Class Notes 9/4 and 9/5 take 2

9/4
Don't overlook contributions to political though of gov't by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
-Hobbes wrote Leviathan. Without government people would live in a state of nature without rules, stealing and killing for personal gain, life would be lonely, poor, nasty, short, and brutsih. -Locke wrote Two Treatises on Government. Argued that protection of life, liberty, and property was the basic objective of gov't. Locke said in a state of nature people were naturally free and equal, but went a step further and recognized that freedom led to inequality and chaos.
Politics is the struggle to gain leadership of the state or government in which you reside.-The two dilemnas of government are: Order vs. Freedom and Freedom vs. EqualityPeople who think seriously about government will create their proper mix of freedom, order, and equality into a political ideology. SEE PAGE 21 FIGURE 1.1
The ism's:
1. Totalitarianism- control all segments of government.
2. Communisn- government is in control of production, economy, as well as most political and social life.
3. Democratic Socialism- government owns major industries but citizens are guaranteed civil liberties.
4. Capitalism- free enterprise(laissez faire) and private ownership.
5. Libertarianism- limits government to protecting life and property.
6. Anarchism- opposition to government in any form.

US Citizens are middle of the road on this continuum. We clearly favor capitalism as a form of economy. In the US we casually throw around terms like liberal and conservative. Commonly known but inadequate definitions are that:
-Liberal position supports a larger role for government.
-Conservative position favors either the staus quo or a reduction in the tole of government.

Commutitarians- want government to guarantee order and equality. They need government assistance.
Libertarians- want their freedom from the government.

9/5

Governments have to make decisions. How they do this is one way to distinguish between governments. If one individual has the power to make all important govt decisions we say there is an autocracy. If an elite, only a select few individuals, maeks the important decisions we say there is an oligarchy. If many people participate in making important dicisions we say there is a democracy

There are basically two models of democracy
1) Direct democracy in which all citizens debate and vote directly on all laws. This requires a high level of participation and a lot of confidence in the judgment of ordinary people. Many of the Founders did not believe the masses had the ability to government themselves thinking they would be too prone to the influence of charismatic leaders who would manipulate public opinion. The founders also thought that the masses would be prone to overlook the rights of those with minority opinion (Tyranny of the Majority.
2) Representative democracy, or indirect democracy, where people elect representatives to govern them, set policy, and make laws. A representative democracy is, in a sense, a compromise between a direct democracy and an authoritarian rule. It is most the accepted for of democracy in the world. Political scientists take Representative democracy in two theoretical directions: elite theory and pluralist theory
a. Elite theory hold that a representative democracy is not really based on the will of the people, but that there is a small, tight elite class that makes almost all the important decisions for the nation. A second version of elite theory holds that voters choose from among competing elites. It would be fairly easy to argue that elite theory applied in the early days of the Republic when the U.S. was essentially an aristocracy
b. Pluralist theory argues that representative democracies are based on group interests that protect the individual’s interest by representing him to government. The basic idea is that in a diverse society such as the U.S. too many interests exist to allow an one coherent group of elites to rule. Govt. decisions are made in an arena of competing interests, all vying for influence and the ability to speak for the people they represent. The would argue that even in the early Republic there were competing interests. Urban v rural, n v s

There are two further schools of thought about what constitutes a democracy:
1) The procedural view, or school of thought, of democracy, can apply to govt. in a direct democracy in which all members of the group meet to make decisions themselves. Three principles define the procedural view:
a. Everyone should participate—universal participation
b. Everyone’s preference should count the same—political equality
c. Decisions are made by majority vote or majority rule
Is the U.S. a democracy by this standard?
2) The procedural view of democracy can also be applied to a representative democracy where citizens elect public officials to govern on their behalf. But to do this we must introduce a fourth principle—responsiveness, the idea that elected representatives should do what the majority wants. Note that f citizens are not going to meet to make decisions themselves there must be a mechanism to ensure that govt. decisions reflect the majority view. If there is no such mechanism we have to be careful about labeling a govt. a democracy
3) The procedural view of democracy can lead to a situation where a country’s political minority enjoys no guaranteed rights. To prevent a tyranny of the majority, it is necessary to limit the government’s responsiveness to public opinion. Two procedural ways of protecting minority rights is to 1) limit the principle of majority rule by requiring a two-thirds majority or some other super-majority for some decisions like amending the constitution or appointing a Supreme Court justices and 2) put the issue in the Constitution where it is out of the reach of the majority in the sense that courts can not strike don an article in the constitution and lawmakers cannot change the Constitution by a simple majority vote in Congress
4) This also leads to the second school of though or substantive democratic theory which focuses on the substance of government policies, not on the procedures followed to make decisions or policies. A problem with substantive democracy is that it lacks precise criteria to determine if a government policy is democratic