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.

Friday, August 12, 2022

JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, IV

 

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

This posting continues this blog’s review of the natural rights perspective from the point of view of one who would advocate it.  That includes describing how it was affected by shifts in the study of politics since the years of the mid-twentieth century.  This addresses the focus that William Schubert’s commonplaces of curricular development places on political science. 

In a few words, the shifts strived to make the study of politics more amenable to scientific methods and later, to address political concerns of a given time – i.e., what would be “popular” issues.  In that vein, this posting starts by asking:  if that study avoids normative concerns, per se – that would be what advances justice, social capital, and civic humanism – then how does it address the motivation that prompts people to abide by the decisions a political system makes?  That is, why would people obey or acquiesce?

          Since systems cannot stand if they rely only on coercive means, that would be too expensive; they must depend on other motivations.  Most people do abide because they judge systems to be legitimate.    The source of legitimacy stems from two factors:  one, people sense or understand the practicality of a systemic process by which to devise decisions, assuming the decisions do not offend any basic beliefs, and two, general acceptances in how systems operate through processes that utilize institutionalized steps.

          Under these conditions, the vast number of citizens will obey the decisions.  But, as the prohibition of liquor in the 1920s demonstrated, even highly legitimate systems, such as that of the United States, at times do issue policies deemed illegitimate.  In that case, vast disregard for the policy is very likely to follow.  Legitimacy, therefore, is a central concern of any political system.[2]

          As such, legitimacy and its related political processes are repeatedly considered by policy makers – at least it is wise that they do so.  Ian Hurd puts this factor into a meaningful context,

 

Actors and institutions constantly work to legitimize their power, and challengers work to delegitimate it. Legitimation is often done by justifying the existence of rulers or their rules in terms of important normative principles of the society. However, legitimation may also be attempted through payoffs and inducements to subordinates. Material incentives and normative appeals are different strategies for legitimation and their success depends on how the audience responds to them. It is not possible to make a general statement about the efficacy of one or the other as a generic legitimating strategy, nor is it possible to say that legitimacy can only arise by following one or the other. By contrast, legitimacy itself is a fundamentally subjective and normative concept: it exists only in the beliefs of an individual about the rightfulness of rule. [3]

 

Therefore, no study of politics or governance can totally dismiss normative concerns, but the natural rights view focuses on what is natural, that is, material incentives.  But all governments depend on their rule reflecting, to some degree, their societies’ norms.

          Hurd continues,

 

It [legitimacy] is distinct from legality, in that not all legal acts are necessarily legitimate and not all legitimate acts are necessarily legal. One would hope for a close coincidence between the two, but it is conceptually necessary to keep the two separate. The possibility always exists that rulers might impose laws which the followers find illegitimate, and this possibility ensures that the two concepts cannot be reduced to one. Moreover, to define what is legal as the same as what is legitimate means that the government would have the power to control the categories of legitimate and illegitimate. This would make legitimacy inherently conservative since it could only buttress existing power relations. In practice, we see many instances in which citizens come to believe that their governments are illegitimate and this creates a serious crisis in governance.[4]

 

This last point was demonstrated not only by Prohibition, but many would point to the current situation in which a good number of Americans question the legitimacy of the last presidential election or the overturning of the Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade.  One result, in terms of the election, was the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and one sees growing discontent in terms of voiding abortion rights.

            With that said, a more general study, one civics strives to present, is how policy is formed by political systems – not just republics or democracies, but by all political systems.  Easton incorporates the idea of systems to the study of politics.  Using the concepts of inputs, outputs, feedback, support, demands, and stress, a basic analogy, first to a machine, and later to an organism, was applied to a governmental arrangement within a society.[5] 

What conditions must this systems’ construct address in order to be a legitimate and viable foundation by which to study government in this nation’s schools?  Answering this question takes on several dimensions.  Eugene J. Meehan provides criteria by which social scientists can judge constructs.  While curriculum developers and/or implementers of curriculum have different concerns from social scientists, some of Meehan’s concerns can be incorporated in evaluating constructs for the purposes of classroom use. 

These concerns were previously utilized in this blog to analyze and evaluate the parochial/federalist construct and will be used to support the natural rights construct as well.  The questions, in shortened form, that Meehan’s criteria ask are:  does the construct have scope, power, precision, reliability, isomorphism, compatibility, predictability, and purpose or control? [6]

In other words, given the general goal of a political systems approach, how does its view of government and politics match up with the realities of governance and serve as a vehicle by which to present that reality to secondary students?  According to the construct, those realities manifest themselves through that governance’s structures, processes, functions, and contexts.

A curriculum, to be viable, must have as one of its sources reputable subject matter from a relevant discipline.[7]  What follows in the upcoming postings are the evidences regarding the manners in which this construct addresses its subject matter.  This account argues, in the form of an antithesis – to the thesis, parochial federalism – that the systems approach provides positive or constructive responses to the questions posed by Meehan’s concerns.

That is, those postings will cite an array of evidence that illustrates, describes, and/or explains how the systems approach offers a viable basis for secondary course work in American government and civics classrooms.  This construct has done so since its widespread adoption in the planning and implementation of curricular content in those courses since the 1960s.  The very next posting will focus on the political systems approach, per se.



[1] This presentation continues with this posting.  The reader is informed that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of the natural rights view might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.  This series of postings begins with “Judging Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.

[2] David Easton, The Political System (New York, NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) AND David Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life (New York, NY:  John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1965).

[3] Ian Hurd, “Legitimacy,” Encyclopedia Princetoniensis (n.d.), accessed August 10, 2022, https://pesd.princeton.edu/node/516.

[4] Ibid.

[5] David Easton, “The Current Meanings of “Behavioralism,” in Contemporary Political Analysis, edited by James C. Charlesworth (New York, NY:  The Free Press 1967), 11-31.

[6] Eugene J. Meehan, Contemporary Political Thought:  A Critical Study (Homewood, IL:  Dorsey Press, 1967).  Here are Meehan’s concerns:  Does a construct explain as many phenomena related to the area of concern as possible; control the explanatory effort by being valid and complete in its component parts and in the relationships among those parts; specifically and precisely treat its concepts, making them clear in their use; explain its components and their relationships the same way time after time; contain a one-to-one correspondence with that portion of reality it is trying to explain; align with other responsible explanations of the same phenomena; predict conditions associated with the phenomena in question; and imply ways to control phenomena in question?

For readers of this blog, this blogger adds two pedagogic questions:  is a construct of such abstraction level that students will be able to comprehend it and is its content motivating to students?

[7] Ralph W. Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, 1949).

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