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 26, 2022

JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, VIII

 

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

The last posting left readers with a review of three orientations regarding interest articulation and interest aggregation.  Interest articulation and interest aggregation are two of the functions Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr.’s structural-functional model identifies[2]; that is, how Americans go about generating, communicating, and targeting their demands at and supports of their respective political systems. 

Of special note is what Daniel Elazar offers as he identifies and describes three subcultures that have, in general terms, characterized American politics and are aligned – coincidentally – with Almond and Powell’s orientations.[3]  The subcultures arose in the historical development of the US.  They are

 

·      The traditional subculture that could and still can be found in the states evolving from the Confederate states. 

·      The absolute-value (moralistic) subculture, in a more moderate form, in the “moralistic” states which evolved from the New England, Puritanical tradition. 

·      And the pragmatic bargaining (individualistic) subculture which was most strongly prevalent in the political/social orientation of the mid-Atlantic states that bolstered a commercial outlook. 

 

Overall, these subcultures were carried by settlers – east to west – as the nation developed toward the Pacific Ocean.  Today, though, dominant orientation in the US is the individualistic subculture.

          Before continuing with the rest of the functions of the political system, a word about interest aggregation should be added.  Excessive stresses can be experienced if many diverse interests are not successfully aggregated to a manageable number; even if they are narrowed, problems may still be present.  Even if there are few alternative demands being articulated at a given time that are extremely far apart in content, i.e., mutually exclusive and uncompromising, the ability to find a suitable resulting policy might be impossible.

          In such cases, any decision might be very unacceptable and considered illegitimate by large portions of the community.  A current issue that takes on this sort of division is abortion or abortion rights.  Almond and Powell call this “fragmentation in aggregation patterns.”  These stresses are most likely to occur in conditions or demand-sets associated with the absolute-value oriented (moralistic) subculture.

          Now it is time to move on to the other Almond and Powell functions.  The next function from their model to be described here is rulemaking.  This function definitely takes students of politics into the “black box” of policy decision making.  Naturally, rules are part of the make-up of any society.  Certain questions or points of analysis are designated by this structural-functional approach to analyze rulemaking.

          These include:  What are the sources of a society’s rules?  What are their natures?  How flexible are the society’s rules?  What are the structures associated with rulemaking and how do they interact or relate with each other?  How does the rulemaking function relate to the other functions of the system?  In the American system, of course, these types of questions lead to the processes associated with the different branches of government at all levels of the federal system.

            Rulemaking is primarily associated with the legislative branch in which Congress, at the national level, legislatures, at the state level, or city or county commissions at local levels, basically decide what government will do by the enactment of laws or ordinances.  The interaction of the executive and judicial branches with the legislative branches, from the central to local governmental platforms, has a large role in what those laws or ordinances will be or how they will actually function. 

For example, more rules are added as legislation is put into operation, mostly done by the executive branches or interpreted by resulting court action in the judicial branches.  So important are these last sets of activities that they constitute separate functions in the Almond and Powell model; that is, the rule-application function and the rule-adjudication function.

Given the more secular character of rules, these separate functions – with their separate structural elements – are more suitable in modern societies.  In premodern societies, rules are usually intertwined with religious beliefs and other institutional values, by which they enjoy high degrees of legitimacy and, therefore, almost complete adherence.  In modern societies, this support is absent – or almost absent.  Currently, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there seems to be ample antagonism to what many see as religious based policy to ban abortions.

If those sorts of policies were enacted – laws against gay marriage, against the sale of contraceptive medication, along with the sale and provision for end of pregnancy medications and procedures – due to lack of legitimacy, they would necessitate large bureaucratic set ups to police obedience.  Add that to modern, pragmatic bargaining induced policies such as Social Security, and such traditional biases might make the affected governments overwhelmed or highly taxed.

The same can be said of the rule-adjudication function.  Questions associated with whether rules are broken, who broke them, what should be done if they are broken, or even if the rule or law is a legal rule or law to begin with, are all issues that modern societies through their judiciaries must face.  That is, the main structure to deal with these questions is the courts, but there are other structures that share in adjudicating activities.

These include police, regulation inspectors, and regulatory commissions.  Of special concern with the adjudicating function is the issue of impartiality.  It is essential that the function be satisfied in such a way that the members of political systems believe them to be fair.  Impartiality, or the belief in it, goes a long way in encouraging the trust that systems are fair.  Autonomy, in turn, from other structures gives adjudicating structures the advantage of not being unduly influenced by partial (political) forces.

From these descriptions, readers can get a feel for how interactive the parts of systems are – making them true systems.  And this is without considering outputs.  A lot happens within the “black box” and what students should remember is that those processes are continually taking place.  The next posting will focus on outputs and further identify and describe these interactions.



[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] Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown. 1966).

[3] Daniel J.  Elazar, American Federalism:  A View from the States (New York, NY:  Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1966).  He further develops this claim in this book’s edition published in 1986.  The subcultures, a federalist view, Elazar identifies were theorized independently from the work of Almond and Powell or even of that of David Easton.

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