JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, VII

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

With the last posting, this blog introduced the functional-structural model by Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell.[2]  That posting identified two functions – two elements of that model – that Almond and Powell highlight; they are interest articulation and interest aggregation.  Before going on with the other functions that this model deems important, a word on the other half of the model needs to be described, at least initially.

          Along with functions, it draws students’ attention on certain structural elements with their processes.  So, in the case of interest articulation, individuals or groups may engage in those processes that communicate the information they wish to convey to advance their demands and/or supports.  On rare occasions, some individuals are so powerful on their own that they find it more effective and profitable to operate by themselves.[3]  Usually, though, people find it more effective or even necessary to work the system through group affiliations.[4] 

These groups are known as interest groups or pressure groups.  Often, groups represent the interests of some economic or social constituency.  The bond between and among individuals involved can be occupation, socioeconomic class, education, or some other basis.  In Almond and Powell’s model there are four types of groups.

The first type is what they call anomic interest groups.  Anomic groups are so designated because of their spontaneous and informal nature.  Usually engaged in unstructured arrangements and activities, from unplanned demonstrations to violence, and assassinations (at times more structured groups participate in activities that are meant to seem spontaneous but are not and as such are not anomic group activities). 

Their activities – anomic groups – become more prevalent from time to time.  One such time was the anti-Vietnam demonstrations of the 1960s and more recently, Black Lives Matter demonstrations fall under this classification.  The current polarized political environment promises to encourage such activities and of course, the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol has the outer appearance of such behavior, but there are investigations going on – including by a Congressional Committee – looking into how unspontaneous that demonstration was.

The second type of groups in Almond and Powell’s model is the non-associational interest groups.  These groups lack ongoing structures or set ways of making their wants heard.  They do have some bases of common interests such as class, race, ethnicity, or geographical localities.

Because they lack organization, they are usually not effective in the competition of placing their demands on political systems.  Without appropriate organization, problems these groups face have to do with how to handle internal dissimilarities among their memberships that can and often do overwhelm their similarities.

Institutional interest groups are Almond and Powell’s next type of faction.  These groups do enjoy significant levels of organization and their prime reason for existence is to pursue some aims other than interest articulations.  Examples of institutional interest groups include the churches, the bureaucracies, political parties, and the military. 

It is interesting to note that some of these groups are in government.  Another characteristic of these organizations is that interest articulation is not undertaken or accomplished by the rank and file of these organizations, but by “internal” factions (internal to the overall groups) or cliques.

When interests set up structures for the purposes of interest articulation with usual sophisticated organizations and permanent positions, then Almond and Powell consider these arrangements to be associational interest groups.  These types engage in very sophisticated, professional activities to assure success in their interest articulations. 

They hire full-time professional staffs to carry out these activities.  Some of America’s most successful institutional interest groups include such groups as American Medical Association.  Factors that tend to affect the level of success that these groups experience are wealth, appropriate skills in organizing efforts, a sense of togetherness, and a sense of purpose.

After demands are articulated to systems, the very important function of interest aggregation must take place if systems are going to be viable.  Central to this function are the activities of political parties – the main funneling entity within the system.  Through the processes of choosing candidates, with their platforms, a great deal of aggregating of demands takes place. 

When candidates propose a set of ideas and plans that they say will go into effect if elected, to be attractive to a significant number of voters, a great deal of aggregation has to take place.  This function is clearly performed, for example, when the major political parties develop their respective platforms at the national conventions every four years.  There, representatives of major interest groups try to influence the final platform statements.  Of course, this function does not stop with pre-election activities. 

The function is an ongoing concern in political systems.  The legislative phase of policy formation continues this aggregating function as well as during the execution of laws.  At all stages of governmental processes, decisions are made in which diverse interests of respective groupings are aggregated.

This model identifies three interest aggregating styles.  These styles – designated as different manners or modes by which particular structures carry out these functions – are pragmatic bargaining, absolute-value orienting, and traditionalistic preserving.  These styles, to a degree, draw readers to consider political systems other than that of the US.

In the pragmatic bargaining style, participants are willing to compromise and arrive at accommodations.  Noted for a subdued emotional tone, extreme or highly ideological demands tend to be disposed of or overwhelmed.  In two-party systems like that of the US, this style prevails.  American political parties can be seen as coalitions of diverse interest groups and serve to assist the compromising processes of diverse demands of various groups.  Consequently, these parties are referred to as brokerage parties.

In multiparty systems, usually a different style prevails.  In those situations, they tend to be more ideologically motivated and pursue more uncompromising positions.  That is, they follow an absolute-value oriented style.  Of course, under this style, compromises are much more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.  Also, totalitarian one-party systems are noted by an absolute-value orientation, but only single positions are tolerated or exist at viable levels.

But again, in multiparty systems, the prevailing absolute-value oriented style tends to make politics more unstable and stressful.  This is especially true when coalition arrangements are formed when no party gains the majority in legislative bodies – such as parliaments.  History has shown that in those situations, governments have difficult if not impossible abilities to institute broad policy endeavors.

Almond and Powell next identify a style that was more prevalent in premodern systems in which customs and traditions determined policies.  These traditionalistic systems are found where there are low levels of institutionalization of separate political practices and structures.  The political practices and structures that exist tend to be intermixed with other social institutions. 

The political orientations of involved participants tend to be diffused by these other institutional orientations.  Other institutions, such as religion or kinship, tend to have more pronounced roles in the business of articulating or aggregating demands than the political system.  Other elites very possibly have higher status in social and political matters than political authorities do. This sort of system seems to be a good part of the story with America’s involvement in Afghanistan.

The next posting will begin with the application of these styles in American history.  Their leanings match three subcultures that Daniel Elazar identifies as characterizing the American system.  Such a review helps students apply some color or granulation to the study of governance, politics, and of course civics.  Otherwise, that study would be overly objectified and lack a lot of the drama these aspects of life inherently have.

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

[3] Well-endowed factions – in terms of money or other assets – cannot only be successful on their own, but they need not share in any spoils that success might render.  See E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People:  A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (New York, NY:  Hole, Rinehart and Winston, 1960).

[4] In his recently published book, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics, this blogger argues that the current political landscape in America will influence even well-endowed political actors to seek and establish political alliances with other citizens.  See Robert Gutierrez, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics:  Obstacles in Achieving a Federated Nation (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas Civics Books, 2022), available through Amazon. 

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.

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.

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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] 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).