in the polity react to output (which is usually governmental policies).

          Either way, by political science shifting to behavioral modeling, and its overall effort to resemble the natural sciences, it, through its protocols, focuses on stripping any emotional biases from its studies.  One of the main objections to traditional – usually historical – studies of politics was their likelihood of being biased accounts to the study of political developments. 

Therefore, a prominent, initial concern in adopting behavioral methods was how to objectify political studies.  In further shifting the analysis to take into account reactions or feedback – with all the emotional factors involved both on the part of subjects and observing scientists – normative factors came to be seen as necessary elements of what needed to be studied even if that meant objectification would be less possible or less stringent. 

          The political actor can no longer be perceived in a way that is akin to a pigeon in a Skinner experiment.  Does the subject vote for a candidate (does a pigeon peck at a lever) or not?  It turns out humans acting politically cannot be reduced to this level of objectification.  And this writer’s use of political science literature has led him to believe that that research is more productive and useful with a more encompassing view of governance and politics, i.e., one that takes into account feedback.

          But how has the shift affected civics education?  This blog has reviewed civics textbooks with this question in mind.[3]  Generally, that review found that those books do little to account for feedback; it is an element that is mostly ignored.  No, their descriptions of political behavior do not reduce it to descriptions or explanations as stark as Skinnerian studies, but one can note a definite disregard for the emotions involved. 

Therefore, one can judge that what the American civics curriculum, as betrayed in those textbooks, expose to the secondary students is a mechanical view.  But a distinction needs to be made.  The political system itself, under the more organic view, is seen as an organism.  And the system is made up of organisms, that being the individual members of a system. 

But at the systemic level, the system is an analogized organ entity; the members, if one is speaking of the people, are, of course, actual organ entities.  What a federalist would judge of this construct, even after this more humanizing change, is that the analogized portion of the model falls short and is somewhat bizarre.  They would ask:  why analogize? 

To them a political system is a partnership, and a partnership is real assuming that its partners are conscious of their status and that they are partners of their own volition.  And in this, the political systems model provides a disservice.  By being the model civics adopts, it seriously undermines the constitutional arrangement that document formally establishes among the American people by portraying the union as some made up concept.  In using the resulting textbooks, the onus is on educators to make this clear.

          Now, with that off this federation theory advocate’s chest, one point needs to be clarified, civics studies governance and politics and those two processes determine how sought-after, public assets are distributed.  An organic view – and more so, a federated view – relies on a more humane perspective when compared to a mechanical view. 

Therefore, by opting for a mechanical view, civics instruction loses the dramatic quality of politics as being the “art of the possible.”  Instead, a less than full human image is presented, and with that, an inevitable, misleading governmental role is promoted.  That is, it gives government a solely agency role – i.e., it is pictured as this grand entity fully controlled by the wishes of the electorate. 

Further, that electorate is pictured as citizens who all have equal voices – not as an ideal (that would be too unobjectified) – but as a reality.  In short, these books ignore the presence, makeup, and function of power – what it is, how it is acquired, how it is exercised, how it is increased, how it is lost, and how it is maintained are questions these books mostly ignore.  Any reference to power is merely incidental to some event or condition they describe and treat it as contextual matter.

          And a textbook on governance and politics that avoids these questions, is an account that not only falls way short of what is involved, but also plays a role in setting up students to become disinterested, disappointed, and indifferent adult citizens.  Yes, a successful rendering of these books’ contents will set up students to understand what the popular press reports.  But as to the reasons of why political developments take the shape they do, they, as students today and as their adult versions tomorrow, are apt to be clueless.

          Evidence of this can be the following:  when a politician claims to set out to “drain the swamp” and that is interpreted as depopulating the government of civil servants who act apolitically, a serious level of misunderstanding is occurring.  People with that level of misperception are ripe for being subjects of unfounded arguments and believers of baseless conspiracy theories.  The reader might look around; the nation is there.

P.S.:  Happy election day; please vote.



[1] See “Inputs, Outputs, and Feedback,” March 13, 2020, accessed November 1, 2020, http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020_03_08_archive.html .

[2] Easton, “The Current Meanings of ‘Behavioralism,’” in Contemporary Political Analysis, 11-31.

[3] A future posting will summarize that review.

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