JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, VI

 

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

This presentation goes on with its review of a political systems approach that represents a natural rights bias in the study of politics.  Central to this review is describing David Easton’s theorizing.[2]  Within that theorizing, initiators of political action are demands and supports.  The former is what citizens want and was addressed in the last posting.  Supports are just what the term suggests, being positive messaging or sharing of assets.

Easton writes of two types of supports:  specific and diffuse.[3]  Specific supports refer to positive reactions among the citizenry directed at those individuals responsible, or perceived responsible, for actions deemed favorable by those members expressing the support.  For example, an authority figure who favors and works for lowering taxes would be in line for specific support from many members of the system. 

Specific supports tend to be limited in time.  On the other hand, a more lasting support are diffuse supports which are more like reservoirs of support for past positive experiences and feelings.  These reservoirs of credit can be drawn upon by those in power when times are not so good.

          Sometimes diffuse supports could take the form of supporting the office instead of the individuals who are holding the positions at a given time.  Often these positive feelings are the product of early political socialization of individuals and are further reinforced by media messages and possibly by acquaintances and friends.  In many cases, widespread family socialization practices have become so ingrained among the citizenry that they have become part of the culture.

          In any case, family attempts to encourage certain political attitudes or perspectives are usually highly effective.  Of course, this includes attitudes and even values that are directed beyond supporting individual authority figures.  They can include supports for democratic practices and beliefs.

If so inclined, these lessons can have lifelong influences on those who receive such messaging, especially as young people grow up in households where such messaging is common.  Of course, such socializing can also be anti-democratic and of concern for those who wish to maintain the nation’s democratic institutions.[4]

          And then there are feedbacks.  Easton emphasizes how the loop of information concerning how people react to outputs (policies, laws, proclamations, etc.) serve as self-correcting mechanisms on systems.  They are, as those in authority hear and see how people react to past or ongoing policies and actions, instrumental in potentially adjusting governmental actions or correcting perceived mistakes.  Obviously, those situations entail issuing newer outputs that are more in line with what the members of the system support.

          Readers might be tempted to relate systems analysis to the school of psychology known as behaviorism.  That is, political systems, like organisms, are merely responding to stimuli in their environments.  They will engage in outputs that have proven to be rewarding and avoid those that are deemed punishing.  Easton writes,

 

In the intervening years since behaviorism was first enunciated, most psychologists have come to recognize that, between external stimulus and observable response, subjective experiences occur that influence the interpretation and effect of the stimulus and, thereby, the nature of the response.  The original behavioristic paradigm, S-R (stimulus-response), has yielded to the more intelligible one of S-O-R (stimulus-organism-response) in which feelings, motivations, and all the other aspects of the subjective awareness and reaction of the organism are taken into account as potentially useful data.  This has, of course, spelled the doom of pristine behaviorism and as a term, although not necessarily as a point of view, it has just about disappeared from psychology.[5]

 

While Easton writes of motivational factors by those in government,[6] he does not provide an insightful view of how inputs convert into outputs.  He treats governmental decision-making, where such conversions take place, as a “black box.”[7]

Structural-Functional Model

          And with that “black box” analogy, this review naturally moves on to describing the structural-functional model.  And that focus will take up a good deal of attention – beyond this posting and into probably more than one subsequent posting.  Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell provide a model[8] that builds on Easton’s ideas and augments them by depicting the functions that political systems must perform or satisfy in order to survive, i.e., it takes the student into the “black box.”

          A good place to begin describing the Almond and Powell model is still within the environment of the system, i.e., with their account of political culture.  Political cultures are environmental elements in which political systems find themselves.  Here, references are to the general feelings or orientations that the members of political systems have for systems themselves.  These orientations consist of values, attitudes, beliefs, and habits of people and how they affect the political processes, decisions, and actions of governments and their authorities.

          Political cultures can be viewed as subsystems of general overall cultures of societies.  They can also be described as sociopsychological fields that help condition political behaviors.  For example, political cultures discourage or even place limits on the types of demands that systems’ members will be socially allowed to place on their respective systems.  Types of political behavior are judged by cultures’ values and in turn their “sanctioning” processes are highly instrumental in affecting the strategies employed by participants in resolving conflicts.

          In terms of inputs, the Almond and Powell model first identifies systemic functions by which demands are communicated to respective political systems and then are narrowed so that political systems can deal with them.  There are two functions that are involved with inputs.  They are interest articulation and interest aggregation.  Interest articulations have to do with communicating wants and demands to political systems.

          Through interest aggregations, priorities are placed on demands and some demands are given high priority and moved through systems quickly, while others are given little opportunities to be considered.  Of course, governmental decision-making requires that a limiting and concessionary process take place and not all demands can be either satisfied or even addressed.

          This posting ends with this “intro” to interest aggregations.  Such questions about what sorts of aggregations are effective will be addressed in the next posting and other functions’ concerns will also be addressed.  Overall, though, these functions provide students mental tools by which to address what happens in those “black boxes” generally thought of as governments.

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[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] Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life.

[4] Currently, the news media is reporting that among conservative populations of the US there is a train of thought being socialized that one can call Christian nationalism.  Part of that messaging is the claim that America is not a democracy but a republic.  Further, such reasoning is justifying voting restricting policies.

[5] David Easton, “The Current Meanings of ‘Behavioralism,’” in Contemporary Political Analysis, ed. James C. Charlesworth (New York, NY:  The Free Press, 1967), 11-31, 12.  Emphasis added.

[6] Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life.

[7] “Fig 3 – uploaded Adam M. Wellstead,” Research Gate (n.d.), accessed August 17, 2022, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-black-box-model-of-political-system-Source-adapted-from-Easton-1965_fig3_270712271.

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

JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, V

 

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

Readers following this blog have, in the last posting, been given a general overview of how the discipline of political science has affected civics education in the US.  With this posting, that review turns to a more specific treatment of this influence.  What follows is still general, but more granular, descriptions of the two popular models, political systems approach and a spin-off model, the structural-functional analysis model.

          As William T. Callahan indicates, these perspectives have been the most widely used constructs in the study of American government and civics in American schools.[2]  After the two models are described, there will be short responses to the questions Eugene Meehan[3] proposes for analyzing and evaluating constructs.

The political systems model described will be that of David Easton[4] and the structural-functional model will be that of Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr. [5]  The former model is the topic of this posting and part of the next, and the latter one will also be addressed in the next posting.

            Given that the use of the systems’ construct is for curricular purposes, the goal has been to assist in preparing students to be reasonably successful consumers of governmental services.  To do so, the approach must prove useful and appropriate in identifying the knowledge such a goal presupposes.  From the description in these postings, this antithesis[6] holds that it does so.

The Easton model, supplemented by the Almond and Powell model, speaks to all the significant structures and processes associated with the political system.  This analysis attempts to demonstrate the usefulness and appropriateness of this construct and bolsters the claim that it should be utilized in the development of civics curricular content.

Easton was primarily concerned with two questions:  what processes constitute a viable political system and does that system maintain itself?  He defined stress to the system as those forces that motivate a system into action and if sufficiently unsuccessful lead to possible dissolution.  The construct focuses on what makes some systems successful and others not in the management and coping of stress.

In all systems, people place demands on their political systems.  Demands or wants (preconceived demands) can be any sought after general or particular action requested or desired that citizens want performed by their government.  Stresses are the felt intensity levels of these demands.  Demands constitute inputs into the system.  Another type of inputs is supports.  Supports are positive messaging or assets citizenries provide political systems.  High levels of supports help alleviate stresses and low levels can increase them.

Whether systems can successfully manage stresses indicates how stable systems are.  Of course, low stabilities can lead to systems’ demises.[7]  Any reactions by governments to demands and/or supports are outputs.  Outputs take the form of policies, laws, pronouncements, proclamations, and the actual actions that carry out policies.  The citizenries’ responses to outputs are feedbacks.  Feedbacks can take the form of additional inputs affecting future governmental actions and, again, take on the form of demands and supports.[8]

Within Easton’s model, there are certain character elements of political systems that are labeled political objects.  These are political communities, regimes, and authorities and as such, these elements, if strong enough, can categorize different systems.  For example, if their authority element becomes overly descriptive of a system, it might be considered authoritarian.  They make, to the exclusion of other functions, authoritative allocations of values for particular societies of groups or people. 

To whatever level, those subgroups or congregations are called political communities.  These communities can be of varying sizes, from classrooms to whole nations, though Easton wrote of national communities.  Beyond being conceptual tools by which to analyze systems, they do show an element of community or normative bias in a highly objectified approach to the study of politics.

The term, regimes, is used to designate the rules by which political processes are carried out for individual systems.  The term usually refers to types of governments associated with particular sets of rules such as parliamentary, monarchies, and democracies.  And authorities are the officials who hold government positions and fulfill roles of making binding decisions, that is, binding on fellow citizens or members of the various communities.

Another term, legitimacy, that was described in the last posting, is greatly enhanced by feelings of cohesion, or belonging together under the auspices of political communities.

 

The we-ness or sense of community which indicates political cohesion of a group of persons, regardless of the kind of regime they have or may develop, consists of the feeling of belonging together as a group which, because it shares a political structure, also a political fate.  Regardless of the dissimilarities of customs, religion, socio-economic status, nationality, and the like, to the extent that there is a feeling of political community, the members will possess mutual sympathy and loyalty with respect to their participation in a common political unit.[9]

 

Communities can and usually do transcend regimes and sets of authorities.  These feelings are essential in integrating the political system.  As such, they allow political systems to handle a great number of stresses.

          If significant enough portions of populations lose these feelings or significant members of systems are disillusioned and do not consider themselves belonging to communities, political systems are in serious danger of being terminated.  A sense of communities might be intact, but if there is a large lack of supports for individual regimes, these types of stresses might lead to revolutions.  Revolutions refer to transformations of societal institutions such as their economies, social arrangements, and/or political systems.

          Perhaps there are sufficient supports for communities and for regimes, but there are serious antagonisms for authorities.  These could lead to removal of those authorities either through elections, impeachment processes, or coup d’états.  Probably disgruntled citizens, if disgruntled enough, do not necessarily distinguish these forms of antagonisms, and their potential support for one of these reactions is likely intermingled with those of the others.  But clear distinctions assist students in analyzing stresses and political problems that systems might encounter.[10]

          And this blog, in the next posting, will further this last note of concern, stress, and how citizens who have above average levels of stress react to such situations.  What readers should be sensitive to is the manner in which systems theory considers stress.  Yes, there is language, as expressed above, that cites communal concerns, but it becomes highly objectified as one delves into the concerns over dysfunctional conditions that political systems must address if they are to survive.  This objectivity helps pursue accurate analyses of what ail political systems.

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[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] William T. Callahan, Jr. “Introduction,” in Citizenship for the 21^st Century, edited by William T. Callahan and Ronald A. Banaszak (Bloomington, IN:  Social Studies Development Center, 1990 AND Robert Gutierrez, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics:  Obstacles in Achieving a Federated Nation (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas Civics Books, 2022).  This second cite offers an extensive review of currently used high school textbooks used in American government courses.  The review supports this claim.

[3] Eugene J. Meehan, Contemporary Political Thought:  A Critical Study (Homewood, IL:  Dorsey Press, 1967).  Meehan’s criteria ask:  does the construct have scope, power, precision, reliability, isomorphism, compatibility, predictability, and purpose or control?

[4] 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).

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

[6] This antithesis to the thesis, parochial/traditional federalism.

[7] Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life.

[8] Ibid.  More on feedbacks in the next posting.

[9] Ibid., 185 (emphasis in the original).

[10] Ibid.