Welcome to Political Science 101, American Politics. I'm Dr. Andrea Haupt and this is the second lecture for topic 1a. In this lecture, we'll address three major points.
The first pertains to defining what government is and discussing why it's necessary. The second point addresses forms or types of government. And thirdly, we'll look at challenges of representative government, asking, does representative government work? Our first theme is, what is government and why is it necessary?
During my last lecture, I told you that my lectures are not a repeat of the textbook. However, I decided for the next couple lectures that because there are so many analytical concepts up front, I'm going to follow the textbook closely just to make things more manageable for you. The clarification of terms here, governance and government, is taken from your textbook. Governance refers to the process of governing, which involves making official decisions about a nation's affairs.
and having the authority to put them into effect. And by contrast, a government refers to the institutions, and of course, the people that are part of it, through which a country and its people are ruled. Why is government necessary in the first place?
For hundreds of years, there has been a debate about how much government is desirable. Famously, Thomas Jefferson observed that the best form of government was the one that governs least. And we will explore ideas about political ideology and political values.
in our next lecture. For now, however, we can say that most people generally agree that there are some basic functions of government. And those three functions are maintaining order.
This means basically you can expect to go about your daily life without chaos ensuing. Then protecting property. And thirdly, an important function of government is to provide public goods, which markets are not very good at providing. And let's clarify the term public goods. which you may have heard in an economics class before.
A public or collective good is a benefit that no member of a group can be prevented from enjoying once it has been provided. If government provides a public good, citizens, any one citizen cannot be excluded from using that and benefiting from that good. Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, meaning that the use by one person generally does not infringe upon the use.
of another person of that good. An example would be roads. Once they have been provided, people can use them.
Public parks, national defense, and clean air. With respect to the last example, once clean air has been provided, I cannot keep you from breathing it, and my breathing of it doesn't infringe on your breathing of it. Again, public or collective goods are ones that are non-excludable, non-rivalrous, and there is a tendency for people to want to enjoy these public goods without contributing to the costs.
That tendency is called free writing. Our second theme in this lecture are forms or types of government. In the last lecture we used the term democracy but we hadn't really clarified that and so we'll do that today and you may also remember that I told you about subfields of political science and that comparative politics focuses on national level politics and compares governments or countries to each other.
and that includes a look at forms or types of government. There are a couple different ways that we can slice the study of forms or types of governments and one way to look at them is to understand who is in charge, who rules and how many people, how many individuals are ruling. One possible type of government is an autocracy in which a single individual rules. That is clearly not a democracy. One person is in charge and when we look at modern day politics perhaps the most obvious example that comes to mind is the government of North Korea, in which political authority has been handed down from grandfather to father to grandson.
An oligarchy, by comparison, refers to a form of government in which a small group of people is in charge. And throughout history, we've seen different versions of that. This could be landowners, military officers, like in a military dictatorship, or wealthy merchants.
And again, an oligarchy is not a democracy. A democracy is defined as a system of rule that permits citizens to play a significant part in government, usually through the selection of key public officials. And in simpler terms, democracy refers to rule by the people, the Greek origin of the word.
Demos in Greek means the people, and krat or the suffix krasi refers to rule or rule by. Democracy means rule by the people. We can also look at forms of government. by understanding limits of power on government.
We can say that some government are limited by constitution. So specific limits are placed on the power. of the government and though mostly this refers to democracies, democracies typically have a constitution and they're governed by the laws of the constitution, we do have some examples of constitutional governments that are not democracies and some that are. And so here are two newspaper screenshots. One of them discusses the kingdom of Jordan.
Jordan is not a democracy, it's a constitutional monarchy. And this article here from 2016 discusses how the Jordanian king is receiving now receiving more power and by comparison here Great Britain is a democracy but its long history includes being a constitutional monarchy so we have a parliamentary democracy in Great Britain but we also still have the queen who has at least symbolic and actually also some actual political say. Okay so this is the first term constitutional where constitutions are in place and again generally when we hear the term constitutional you It refers to democracies, but not exclusively. In authoritarian governments, there are no or few legal limits that are placed on government, and power may be checked by other social institutions.
Monarchies, again, is an example typically of authoritarian government. An authoritarian has that term authority in there. Again, we're talking about non-democracies. An authoritarian government could be a monarchy, as the case in Jordan.
It could be a military dictatorship. It could be a one-party rule as the case in China. The term totalitarian suggests that government has no formal or effective limits of any kind placed on its power, basically more control yet.
And totalitarian governments like Nazi Germany have typically also asked people to internalize a certain ideology. Here's a chart for you. This is actually from a different textbook.
And this summarizes what we just discussed. I thought this may be helpful. And it's a reminder that when you're watching these lectures, you should always feel free to pause, of course, so that you can take notes. Now, democratic representation. We can differentiate between direct democracy and representative democracy.
Direct democracy refers to a type of situation where citizens cast a vote directly for a given law. As your textbook describes, a rule that permits citizens to vote direct. on laws and policies.
And this is the kind of democracy that Aristotle and Plato, so Greek philosophers that wrote about democracy, had in mind. But for our modern and complex society, that's not something that is the dominant form of democracy. We generally elect representatives, but we do have some direct democracy in the U.S., and a good example of that are California's propositions. California's propositions could either be initiatives or referendums referring to new laws. or decisions on existing laws, respectively.
And in California, citizens can petition through collection of signatures to bring an issue directly before the people. And when you vote, you may see on the ballot props for California. And an example from 2016 would be California Proposition 64, which legalized the sale and distribution of cannabis. What is much more common?
and arguably necessary in a society as complex as ours is representative democracy and representative democracies are also called republics. The definition again from your textbook is a government in which the citizens select the representatives and delegate authority. Your textbook also introduces the term principal-agent relationship and this refers to the relationship between the elected official, this is the agent, and the principal, the voter or constituent.
on whose behalf he or she is acting. Now, I thought that this article was a fun one to share with you. And maybe with all these terms, you don't agree with me.
But bear with me. The question here is, is the United States of America a republic or a democracy? So the question is, is the U.S. a constitutional republic or is it a representative democracy? And the answer is yes and yes. And as the author Eugene Volokh points out, This is a false dichotomy.
The U.S. is a constitutional republic because we have a constitution and representative democracy. That's the meaning of republic, representative democracy. And so we are a representative democracy as well as the constitutional republic. The debate goes back to some of the terminologies that the framers used.
So, for example, Madison said that the Constitution established a republic and other founding fathers like John Adams referred to it. pure democracy versus a republic, but it's not really sensical anymore because today we understand that a democracy refers to either a direct democracy or a representative democracy. There is no contradiction there. Before we explore a few The challenges associated with representative democracies, a few words about the history and the current status of democracy around the world. And you'll hear me emphasize this a few times throughout the course.
I'm showing you a screenshot here of an article by Ronald Englehart titled The Age of Insecurity, Can Democracy Save Itself? There is a big debate currently about the future of democracy globally. Participation of citizens and government has been considered the... hallmark of democratic forms of government and also desirable.
The U.S. considers itself a democracy. It has spent quite a bit of energy to promote democracy around the world. And we have seen the rise of democracies, the rise of number of democracies, especially since the middle of the 20th century. To give you just a few examples of the democratic transitions that we have seen in Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, where it military dictatorships in the 80s still, and they have transitioned out of that.
South Korea made a transition to democracy. In Europe, Spain and Portugal transitioned to democracy. And the end of the Cold War brought democracy to Eastern Europe and initially to Russia.
And so we've been talking about these waves of democratization. But as many scholars have observed, we have seen a reversal. Democracy has been weakened.
This has complex reasons. One of them is the rise of nationalist sentiments, anti-immigrant sentiments in the form of a political movement that we have called right-wing populism. We have seen a decline in democracy, mostly in marginally democratic countries that have become more authoritarian again.
A good example of that, a very obvious example, is India, but also Brazil and Hungary, Poland. Democracies appear. quite fragile. At the same time, there's nothing inevitable about democratic decline.
And just to give you a heads up, if you're interested, this think tank, Freedom House, quantifies civil and political liberties and observes where countries are heading politically and just how free and democratic they are. Now to our third theme of the course, that is representative government, the challenges, and does representative government work. And before we talk about two competing ideas of representation, I just want to ask the question, who runs for office? And we can say that people run for office for two reasons. One, to improve public policy.
And two, to pursue power and influence. Generally, it's not to make money. This is supported by the fact that most people, when they go into politics, take a substantial pay cut. Members of Congress make about the same as a first-year lawyer at a big law firm. And the salaries of government officials...
generally don't compare favorably to those of the private sector. When it comes to the second point of view, people seeking power and influence, the question is, is that bad? And I would ask you, how many people do you know that are purely selfless? Elections typically do not involve people who are fundamentally different than those who vote. Arguably, the framers understood these different incentives, and the system is set up to tolerate people who act.
both selfless and self-interested. Let's take an example here of recent politics and think about the major tax cuts that have been adopted during the Trump administration. It's possible that they could be pursued because there was a belief that the country would actually be better off, or it was pursued for strategic reasons. Ultimately, it should not matter because people should be voting on policies, and democracy works best when we are given a wide set of options.
It's more important that representatives are held accountable and that elected officials are following through. Ideally, elections are a competition of policies and the origin of these policies is not as important. The key point here is that democracy is about conflict and competing ideas. It's about competition of policy ideas and democracy without conflict about what to do is not a healthy democracy. A lack of conflict is an inherent attribute of an authoritarian system.
The last point of this lecture is to contrast two theories of representation. The first theory of representation would be majoritarianism. This is the idea that the will of the majority as an undifferentiated whole should be adopted and should be represented. And most people think of this as the legitimate form of government and think that this is representing the people.
It's associated with the majority. but it's actually quite rare that more than 50% or 60% of people vote for something, in particular if it's a bigger issue. The reason is that most people don't care about most issues most of the time, and that's not necessarily human failing, it's oftentimes an issue of volume of information.
But some people care a lot. Secondly, most people are not well informed, and thirdly, sometimes there's not a majority. The competing idea of representation is pluralism. This is the theory that all interests are and should be free to compete for influence and government.
The critique here is that some people are better able to organize their interest, and this is related to a collective action problem, and that this is resulting in a biased expression of interest. Secondly, how much interest is enough? We're saying some people care more, but how much do they have to care? So majoritarianism may be crude, but best.
Third criticism is that minorities may not work in the best interest of society as a whole. Majoritarianism and pluralism are two theories of representation and you can make arguments for and against each. Now the question is what do we have in the US? We really have a mix.
You can say that when it comes to elections, we're roughly adhering to the majority principle and in between elections it's quite pluralistic. And this could be good or not. We will certainly return to this question. This is all for today.
In our next lecture we will look at political values and ideology and we will also look at the founding in the Constitution of the US.