What is a government type where one person has all of the power and the next in line is a relative?

Introduction to Government and Politics

In one of Max Weber’s last public lectures — “Politics as a Vocation” [1919] — he asked, what is the meaning of political action in the context of a whole way of life? [More accurately, he used the term Lebensführung: what is the meaning of political action in the context of a whole conduct of life, a theme we will return to in the next section]. He asked, what is political about political action and what is the place of “the political” in the ongoing conduct of social life?

Until recently we might have been satisfied with an answer that examined how various political institutions and processes function in society: the state, the government, the civil service, the courts, the democratic process, etc. However, in the last few years, among many other examples we could cite, we have seen how the events of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt [2010–2011] put seemingly stable political institutions and processes into question. Through the collective action of ordinary citizens, the long-lasting authoritarian regimes of Ben Ali, Gadhafi, and Mubarak were brought to an end through what some called “revolution.” Not only did the political institutions all of a sudden not function as they had for decades, they were also shown not to be at the center of political action at all. What do we learn about the place of politics in social life from these examples?

Revolutions are often presented as monumental, foundational political events that happen only rarely and historically: the American revolution [1776], the French revolution [1789], the Russian revolution [1917], the Chinese revolution [1949], the Cuban revolution [1959], the Iranian revolution [1979], etc. But the events in North Africa remind us that  revolutionary political action is always a possibility, not just a rare political occurrence. Samuel Huntington defines revolution as:

a rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the dominant values and myths of a society, in its political institutions, social structure, leadership, and government activity and policies. Revolutions are thus to be distinguished from insurrections, rebellions, revolts, coups, and wars of independence [Huntington 1968, p. 264].

What is at stake in revolution is also, therefore, the larger question that Max Weber was asking about political action. In a sense, the question of the role of politics in a whole way of life asks how a whole way of life comes into existence in the first place.

How do revolutions occur? In Tunisia, the street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after his produce cart was confiscated. The injustice of this event provided an emblem for the widespread conditions of poverty, oppression, and humiliation experienced by a majority of the population. In this case, the revolutionary action might be said to have originated in the way that Bouazizi’s act sparked a radicalization in people’s sense of citizenship and power: their internal  feelings of individual dignity, rights, and freedom and their capacity to act on them. It was a moment in which, after living through decades of deplorable conditions, people suddenly felt their own power and their own capacity to act. Sociology is interested in studying the conditions of such examples of citizenship and power.

17.1. Power and Authority

The nature of political control — what we will define as power and authority — is an important part of society.

Sociologists have a distinctive approach to studying governmental power and authority that differs from the perspective of political scientists. For the most part, political scientists focus on studying how power is distributed in different types of political systems. They would observe, for example, that the Canadian political system is a constitutional monarchy divided into three distinct branches of government [legislative, executive, and judicial], and might explore how public opinion affects political parties, elections, and the political process in general. Sociologists, however, tend to be more interested in government more generally; that is, the various means and strategies used to direct or conduct the behaviour and actions of others [or of oneself]. As Michel Foucault described it, government is the “conduct of conduct,” the way some seek to act upon the conduct of others to change or channel that conduct in a certain direction [Foucault 1982, pp. 220-221].

Government implies that there are relations of power between rulers and ruled, but the context of rule is not limited to the state. Government in this sense is in operation whether the power relationship is between states and citizens, institutions and clients, parents and children, doctors and  patients, employers and employees, masters and dogs, or even oneself and oneself. [Think of the training regimes, studying routines, or diets people put themselves through as they seek to change or direct their lives in a particular way]. The role of the state and its influence on society [and vice versa] is just one aspect of governmental relationships.

On the other side of governmental power and authority are the various forms of resistance to being ruled. Foucault [1982] argues that without this latitude for resistance or independent action on the part of the one over whom power is exercised, there is no relationship of power or government. There is only a relationship of violence or force. One central question sociological analysis asks therefore is: Why do people obey, especially in situations when it is not in their objective interests to do so?  “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” as Gilles Deleuze once put it [Deleuze and Guattari 1977, p. 29].  This entails a more detailed study of what we mean by power.

Making Connections: Social Policy and Debate

Neoliberalism as Style of Government

Neoliberalism  is fascinating sociologically because, aside from being a type of economic policy [see Chapter 9], it signals a new way of governing individuals. This has broad implications outside of the narrow parameters of neoliberal policies like tax cuts, deregulation, and reducing the state’s role in the economy. Neoliberalism also refers to a more general strategy of governing individual conduct in a number of different areas including health, employment, education, security, and crime control. In an interesting way, it governs individuals through their exercise of freedom and free choice. Whereas the welfare state has been frequently criticized by neoliberals for fostering a culture of welfare dependency and a “one size fits all” concept of government services, the new types of neoliberal strategies emphasize various ways to create active and independent entrepreneurial citizens [Rose, 1999]. Thus, the idea of markets is important because markets are mechanisms that regulate and discipline people through the free choices that they make. If they make good choices they profit; if they make bad choices they pay.

One thing the “neo” [or “new”] in neo-liberalism signifies is the extension of the idea of the market into areas of life where no markets existed before. For example, the provision of care for the disabled used to be provided through state institutionalization. Today, it is common to find a model of care like “individualized funding” [See, for example, Community Living BC, 2013]. The state provides families of the disabled with direct payments that they use to pay for care providers who they choose after doing their own research on appropriate therapies or treatments. A market for caregivers and therapists is created, based on an assumption that this it is a more efficient model for matching the skills of care contractors with the needs of the disabled. Rather than care being provided as needed, individuals or families are encouraged or obliged to become active consumers of therapeutic services and to make calculative decisions from an array of market choices. The families need to demonstrate their competent use of the money through formal mechanisms like budgets, audits, targets, minimal standards, and contracts but otherwise are free to choose the services they want.

In practice these policies are often means to further reduce the overall amount of state expenditure for the disabled and their families, but as a method for governing the lives of individuals, they represent a fundamental shift from the notion of individuals as citizens with rights to individuals as agents who must independently exercise free choice, enterprise, and self-responsibility. Even though these types of policies, when properly funded, have many positive features for those with the wherewithal to take advantage of the expansion of choice [Sandborn, 2012], they represent a significant shift in the strategies of government. Thus, neoliberalism is both a macro-level economic policy, but it is also a strategy designed to change the type of relationship we have with ourselves and the concept of ourselves as citizens.

What Is Power?

For centuries, philosophers, politicians, and social scientists have explored and commented on the nature of power. Pittacus [c. 640–568 BCE] opined, “The measure of a man is what he does with power,” and Lord Acton perhaps more famously asserted, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely” [1887]. Indeed, the concept of power can have decidedly negative connotations, and the term itself is difficult to define. There are at least two definitions of power, which we will refer to below as power [1] and power [2].

As we noted above, power relationships refer in general to a kind of strategic relationship between rulers and the ruled: a set of practices by which states seek to govern the life of their citizens, managers seek to control the labour of their workers, parents seek to guide and raise their children, dog owners seek to train their dogs, doctors seek to manage the health of their patients, chess players seek to control the moves of their opponents, individuals seek to keep their own lives in order, etc. Many of these sites of the exercise of power fall outside our normal understanding of power because they do not seem “political” — they do not address fundamental questions or disagreements about a “whole way of life” — and because the relationships between power and resistance in them can be very fluid. There is a give and take between the attempts of the rulers to direct the behaviour of the ruled and the attempts of the ruled to resist those directions. In many cases, it is difficult to see relationships as power relationships at all unless they become fixed or authoritarian. This is because our conventional understanding of power is that one person or one group of people has power over another. In other words, when we think about somebody, some group, or some institution having power over us, we are thinking about a relation of domination.

Max Weber defined power [1] as “the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action” [Weber 1919a, p. 180]. It is the varying degrees of ability one has to exercise one’s will over others. When these “chances” become structured as forms of domination, the give and take between power and resistance is fixed into more or less permanent hierarchical arrangements. They become institutionalized. As such, power affects more than personal relationships; it shapes larger dynamics like social groups, professional organizations, and governments. Similarly, a government’s power is not necessarily limited to control of its own citizens. A dominant nation, for instance, will often use its clout to influence or support other governments or to seize control of other nation states. Efforts by the Canadian government to wield power in other countries have included joining with other nations to form the Allied forces during World Wars I and II, entering Afghanistan in 2001 with the NATO mission to topple the Taliban regime, and imposing sanctions on the government of Iran in the hopes of constraining its development of nuclear weapons.

Endeavours to gain power and influence do not necessarily lead to domination, violence, exploitation, or abuse. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, for example, commanded powerful movements that affected positive change without military force. Both men organized nonviolent protests to combat corruption and injustice and succeeded in inspiring major reform. They relied on a variety of nonviolent protest strategies such as rallies, sit-ins, marches, petitions, and boycotts.

It is therefore important to retain the distinction between domination and power. Politics and power are not “things” that are the exclusive concern of “the state” or the property of an individual, ruling class, or group. At a more basic level, power [2] is a capacity or ability that each of us has to create and act. As a result, power and politics must also be understood as the collective capacities we have to create and build new forms of community or “commons” [Negri, 2004]. Power in this sense is the power we think of when we speak of an ability to do or create something — a potential. It is the way in which we collectively give form to the communities that we live in, whether we understand this at a very local level or a global level. Power establishes the things that we can do and the things that we cannot do.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle’s original notion of politics is the idea of a freedom people grant themselves to rule themselves [Aristotle, 1908]. Therefore, power is not in principle domination. It is the give and take we experience in everyday life as we come together to construct a better community — a “good life” as Aristotle put it. When we ask why people obey even when it is not in their best interests, we are asking about the conditions in which power is exercised as domination. Thus the critical task of sociology is to ask how we might free ourselves from the constraints of domination to engage more actively and freely in the creation of community.

Making Connections: Big Picture

Did Facebook and Twitter Cause the Arab Spring?

Recent movements and protests that were organized to reform governments and install democratic ideals in northern African and the Middle East have been collectively labelled “Arab Spring” by journalists. In describing the dramatic reform and protests in these regions, journalists have noted the use of internet vehicles such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, some even implying that this technology has been instrumental in spurring these reforms. In a nation with a strong capacity for media censorship, social sites provided an opportunity for citizens to circumvent authoritarian restrictions [Zuckerman, 2011].

As discontents in northern Africa used the internet to communicate, it provided them with an invaluable tool: anonymity. John Pollock [2011], in an authoritative analysis published in MIT’s Technology Review, gave readers an intriguing introduction to two transformative revolutionaries named “Foetus” and “Waterman,” who are leaders in the Tunisian rebel group Takriz. Both men relied heavily on the internet to communicate and even went so far as to call it the “GPS” for the revolution [Pollock, 2011]. Before the internet, meetings of protestors led by dissidents like Foetus and Waterman often required participants to assemble in person, placing them at risk of being raided by government officials. Thus, leaders would more likely have been jailed, tortured — and perhaps even killed — before movements could gain momentum.

The internet also enabled widespread publicity about the atrocities being committed in the Arab region. The fatal beating of Khaled Said, a young Egyptian computer programmer, provides a prime example. Said, who possessed videos highlighting acts of police corruption in Egypt, was brutally killed by law enforcement officers in the streets of Alexandria. After Said’s beating, Said’s brother used his cell phone to capture photos of his brother’s grisly corpse and uploaded them to Facebook. The photos were then used to start a protest group called “We Are All Khaled Said,” which now has more than a million members [Pollock, 2011]. Numerous other videos and images, similarly appalling, were posted on social media sites to build awareness and incite activism among local citizens and the larger global community.

Politics and the State

What is politics? What is political? The words politics and political refer back to the ancient Greek polis or city-state. For the Greek philosopher Aristotle [384–322 BCE], the polis was the ideal political form that collective life took. Political life was life oriented toward the “good life” or toward the collective achievement of noble qualities. The term “politics” referred simply to matters of concern to the running of the polis. Behind Aristotle’s idea of the polis is the concept of an autonomous, self-contained community in which people rule themselves. The people of the polis take it upon themselves to collectively create a way of living together that is conducive to the achievement of human aspirations and good life. Politics [1] is the means by which form is given to the life of a people. The individuals give themselves the responsibility to create the conditions in which the good life can be achieved. For Aristotle, this meant that there was an ideal size for a polis, which he defined as the number of people that could be taken in in a single glance [Aristotle 1908]. The city-state was for him therefore the ideal form for political life in ancient Greece.

Today we think of the nation-state as the form of modern political life. A nation-state is a political unit whose boundaries are co-extensive with a society, that is, with a cultural, linguistic or ethnic nation. Politics is the sphere of activity involved in running the state. As Max Weber defines it, politics [2] is the activity of “striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state” [Weber 1919b, p. 78]. This might be too narrow a way to think about politics, however, because it often makes it appear that politics is something that only happens far away in “the state.” It is a way of giving form to politics that takes control out of the hands of people.

In fact, the modern nation-state is a relatively recent political form. Foraging societies had no formal state institution, and prior to the modern age, feudal Europe was divided into a confused patchwork of small overlapping jurisdictions. Feudal secular authority was often at odds with religious authority. It was not until the Peace of Westphalia [1648] at the end of the Thirty Years War that the modern nation-state system can be said to have come into existence. Even then, Germany, for example, did not become a unified state until 1871. Prior to 1867, most of the colonized territory that became Canada was owned by one of the earliest corporations: the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was not governed by a state at all. If politics is the means by which form is given to the life of a people, then it is clear that this is a type of activity that has varied throughout history. Politics is not exclusively about the state or a property of the state. The question is, Why do we come to think that it is?

The modern state is based on the principle of sovereignty and the sovereign state system. Sovereignty is the political form in which a single, central “sovereign” or supreme lawmaking authority governs within a clearly demarcated territory. The sovereign state system is the structure by which the world is divided up into separate and indivisible sovereign territories. At present there are 193 member states in the United Nations [United Nations 2013]. The entire globe is thereby divided up into separate states except for the oceans and Antarctica.

Thomas Hobbes [1588–1679] is the early modern English political philosopher whose Leviathan [1651] established modern thought on the nature of sovereignty. Hobbes argued that social order, or what we would call today “society” [“peaceable, sociable and comfortable living” [Hobbes 1651, p.146], depended on an unspoken contract between the citizens and the “sovereign” or ruler. In this contract, individuals give up their natural rights to use violence to protect themselves and further their interests and cede them to a sovereign. In exchange, the sovereign provides law and security for all [i.e., for the “commonwealth”]. For Hobbes, there could be no society in the absence of a sovereign power that stands above individuals to “over-awe them all” [1651, p. 112]. Life would otherwise be in a “state of nature” or a state of “war of everyone against everyone” [1651, p. 117]. People would live in “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man [would be] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” [1651,  p. 113].

It is worthwhile to examine these premises, however, because they continue to structure our contemporary political life even if the absolute rule of monarchs has been replaced by the democratic rule of the people. [An absolute monarchy is a government wherein a monarch has absolute or unmitigated power.] The implication of Hobbes’s analysis is that the people must acquiesce to the absolute power of a single sovereign or sovereign assembly, which, in turn, cannot ultimately be held to any standard of justice or morality outside of its own guarantee of order. Therefore, democracy always exists in a state of tension with the authority of the sovereign state. Similarly, while order is maintained by “the sovereign” within the sovereign state, outside the state or between states there is no sovereign to over-awe them all. The international sovereign state system is always potentially in a state of war of all against all. It offered a neat solution to the problem of confused and overlapping political jurisdictions in medieval Europe, but is itself inherently unstable.

Hobbes’ definition of sovereignty is also the context of Max Weber’s definition of the state. Weber defines the state, not as an institution or decision-making body, but as “a human community that [successfully] claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” [Weber 1919b, p. 78]. Weber’s definition emphasizes the way in which the state is founded on the control of territory through the use of force. In his lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” he argues, “The decisive means for politics is violence” [Weber 1919b, p. 121]. However, as we have seen above, power is not always exercised through the use of force. Nor would a modern sociologist accept that it is conferred through a mysterious “contract” with the sovereign, as Hobbes argued. Therefore, why do people submit to rule? “When and why do men obey?” [Weber 1919b], p. 78].  Weber’s answer is based on a distinction between the concepts of power and  authority.

Types of Authority

The protesters in Tunisia and the civil rights protesters of Mahatma Gandhi’s day had influence apart from their position in a government. Their influence came, in part, from their ability to advocate for what many people held as important values. Government leaders might have this kind of influence as well, but they also have the advantage of wielding power associated with their position in the government. As this example indicates, there is more than one type of authority in a community.

If Weber defined power as the ability to achieve desired ends despite the resistance of others [Weber, 1919a, p. 180], authority is when power or domination is perceived to be legitimate or justified rather than coercive. Authority refers to accepted power — that is, power that people agree to follow. People listen to authority figures because they feel that these individuals are worthy of respect. Generally speaking, people perceive the objectives and demands of an authority figure as reasonable and beneficial, or true.

A citizen’s interaction with a police officer is a good example of how people react to authority in everyday life. For instance, a person who sees the flashing red and blue lights of a police car in his or her rearview mirror usually pulls to the side of the road without hesitation. Such a driver most likely assumes that the police officer behind him serves as a legitimate source of authority and has the right to pull him over. As part of the officer’s official duties, he or she has the power to issue a speeding ticket if the driver was driving too fast. If the same officer, however, were to command the driver to follow the police car home and mow his or her lawn, the driver would likely protest that the officer does not have the authority to make such a request.

Not all authority figures are police officers or elected officials or government authorities. Besides formal offices, authority can arise from tradition and personal qualities. Max Weber realized this when he examined individual action as it relates to authority, as well as large-scale structures of authority and how they relate to a society’s economy. Based on this work, Weber developed a classification system for authority. His three types of authority are traditional authority, charismatic authority, and rational-legal authority [Weber 1922].

Traditional authority is usually understood in the context of pre-modern power relationships. According to Weber, the power of traditional authority is accepted because that has traditionally been the case; its legitimacy exists because it has been accepted for a long time. People obey their lord or the church because it is customary to do so. The authority of the aristocracy or the church is conferred on them through tradition, or the “authority of the ‘eternal yesterday’” [Weber 1919b, p. 78]. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, for instance, occupies a position that she inherited based on the traditional rules of succession for the monarchy, a form of government in which a single person, or monarch, rules until that individual dies or abdicates the throne. People adhere to traditional authority because they are invested in the past and feel obligated to perpetuate it. However, in modern society it would also be fair to say that obedience is in large part a function of a customary or “habitual orientation to conform,” in that people do not generally question or think about the power relationships in which they participate.

For Weber though, modern authority is better understood to oscillate  between the latter two types of legitimacy: rational-legal and charismatic authority. On one hand, as he puts it, “organized domination” relies on “continuous administration” [1919, p. 80] and in particular, the rule-bound form of administration known as bureaucracy. Power made legitimate by laws, written rules, and regulations is termed rational-legal authority. In this type of authority, power is vested in a particular system, not in the person implementing the system. However irritating bureaucracy might be, we generally accept its legitimacy because we have the expectation that its processes are conducted in a neutral, disinterested fashion, according to explicit, written rules and laws. Rational-legal types of rule have authority because they are rational; that is, they are unbiased, predictable, and efficient.

On the other hand, people also obey because of the charismatic personal qualities of a leader. In this respect, it is not so much a question of obeying as following. Weber saw charismatic leadership as a kind of antidote to the machine-like rationality of bureaucratic mechanisms. It was through the inspiration of a charismatic leader that people found something to believe in, and thereby change could be introduced into the system of continuous bureaucratic administration. The power of  charismatic authority is accepted because followers are drawn to the leader’s personality. The appeal of a charismatic leader can be extraordinary, inspiring followers to make unusual sacrifices or to persevere in the midst of great hardship and persecution. Charismatic leaders usually emerge in times of crisis and offer innovative or radical solutions. They also tend to hold power for short durations only because power based on charisma is fickle and unstable.

Of course the combination of the administrative power of rational-legal forms of domination and charisma have proven to be extremely dangerous, as the rise to power of Adolf Hitler shortly after Weber’s death demonstrated. We might also point to the distortions that a valuing of charisma introduces into the contemporary political process. There is increasing emphasis on the need to create a public “image” for leaders in electoral campaigns, both by “tweaking” or manufacturing the personal qualities of political candidates — Stephen Harper’s sudden propensity for knitted sweaters, Jean Chretian’s “little guy from Shawinigan” persona, Jack Layton’s moustache — and by character assassinations through the use of negative advertising — Stockwell Day’s “scary, narrow-minded fundamentalist” characterization, Paul Martin’s “Mr. Dithers” persona, Michael Ignatieff’s “the fly-in foreign academic” tag, Justin Trudeau’s “cute little puppy” moniker. Image management, or the attempt to manage the impact of one’s image or impression on others, is all about attempting to manipulate the qualities that Weber called charisma. However, while people often decry the lack of rational debate about the facts of policy decisions in image politics, it is often the case that it is only the political theatre of personality clashes and charisma that draws people in to participate in political life.

17.2. Democratic Will Formation

Most people presume that anarchy, or the absence of organized government, does not facilitate a desirable living environment for society. They have in the back of their minds the Hobbesian view that the absence of sovereign rule leads to a state of chaos, lawlessness, and war of all against all. However, anarchy literally means “without leader or ruler.” Anarchism therefore refers to the political principles and practice of organizing social life without formal or state leadership. As such, the radical standpoint of anarchism provides a useful standpoint from which to examine the sociological question of why leadership in the form of the state is needed in the first place. We will return to this question in the final section of this chapter.

The tradition of anarchism developed in Europe in the 19th century in the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon [1809–1865], Mikhail Bakunin [1814–1876], Peter Kropotkin [1842–1921] and others. It promoted the idea that states were both artificial and malevolent constructs, unnecessary for human social organization [Esenwein 2004]. Anarchists proposed that the natural state of society is one of self-governing collectivities, in which people freely group themselves in loose affiliations with one another rather than submitting to government-based or human-made laws. They had in mind the way rural farmers came together to organize farmers’ markets or the cooperative associations of Swiss watchmakers in the Jura mountains. For the anarchists, anarchy was not violent chaos but the cooperative, egalitarian society that would emerge when state power was destroyed.

The anarchist program was [and still is] to maximize the personal freedoms of individuals by organizing society on the basis of voluntary social arrangements. These arrangements would be subject to continual renegotiation. As opposed to right-wing libertarianism, the anarchist tradition argued that the conditions for a cooperative, egalitarian society were the destruction of both the power of the state and of private property [i.e., capital]. One of Proudhon’s famous anarchist slogans was “Private property is theft!” [Proudhon 1840].

In practice, 19th century anarchism had the dubious distinction of inventing modern political terrorism, or the use of violence on civilian populations and institutions to achieve political ends [CBC Radio 2011]. This was referred to by Mikhail Bakunin as “propaganda by the deed” [1870]. Clearly not all or even most anarchists advocated violence in this manner, but it was widely recognized that the hierarchical structures and institutions of the old society had to be destroyed before the new society could be created.

Nevertheless, the principle of the anarchist model of government is based on the participatory or direct democracy of the ancient Greek Athenians. In Athenian direct democracy, decision making, even in matters of detailed policy, was conducted through assemblies made up of all citizens. These assemblies would meet a minimum of 40 times a year [Forrest 1966]. The root of the word democracy is demos, Greek for “people.” Democracy is therefore rule by the people. Ordinary Athenians directly ran the affairs of Athens.  [Of course “all citizens,” for the Greeks, meant all adult men and excluded women, children, and slaves.]

Direct democracy can be contrasted with modern forms of representative democracy, like that practised in Canada. In representative democracy, citizens elect representatives [MPs, MLAs, city councillors, etc.] to promote policies that favour their interests rather than directly participating in decision making themselves. It is based on the idea of representation rather than direct citizen participation. Critics note that the representative model of democracy enables distortions to be introduced into the determination of the will of the people: elected representatives are typically not socially representative of their constituencies as they are dominated by white men and elite occupations like law and business; corporate media ownership and privately funded advertisement campaigns enable the interests of privileged classes to be expressed rather than those of average citizens; and lobbying and private campaign contributions provide access to representatives and decision-making processes that is not afforded to the majority of the population. The distortions that intrude into the processes of representative democracy — for example, whose interests really get represented in government policy? — are no doubt behind the famous comment of the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who once declared to the House of Commons, “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government … except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” [Shapiro 2006].

Democracy however is not a static political form. Three key elements constitute democracy as a dynamic system: the institutions of democracy [parliament, elections, constitutions, rule of law, etc.], citizenship [the internalized sense of individual dignity, rights, and freedom that accompanies formal membership in the political community], and the public sphere [or open “space” for public debate and deliberation]. On the basis of these three elements, rule by the people can be exercised through a process of democratic will formation.

Jürgen Habermas [1998] emphasizes that democratic will formation in both direct and representative democracy is reached through a deliberative process. The general will or decisions of the people emerge through the mutual interaction of citizens in the public sphere. The underlying norm of the democratic process is what Habermas [1990] calls the ideal speech situation. An ideal speech situation is one in which every individual is permitted to take part in public discussion equally: to question assertions and introduce ideas. Ideally no individual is prevented from speaking [not by arbitrary restrictions on who is permitted to speak, nor by practical restrictions on participation like poverty or lack of education]. To the degree that everyone accepts this norm of openness and inclusion, in free debate the best ideas will “rise to the top” and be accepted by the majority. On the other hand, when the norms of the ideal speech situation are violated, the process of democratic will formation becomes distorted and open to manipulation.

Political Demand and Political Supply

In practice democratic will formation in representative democracies takes place largely through political party competition in an electoral cycle. Two factors explain the dynamics of democratic party systems [Kitschelt 1995]. Firstly, political demand refers to the underlying societal factors and social changes that create constituencies of people with common interests. People form common political preferences and interests on the basis of their common positions in the social structure. For example, changes in the types of jobs generated by the economy will affect the size of electoral support for labour unions and labour union politics. Secondly, political supply refers to the strategies and organizational capacities of political parties to deliver an appealing political program to particular constituencies. For example, the Liberal Party of Canada often attempts to develop policies and political messaging that will position it in the middle of the political spectrum where the largest group of voters potentially resides. In the 2011 election, due to leadership issues, organizational difficulties, and the strategies of the other political parties, they were not able to deliver a credible appeal to their traditional centrist constituency and suffered a large loss of seats in Parliament [see Figure 17.13]. In the 2015 election, the Conservative Party’s program and messaging consolidated its “right wing” constituency of social conservatives and free market proponents but failed to appeal to people in the center of the Canadian political spectrum [see Figure 17.14].

The relationship between political demand and political supply factors in democratic will formation can be illustrated by mapping out constituencies of voters on a left/right spectrum of political preferences [Kitschelt 1995; see Figure 17.14]. While the terms “left wing” and “right wing” are notoriously ambiguous [Ogmundson 1972], they are often used in a simple manner to describe the basic political divisions of modern society.

In Figure 17.15, one central axis of division in voter preference has to do with the question of how scarce resources are to be distributed in society. At the right end of the spectrum are economic conservatives who advocate minimal taxes and a purely spontaneous, competitive market-driven mechanism for the distribution of wealth and essential services [including health care and education], while at the  left end of the spectrum are socialists who advocate progressive taxes and state redistribution of wealth and services to create social equality or “equality of condition.” A second axis of division in voter preference has to do with social policy and “collective decision modes.” At the right end of the spectrum is authoritarianism [law and order, limits on personal autonomy, exclusive citizenship, hierarchical decision making, etc.], while at the left end of the spectrum is individual autonomy or expanded democratization of political processes [maximum individual autonomy in politics and the cultural sphere, equal rights, inclusive citizenship, extra-parliamentary democratic participation, etc.]. Along both axes or spectrums of political opinion, one might imagine an elliptically shaped distribution of individuals, with the greatest portion in the middle of each spectrum and far fewer people at the extreme ends. The dynamics of political supply in political party competition follow from the way political parties try to position themselves along the spectrum to maximize the number of voters they appeal to while remaining distinct from their political competitors.

Sociologists are typically more interested in the underlying social factors contributing to changes in political demand than in the day-by-day strategies of political supply. One influential theory proposes that since the 1960s, contemporary political preferences have shifted away from older, materialist concerns with economic growth and physical security [i.e., survival values] to postmaterialist concerns with quality of life issues: personal autonomy, self-expression, environmental integrity, women’s rights, gay rights, the meaningfulness of work, habitability of cities, etc. [Inglehart 2008]. From the 1970s on, postmaterialist social movements seeking to expand the domain of personal autonomy and free expression have encountered equally postmaterialist responses by neoconservative groups advocating the return to traditional family values, religious fundamentalism, submission to work discipline, and tough-on-crime initiatives. This has led to a new postmaterialist cleavage structure in political preferences.

In Figure 17.14 we have represented this shift in political preferences in the difference between the ellipse centred on the free-market/state redistribution axis and the ellipse centred on the free-market-social-conservativism/ redistribution-social-liberalism axis [Kitschelt 1995]. As a result of the development of postmaterialist politics, the “left” side of the political spectrum has been increasingly defined by a cluster of political preferences defined by redistributive policies, social and multicultural inclusion, environmental sustainability, and demands for personal autonomy, etc., while the “right” side has been defined by a cluster of preferences including free-market policies, tax cuts, limits on political engagement, crime policy, and social conservative values, etc.

What explains the emergence of a postmaterialist axis of political preferences? Arguably, the experience of citizens for most of the 20th century was defined by economic scarcity and depression, the two world wars, and the Cold War resulting in the materialist orientation toward the economy, personal security, and military defence in political demand. The location of individuals within the industrial class structure is conventionally seen as the major determinant of whether they preferred working-class-oriented policies of economic redistribution or capitalist-class-oriented policies of free-market allocation of resources. In the advanced capitalist or post-industrial societies of the late 20th century, the underlying class conditions of voter preference are not so clear however. Certainly the working-class does not vote en masse for the traditional working class party in Canada, the NDP, and voters from the big business, small business, and administrative classes are often divided between the Liberals and Conservatives [Ogmundson 1972].

Kitschelt [1995] notes two distinctly influential dynamics in western European social conditions that can be applied to the Canadian situation. Firstly, in the era of globalization and free trade agreements people [both workers and managers] who work in and identify with  sectors of the economy that are exposed to international competition [non-quota agriculture, manufacturing, natural resources, finances] are likely to favour free market policies that are seen to enhance the global competitiveness of these sectors, while those who work in sectors of the economy sheltered from international competition [public-service sector, education, and some industrial, agricultural and commercial sectors] are likely to favour redistributive policies. Secondly, in the transition from an industrial economy to a postindustrial service and knowledge economy, people whose work or educational level promotes high levels of communicative interaction skills [education, social work, health care, cultural production, etc.] are likely to value personal autonomy, free expression, and increased democratization, whereas those with more instrumental task-oriented occupations [manipulating objects, documents, and spreadsheets] and lower or more skills-oriented levels of education are likely to find authoritarian and traditional social settings more natural. In Figure 17.14, new areas of political preference are shown opening up in the shaded areas labelled Space A and Space B.

The implication Kitschelt draws from this analysis is that as the conditions of political demand shift, the strategies of the political parties [i.e., the political supply] need to shift as well [see Figure 17.14]. Social democratic parties like the NDP need to be mindful of the general shift to the right under conditions of globalization, but to the degree that they move to the centre [2] or the right [3], like British labour under Tony Blair, they risk alienating much of their traditional core support in the union movement, new social movement activists, and young people. The Green Party is also positioned [1] to pick up NDP support if the NDP move right. On the other side of the spectrum, the Conservatives do not want to move so far to the right [5] that they lose centrist voters to the Liberals or NDP [as was the case in the Ontario provincial election in 2014 and the federal election in 2015]. However, to the degree they move to the centre they risk being indistinguishable from the Liberals and a space opens up to the right of them on the political spectrum. The demise of the former Progressive Conservative party after the 1993 election was precipitated by the emergence of postmaterialist conservative parties further to the right [Reform and the Canadian Alliance].

This model of democratic will formation in Canada is not without its problems. For one thing, Kitschelt’s model of the spectrum of political party competition is based on European politics. It does not take into account the important role of regional allegiances that cut across the left/right division and make Canada an atypical case [in particular the regional politics of Quebec and western Canada]. Similarly, the argument that political preferences have shifted from materialist concerns with economic growth and distribution to postmaterialist concerns with quality-of-life issues is belied by opinion polls which consistently indicate that Canadians rate the economy and unemployment as their greatest concerns, [although climate change and health care often rank highly in opinion polls]. On the other hand, it is probably the case that postmaterialist concerns are not addressed effectively in current formal political processes and political party platforms. Canadians have been turning increasingly to nontraditional political activities like protests and demonstrations, signing petitions, and boycotting or “boycotting” to express their political grievances and aspirations. With regard to the distinction between direct democracy and representative democracy, it is interesting to note that in the current era of declining voter participation in elections, especially among young people, people [especially young people] are turning to more direct means of political engagement [See Figure 17.15].

N/A means not applicable. * means statistically different from 22 to 29-year-olds [p