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 25, 2023

VIABILITY OF THE LIBERATED FEDERALISM, VI

 

This posting will address another concern of Eugene Meehan’s criteria as they are applied to the social construct, the liberated federalism model.[1]  This blog has been applying that criteria to describe the viability of that construct.  The sixth Meehan criterion asks:  does the construct align with other responsible models explaining the same phenomena?  That is, does it have compatibility? 

There is nothing in this proposed model that either contradicts the parochial/traditional federalism model or the political systems model and its offshoot models that have, to some degree, been previously reviewed in this blog.  What follows is a description of how liberated federalism is compatible.

          From this perspective, the model offered here can be seen as an open-ended one in which all of these models and theories are called into play by the activities of the deliberative process which the model in question highlights.  The federalist model of government is a more encompassing one.  These other models – those that have emanated from the political systems model – are mid-range models that describe and attempt to explain how political actors work their processes for a given context. 

As such, the mid-range models are useful in understanding political conditions, given specific political challenges, and in devising effective strategies.  As stated in an earlier posting, the model that has the closest overlapping content to liberated federalism is group theory.  Roy C. Macridis writes:

 

… [T]hey [group theorists] tell us that in order to understand how groups behave and how they interact, we must study the political system, the overall behavior patterns, the values and beliefs held by the actors, the formal organization of authority, the degree of legitimacy, etc., etc.  Without realizing it, they reverse their theoretical position.  They start with groups only to admit the primacy of the political phenomenon and suggest that in order to explain group behavior we must start with what group behavior purported to explain – the political system![2]

 

In a similar way, if the liberated federalism model were presented for purposes of generating hypotheses which would lead to empirical studies, this criticism would similarly be a serious one in terms of the model’s usefulness.  But that is not its purpose.

          The model is presented as a foundational construct for the study of American government and civics and, therefore, the Macridis statement is seen as having a functional quality because these are exactly the types of concerns that one wants secondary students to tackle in their study of government and civics.

          The literature about groups has been concerned mostly with the actions of interest groups, i.e., groups that have the on-going role of bringing demands to the political perspective of group behavior.[3]  While this type of group concern is not excluded from the liberated federalism model, it, liberated federalism, is not limited to that concern.  Besides, the emphasis is not limited to questions of effectiveness, although also included, but the emphasis is also heavily concerned with the communal interaction of entities with arrangements/associations and the moral quality of their actions.

          Therefore, the judgment here is that for pedagogical reasons, liberated federalism is not only compatible but also solicits a functional role for systems-based models in guiding civics instruction at the secondary level.  The next criterion to be addressed is predictability.



[1] That is, this posting continues the blog’s review of Eugene Meehan’s criteria by which to evaluate social science theories and models.  For readers wishing to read the previous postings relating these viability claims that the blog is making, they can read the last five postings found in the online site http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/.  As for Meehan’s criteria, see Eugene J. Meehan, Contemporary Political Thought:  A Critical Study (Homewood, IL:  Dorsey Press, 1967).  To date the blog has reviewed comprehensiveness, power, precision, consistency/reliability, and isomorphism.

[2] Roy C. Macridis, “Groups and Group Theory” in Comparative Politics:  Notes and Readings, edited by Roy C. Macridis and Bernard E. Brown (Chicago, IL:  The Dorsey Press, 1986), 281-287, 286.

[3] Current academic political thinking concerning group theory has a mixed opinion as to its viability.  See “Political Group Analysis,” Encyclopedia.com (n.d.), accessed August 23, 2023, https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/political-group-analysis AND for a more positive view, see Robert A. Heineman, Steven A. Peterson, and Thomas H. Rasmussen, American Government (New York, NY:  McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1995).

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