Research emphasizing the correlates of state policy outputs and the performance of particular institutions has overshadowed the role of the citizenry in the drama of state politics. One question of basic concern is the relevance of state government and politics for the inhabitants of a state. At the level of public policy and institutional performance the answer to this is factual and straightforward. The nature, amount, distribution, and to some extent the quality of a state's services and policies can be specified. Since states perform most of the traditional functions of governmental units and since these functions affect the fortunes of the citizens, state politics has an obvious, tangible, objective relevance for a state's inhabitants. At another level, however, the answer is not so clear-cut. Here we are dealing with the idea of what is subjectively relevant. Large numbers of people apparently pass their lives being touched by political institutions in a variety of ways without becoming particularly interested in or involved with these institutions. Other people become intensely, purposively related to these same institutions. Still others fall along a continuum between these two poles. If substantial variations exist in the general salience of politics, there is little reason to doubt that the same conditions may be found in particular subsets of political matters. In the case at hand this subset consists of the cluster of institutions, actors, and processes known as state political systems.
Prewitt and Eulau, loc cit. 33. Assuming that sheer number of local sources used is a guide to diversity supports this conclusion: the correlations between number of sources and group responsiveness is .50 and that for individualized resporiziveness is-.48. 34. Robert Bendiner discusses current proposals and .xperiences in his The Politics of Schools, (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), chapters 11-14.
“National wars against the imperial powers are not only possible and probable; they are inevitable, progressive, and revolutionary”V. I. Lenin.“It is obvious that the use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of foreign policy”M. S. Gorbachev.The rhetoric of the leadership of the world's most powerful Marxist state has changed over the last seventy years. The more recent oratory is warmly welcomed in Western circles, especially when accompanied by specific pledges of unilateral military force reductions. But what if Marxist nations, irrespective of particular leaders or styles of leadership, possess a political culture and bureaucratic organization which mandates a persistent militarism? Perhaps there are limits to the demilitarization of socialist nations—limits which are not reciprocal to any behavior of Western capitalist nations, but which arise from the structure of socialist institutions. Put more broadly, do political, economic, and social systems change because leaders want them to?Marxists typically argue exactly this point, using capitalism as their example. The maintenance of a large military establishment undergirds the modern capitalist economy. According to this argument, if it were not for the prop provided by military spending, advanced capitalism would fall victim to its most pervasive internal “contradiction”—underconsumption. In order to absorb “surplus capital” capitalist governments must increase spending; they cannot spend on welfare functions without undermining work incentive, so they spend on the military instead (Baran and Sweezy, 1968;Melman, 1972). This spending not only uses up surplus capital, but also provides capitalist states with the wherewithal to support imperialism.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.