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Governments vary in their structure, their size, and the way they operate. Two questions are of special importance in determining how governments differ: Who governs? And how much government control is permitted?
Some nations are governed by a single individual—a king or dictator, for example. This state of affairs is called autocracy. Where a small group—perhaps landowners, military officers, or the wealthy—controls most of the governing decisions, that government is said to be an oligarchy. If citizens are vested with the power to rule themselves, that government is a democracy.
Governments also vary considerably in terms of how they govern. In the United States and a small number of other nations, governments are limited as to what they are permitted to control (substantive limits) and how they go about it (pro- cedural limits). Governments that are limited in this way are called constitutional governments, or liberal governments. In other nations, including many in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the law imposes few real limits. The government, how- ever, is nevertheless kept in check by other political and social institutions that it is unable to control and must come to terms with—such as autonomous territories, an organized religion, organized business groups, or organized labor unions. Such governments are generally called authoritarian. In a third group of nations, includ- ing the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, Nazi Germany, perhaps prewar Japan and Italy, and North Korea today, governments not only are free of legal limits but also seek to eliminate those organized social groups that might challenge or limit their authority. These governments typically attempt to dominate or control every sphere of political, economic, and social life and, as a result, are called totalitarian (see Figure 1.2).
Americans have the good fortune to live in a nation in which limits are placed on what governments can do and how they can do it. Many of the world’s people do not live in a constitutional democracy. By one measure, just 40 percent of the global population (those living in 86 countries) enjoy sufficient levels of political and personal freedom to be classified as living in a constitutional democracy.13 And constitutional democracies were unheard of before the modern era. Prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governments seldom sought—and rarely received—the support of their subjects. The available evidence strongly suggests that ordinary people often had little love for the government or for the social order. After all, they had no stake in it. They equated government with the police officer, the bailiff, and the tax collector.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, in a handful of Western nations, two im- portant changes began to take place in the character and conduct of government. First, governments began to acknowledge formal limits on their power. Second, a small number of governments began to provide ordinary citizens with a formal voice in public affairs—through the vote. Obviously, the desirability of limits on government and the expansion of popular influence were at the heart of the Amer- ican Revolution in 1776. “No taxation without representation,” as we shall see in Chapter 2, was fiercely asserted from the beginning of the Revolution through the Founding in 1789. But even before the Revolution, a tradition of limiting govern- ment and expanding participation in the political process had developed through- out western Europe.
Limiting Government
The key force behind the imposition of limits on government power was a new social class, the bourgeoisie, which became an important political force in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bourgeois is a French word for “freeman of the city,” or bourg. Being part of the bourgeoisie later became associated with being “middle class” and with involvement in commerce or industry. In order to gain a share of control of government, joining or even displacing the kings, aristocrats, and gentry who had dominated government for centuries, the bour- geoisie sought to change existing institutions—especially parliaments—into in- struments of real political participation. Parliaments had existed for centuries but were generally aristocratic institutions. The bourgeoisie embraced parliaments as means by which they could exert the weight of their superior numbers and growing economic advantage over their aristocratic rivals. At the same time, the bourgeoisie sought to place restraints on the capacity of governments to threaten these economic and political interests by placing formal or constitutional limits on governmental power.
Although motivated primarily by the need to protect and defend their own interests, the bourgeoisie advanced many of the principles that would define the central underpinnings of individual liberty for all citizens—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, and freedom from arbitrary search and seizure. The work of political theorists such as John Locke (1632–1704) and, later, John Stuart Mill (1806–73) helped shape these evolv- ing ideas about liberty and political rights. However, it is important to note that the bourgeoisie generally did not favor democracy as we know it. They were advocates of electoral and representative institutions, but they favored property requirements and other restrictions so as to limit participation to the middle and upper classes. Yet once these institutions of politics and the protec- tion of the right to engage in politics were established, it was difficult to limit them to the bourgeoisie.
Access to Government: The Expansion of Participation
The expansion of participation from the bourgeoisie to ever-larger segments of society took two paths. In some nations, popular participation was expanded by
the Crown or the aristocracy, which ironically saw common people as potential political allies against the bourgeoisie. Thus, in nineteenth-century Prussia, for ex- ample, it was the emperor and his great minister Otto von Bismarck who expanded popular participation in order to build political support among the lower orders.
In other nations, participation expanded because competing segments of the bourgeoisie sought to gain political advantage by reaching out to and mobilizing the support of working- and lower-class groups that craved the opportunity to take part in politics—“lining up the unwashed,” as one American historian put it.15 To be sure, excluded groups often agitated for greater participation. But seldom was such agitation by itself enough to secure the right to participate. Usually, expan- sion of voting rights resulted from a combination of pressure from below and help from above.
The gradual expansion of voting rights by groups hoping to derive some politi- cal advantage has been typical of American history. After the Civil War, one of the chief reasons that Republicans moved to enfranchise newly freed slaves was to use the support of the former slaves to maintain Republican control over the de- feated southern states. Similarly, in the early twentieth century, upper-middle-class Progressives advocated women’s suffrage because they believed that women were likely to support the reforms espoused by the Progressive movement.
Influencing the Government through Participation: Politics
Expansion of participation means that more and more people have a legal right to take part in politics. Politics is an important term. In its broadest sense, it refers to conflicts over the character, membership, and policies of any organization to which people belong. As Harold Lasswell, a famous political scientist, once put it, politics is the struggle over “who gets what, when, how.”16 Although politics is a phenom- enon that can be found in any organization, our concern in this book is narrower. Here, politics will be used to refer only to conflicts and struggles over the leader- ship, structure, and policies of governments. The goal of politics, as we define it, is to have a share or a say in the composition of the government’s leadership, how the government is organized, or what its policies are going to be. Having a share is called having power or influence.
Politics can take many forms, including everything from blogging and posting opinion pieces online, sending emails to government officials, voting, lobbying leg- islators on behalf of particular programs, and participating in protest marches and even violent demonstrations. A system of government that gives citizens a regular opportunity to elect the top government officials is usually called a representative democracy, or republic. A system that permits citizens to vote directly on laws and policies is often called a direct democracy. At the national level, the United States is a representative democracy in which citizens select government officials but do not vote on legislation. Some states and cities, however, have provisions for direct legislation through popular initiative and ballot referendum. These procedures allow citizens to collect petitions requiring an issue to be brought directly to the voters for a decision. In 2016, 165 initiatives appeared on state ballots, dealing with matters that ranged from gun control and raising the minimum wage to legaliz- ing marijuana. Many hot-button issues are decided by initiatives. For example, in Colorado in 2010, voters passed a referendum that called on the state to sue the federal government to enforce immigration laws. Often, broad public campaigns pro- mote controversial referenda, attempting to persuade voters to change existing laws.
For example, in 2016 nine states considered measures that would either decriminalize marijuana or legalize it altogether. Some 82 million people would be affected by the outcome of these contests. Four states considered additional gun control regulations. Colorado voters weighed an amendment to the state constitu- tion that would create a single-payer health system funded by a tax on employers and employees. In California, voters decided on whether to support a ban on plas- tic bags, the first such statewide ban.
Groups and organized interests do not vote (although their members do), but they certainly do participate in politics. Their political activities usually consist of such endeavors as providing funds for candidates, lobbying, and trying to influence public opinion. The pattern of struggles among interests is called group politics, or pluralism. Americans have always been ambivalent about pluralist politics. On the one hand, the right of groups to press their views and compete for influence in the gov- ernment is the essence of liberty. On the other hand, Americans often fear that or- ganized groups may sometimes exert too much influence, advancing special interests at the expense of larger public interests. (We return to this problem in Chapter 11.)
Sometimes, of course, politics does not take place through formal channels at all but instead involves direct action. Direct action politics can include either violent politics or civil disobedience, both of which attempt to shock rulers into behaving more responsibly. Direct action can also be a form of revolutionary politics, which rejects the system entirely and attempts to replace it with a new ruling group and a new set of rules. In recent years in the United States, groups ranging from ani- mal rights activists to right-to-life advocates to the Occupy Wall Street protesters have used direct action to underline their demands. Many forms of peaceful direct political action are protected by the U.S. Constitution. The country’s Founders knew that the right to protest is essential to the maintenance of political freedom, even where the ballot box is available.
Governments vary in their structure, their size, and the way they operate. Two questions are of special importance in determining how governments differ: Who governs? And how much government control is permitted?
Some nations are governed by a single individual—a king or dictator, for example. This state of affairs is called autocracy. Where a small group—perhaps landowners, military officers, or the wealthy—controls most of the governing decisions, that government is said to be an oligarchy. If citizens are vested with the power to rule themselves, that government is a democracy.
Governments also vary considerably in terms of how they govern. In the United States and a small number of other nations, governments are limited as to what they are permitted to control (substantive limits) and how they go about it (pro- cedural limits). Governments that are limited in this way are called constitutional governments, or liberal governments. In other nations, including many in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the law imposes few real limits. The government, how- ever, is nevertheless kept in check by other political and social institutions that it is unable to control and must come to terms with—such as autonomous territories, an organized religion, organized business groups, or organized labor unions. Such governments are generally called authoritarian. In a third group of nations, includ- ing the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, Nazi Germany, perhaps prewar Japan and Italy, and North Korea today, governments not only are free of legal limits but also seek to eliminate those organized social groups that might challenge or limit their authority. These governments typically attempt to dominate or control every sphere of political, economic, and social life and, as a result, are called totalitarian (see Figure 1.2).
Americans have the good fortune to live in a nation in which limits are placed on what governments can do and how they can do it. Many of the world’s people do not live in a constitutional democracy. By one measure, just 40 percent of the global population (those living in 86 countries) enjoy sufficient levels of political and personal freedom to be classified as living in a constitutional democracy.13 And constitutional democracies were unheard of before the modern era. Prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governments seldom sought—and rarely received—the support of their subjects. The available evidence strongly suggests that ordinary people often had little love for the government or for the social order. After all, they had no stake in it. They equated government with the police officer, the bailiff, and the tax collector.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, in a handful of Western nations, two im- portant changes began to take place in the character and conduct of government. First, governments began to acknowledge formal limits on their power. Second, a small number of governments began to provide ordinary citizens with a formal voice in public affairs—through the vote. Obviously, the desirability of limits on government and the expansion of popular influence were at the heart of the Amer- ican Revolution in 1776. “No taxation without representation,” as we shall see in Chapter 2, was fiercely asserted from the beginning of the Revolution through the Founding in 1789. But even before the Revolution, a tradition of limiting govern- ment and expanding participation in the political process had developed through- out western Europe.
Limiting Government
The key force behind the imposition of limits on government power was a new social class, the bourgeoisie, which became an important political force in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bourgeois is a French word for “freeman of the city,” or bourg. Being part of the bourgeoisie later became associated with being “middle class” and with involvement in commerce or industry. In order to gain a share of control of government, joining or even displacing the kings, aristocrats, and gentry who had dominated government for centuries, the bour- geoisie sought to change existing institutions—especially parliaments—into in- struments of real political participation. Parliaments had existed for centuries but were generally aristocratic institutions. The bourgeoisie embraced parliaments as means by which they could exert the weight of their superior numbers and growing economic advantage over their aristocratic rivals. At the same time, the bourgeoisie sought to place restraints on the capacity of governments to threaten these economic and political interests by placing formal or constitutional limits on governmental power.
Although motivated primarily by the need to protect and defend their own interests, the bourgeoisie advanced many of the principles that would define the central underpinnings of individual liberty for all citizens—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, and freedom from arbitrary search and seizure. The work of political theorists such as John Locke (1632–1704) and, later, John Stuart Mill (1806–73) helped shape these evolv- ing ideas about liberty and political rights. However, it is important to note that the bourgeoisie generally did not favor democracy as we know it. They were advocates of electoral and representative institutions, but they favored property requirements and other restrictions so as to limit participation to the middle and upper classes. Yet once these institutions of politics and the protec- tion of the right to engage in politics were established, it was difficult to limit them to the bourgeoisie.
Access to Government: The Expansion of Participation
The expansion of participation from the bourgeoisie to ever-larger segments of society took two paths. In some nations, popular participation was expanded by
the Crown or the aristocracy, which ironically saw common people as potential political allies against the bourgeoisie. Thus, in nineteenth-century Prussia, for ex- ample, it was the emperor and his great minister Otto von Bismarck who expanded popular participation in order to build political support among the lower orders.
In other nations, participation expanded because competing segments of the bourgeoisie sought to gain political advantage by reaching out to and mobilizing the support of working- and lower-class groups that craved the opportunity to take part in politics—“lining up the unwashed,” as one American historian put it.15 To be sure, excluded groups often agitated for greater participation. But seldom was such agitation by itself enough to secure the right to participate. Usually, expan- sion of voting rights resulted from a combination of pressure from below and help from above.
The gradual expansion of voting rights by groups hoping to derive some politi- cal advantage has been typical of American history. After the Civil War, one of the chief reasons that Republicans moved to enfranchise newly freed slaves was to use the support of the former slaves to maintain Republican control over the de- feated southern states. Similarly, in the early twentieth century, upper-middle-class Progressives advocated women’s suffrage because they believed that women were likely to support the reforms espoused by the Progressive movement.
Influencing the Government through Participation: Politics
Expansion of participation means that more and more people have a legal right to take part in politics. Politics is an important term. In its broadest sense, it refers to conflicts over the character, membership, and policies of any organization to which people belong. As Harold Lasswell, a famous political scientist, once put it, politics is the struggle over “who gets what, when, how.”16 Although politics is a phenom- enon that can be found in any organization, our concern in this book is narrower. Here, politics will be used to refer only to conflicts and struggles over the leader- ship, structure, and policies of governments. The goal of politics, as we define it, is to have a share or a say in the composition of the government’s leadership, how the government is organized, or what its policies are going to be. Having a share is called having power or influence.
Politics can take many forms, including everything from blogging and posting opinion pieces online, sending emails to government officials, voting, lobbying leg- islators on behalf of particular programs, and participating in protest marches and even violent demonstrations. A system of government that gives citizens a regular opportunity to elect the top government officials is usually called a representative democracy, or republic. A system that permits citizens to vote directly on laws and policies is often called a direct democracy. At the national level, the United States is a representative democracy in which citizens select government officials but do not vote on legislation. Some states and cities, however, have provisions for direct legislation through popular initiative and ballot referendum. These procedures allow citizens to collect petitions requiring an issue to be brought directly to the voters for a decision. In 2016, 165 initiatives appeared on state ballots, dealing with matters that ranged from gun control and raising the minimum wage to legaliz- ing marijuana. Many hot-button issues are decided by initiatives. For example, in Colorado in 2010, voters passed a referendum that called on the state to sue the federal government to enforce immigration laws. Often, broad public campaigns pro- mote controversial referenda, attempting to persuade voters to change existing laws.
For example, in 2016 nine states considered measures that would either decriminalize marijuana or legalize it altogether. Some 82 million people would be affected by the outcome of these contests. Four states considered additional gun control regulations. Colorado voters weighed an amendment to the state constitu- tion that would create a single-payer health system funded by a tax on employers and employees. In California, voters decided on whether to support a ban on plas- tic bags, the first such statewide ban.
Groups and organized interests do not vote (although their members do), but they certainly do participate in politics. Their political activities usually consist of such endeavors as providing funds for candidates, lobbying, and trying to influence public opinion. The pattern of struggles among interests is called group politics, or pluralism. Americans have always been ambivalent about pluralist politics. On the one hand, the right of groups to press their views and compete for influence in the gov- ernment is the essence of liberty. On the other hand, Americans often fear that or- ganized groups may sometimes exert too much influence, advancing special interests at the expense of larger public interests. (We return to this problem in Chapter 11.)
Sometimes, of course, politics does not take place through formal channels at all but instead involves direct action. Direct action politics can include either violent politics or civil disobedience, both of which attempt to shock rulers into behaving more responsibly. Direct action can also be a form of revolutionary politics, which rejects the system entirely and attempts to replace it with a new ruling group and a new set of rules. In recent years in the United States, groups ranging from ani- mal rights activists to right-to-life advocates to the Occupy Wall Street protesters have used direct action to underline their demands. Many forms of peaceful direct political action are protected by the U.S. Constitution. The country’s Founders knew that the right to protest is essential to the maintenance of political freedom, even where the ballot box is available.
