What is the difference between madisonian pluralism and contemporary pluralism

Thus, voting for representatives manifests three democratic ideals—civic participation, majority rule, and political equality. Margaret V.

Lally is pictured here at the door of a voting booth during the first election where women could vote. The founders of the U. Constitution understood that citizens might band together in organized groups to attempt to influence elected representatives as they develop rules and laws. The United States has many different levels and branches of government that any citizen or group might approach with concerns about protection of liberty and property or maintenance of order and security.

Who is really in control of the government? Many people believe evidence indicates U. This viewpoint is called the pluralist theory of government, which states political power rests with competing interest groups sharing influence over governmental decisions. Some political theorists, however, argue that a minority of citizens, economic and political elite, control the government and others have no influence.

This belief is called the elite theory of government or elitism. According to this theory, the United States is, in fact, an oligarchy where power is concentrated in the hands of the few. Pluralists argue, political power is distributed throughout society. Rather than resting in the hands of individuals, a variety of organized groups hold power, with some groups having more influence on certain issues than others. Thousands of interest groups exist in the United States.

Approximately 70—90 percent of Americans report belonging to at least one group. They were met on the Capitol steps by members of the House who are war veterans, where the photograph shows them being addressed by Rep. Patman of Texas. Credit: Library of Congress Collection. According to pluralist theory, people with shared interests will form groups to make their desires known to politicians.

These groups include environmental advocates, unions, and organizations representing various business interests. Because most people lack the inclination, time or expertise necessary to actively advocate for their interests in Washington, D. As groups compete with one another and find themselves opposed on important issues, government policy forms. In this way, government policy is shaped from the bottom up and not from the top down, as in elitist theory.

Robert Dahl, author of Who Governs? They will attempt to give people what they want in exchange for their votes. The foremost supporter of elite theory was C. Wright Mills. In his book, The Power Elite , Mills argued that government was controlled by a combination of business, military, and political elites. Most political elites are highly educated, often graduating from prestigious universities.

Wealth or political connections allow the elite to secure for themselves the politically important positions used to make decisions and allocate resources in ways that benefit this group. Politicians do the bidding of the wealthy instead of attending to the needs of ordinary people. Those who favor government by the elite believe the elite are better fit to govern and that average citizens are content to allow them to do so. In apparent support of the elite perspective, one-third of U.

There is considerable dispute over the validity of elite theory. While a clearly differentiated socio-economic group appears to exist in positions of power, members of this group often do not have the same political viewpoints. For example, while Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump all attended prestigious east coast universities, they do not share similar political views on many issues.

Outside government, extremely wealthy billionaires can often be found on different sides of the issues, such as George Soros supporting Democrats and Sheldon Adelson supporting Republicans. If Republicans could occasionally attract a fifth of the black population, whether those with good jobs and high incomes who are edging into economic conservatism or those often with less education and lower incomes who espouse religious and moral conservatism, overlapping cleavages would begin to return.

Republicans have already attracted at least that level of Hispanic voters. Bush in the election, and at least a quarter have voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every presidential election since , with one marginal exception Connelly, Asian Americans split their votes even more; roughly forty percent voted for George W. Bush and even higher percentages preferred his Republican predecessors in the previous two presidential elections.

Almost a third call themselves conservative and over a third, moderate; twenty to thirty-five percent identify as Republicans and thirty to fifty percent as Independents, depending on how the question is asked GSS and NES.

On Asian Americans, see Lien, A brief look at some important policy concerns gives further grounds for pluralist claims. There is little racial or ethnic disparity in preferences for governmental action on particular policy issues, so long as they are not associated with race in any explicit way. Across the four major racial and ethnic groups, we see greater disparity across issues than across groups in preferences for Congressional action with regard to welfare or medicare reform, budget balancing, and personal or corporate tax cuts.

Affirmative action policy generates some group-level disparity, and abortion policy even more Washington Post et al. These are, of course, the policies that evoke the greatest passions and revolve least around material interests. But overall, the Madisonian structure largely obtains; Anglos, who would be the largest and therefore most dangerous faction if they held together, break up into smaller factions with different views on a variety of policy concerns, each of which can find allies across racial and ethnic lines.

In short, there are reasonable grounds for thinking that pluralism defined as interlocking cleavages and even as a melting pot reasonably describes some features of American politics.

We would need to look at more understandings of pluralism as well as causal trajectories showing how pluralism takes hold and flourishes, even in an era of dramatic demographic change, in order to say much more about it. Here I simply note its robustness before turning to its converse, identity politics. Identity politics has about as many definitions and nuances as pluralism, and here too I can only suggest its contours.

Identities usually involve a sense of having inherited or been chosen, rather than deliberately or rationally choosing to be of a particular race, gender, religion etc. They usually include an intense commitment to keep the identity vital through many generations in the future. Above all, identity politics as I use the term here implies a rejection of the classic liberal value of the right to be treated only or mostly as an individual without reference to ascriptive characteristics, in favor of the right to be treated as a person who is partly or largely defined by those ascriptive characteristics.

To claim that identity politics represents a totally new political stance would be silly. Many crucial events of American history, from the colonization of Massachusetts and Maryland through the civil rights movement, occurred because of clashes among people committed to particular identities. But identity politics is arguably now playing an unprecedentedly powerful role in peacetime national public life. Illustrations of this claim include assertions that challenges to bilingual education programs are attacks on Latinos, the social cachet now attached to recognition as a member of an Indian nation, the passionate demand for a multiracial category on the U.

Identity politics rejects the melting pot in favor of celebrating difference. Universalism itself is too dangerous an ideal. Chicanos, for example, rely heavily on history:.

Comparison to European immigrants. The presence of Mexicans in American society precedes immigration. What is now the Southwest. This has allowed Mexican immigrants whether they came in or to join the heirs of Mexicans who lived in the region prior to in making what is in effect a primordial claim on the Southwest. Participating in this claim allows Mexican immigrants to develop a unique psychological relationship to American society, one which no other immigrants legitimately share de la Garza, , Asian-Americans also cite historical uniqueness, but perhaps a more powerful claim is social and cultural.

Whites have racialized Asians as superior to blacks though inferior to whites, and as inassimilable and more different from whites than are blacks. This geometry appeared starkly in exclusionary immigration laws, restrictions on property ownership, and controls on naturalization Kim, Descendents of Japanese immigrants, but not of Germans or Italians, were interned in World War II; most Asian immigrants were made eligible for citizenship only in , almost a century after African Americans were recognized as citizens in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Almost all Asian-Americans living outside an ethnic enclave can tell the anecdote of being asked when he or she came to the United States. We cannot afford to live in America scattered and isolated. Identity-based claims among African Americans, of course, are extensive, complex, and well-known; I will not attempt to summarize them here. One telling comment will serve as a placeholder for another huge literature. Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton testified in the Congressional hearings on the possibility of a multiracial category on the U.

At one point, blacks thought they might mitigate the effects of being black by claiming something else in their heritage. About the only thing that American racism did for us is saying no, you are one or the other. So I sit here as a light skin black woman and I sit here to tell you that I am black. That people who are my color in this country will always be treated as black.

Through most of U. Rather than stressing protection of individual rights for all in liberal fashion, or participation in common civic institutions in republican fashion,. I return below to the subject of distortions in democratic practice caused by the presence of a white majority faction; for now, suffice it to say that identity politics is not the exclusive property of minorities protesting some feature of American political practice.

How much do ordinary, nonactivist Americans ascribe to identity politics? If we set up identity politics and pluralism as opposites, we can start to answer that question by examining the flip side of the survey data used above to demonstrate pluralism.

This is conceptually and politically crude, but it is a useful starting point. In four surveys between and , substantial minorities of those with clear opinions in all three of the largest groups agreed that racial and ethnic groups should maintain their distinct cultures GSS , , ; Gallup Organization, , I: 23; see also Sears et al. Identity politics does not predominate in surveys, but neither is it trivial.

Respondents may have been confused, or this may be a dramatic case of social desirability response set. A crucial question for Madisonian constitutionalism is whether identity-based groups are merely distinct or are competitive with, even hostile to, one another. The former is bad enough from the perspective of Federalist No. But the latter is worse since it is likely to generate precisely the instability and contention that opponents of democracy continually warned of in the late eighteenth century.

Again, this is a huge topic which I can only touch on here; again I rely on survey data as a shorthand indicator of the complex analysis needed to sort all of this out. Every survey finds that blacks see the most discrimination, both against themselves and others of their race and against other nonAnglos especially Hispanics. In the Washington Post survey, in which I noted above more division across nonracial policy issues than across groups, we see a different pattern when questions explicitly address race.

African Americans think that their group suffers the most discrimination by a huge margin; Latinos think their own group suffers just as much as, in their view, blacks do. All groups, including Asian Americans, agree that Asian Americans do not win that dubious honor. Here are the seeds of antagonistic identity politics, not only in the old form of blacks versus whites, but also in a new contest between blacks and Hispanics.

This implies trouble for a Madisonian republic. Responses from another survey sharpen the threat of enmity that always attends identity politics. Asked to identify groups other than their own with whom they feel the most, and the least, in common, respondents provide a striking pattern.

Whites feel most in common with blacks, who feel least in common with whites as well as with Asians. Blacks feel most in common with Latinos, who feel least in common with them.

Asian Americans feel most in common with whites, who feel least in common with them. Latinos feel most in common with whites, who feel little in common with them. Even this quick overview shows that identity politics has enough vitality that it, like pluralism, cannot be dismissed as an organizing principle for understanding factions in contemporary American politics.

That conclusion would dismay Madison. It need not dismay us, of course, and it in fact might gratify those who share the view that Hollinger articulates. Just how much they will feel gratified, and what the consequences of identity politics will be for the future of American democratic politics, depend on whether identity-based groups move toward competition or coalition. I turn now to that subject.

Finding evidence of vibrant interracial or interethnic coalitions would be one way to reconcile the apparently contradictory findings that both pluralism and identity politics are flourishing. That is, people may act out of a strong sense of their own group identity, and express that identity in part by allying temporarily with others outside the group to pursue shared interests which may themselves be closely linked to or distinct from identities.

Identity politics provides the motivation; the practice generates a kind of pluralist interaction. Identity-based coalitional politics, like pluralism and identity politics, can take many forms with various trajectories. Interracial or interethnic coalitions may be an transitional step between pure identity politics and a politics of multiple small, interest-based groups.

Who Governs? In the second stage, group members begin to move out of identity politics and become more socially and economically heterogeneous. Consequently an ethnic candidate who can avoid divisive socioeconomic issues is still able to activate strong sentiments of ethnic solidarity in all strata of his ethnic group.

In the third stage of assimilation, descendents of immigrants are very heterogeneous socially and economically. Political attitudes and loyalties have become a function of socioeconomic characteristics.

Members of the group display little political homogeneity. They have moved out of identity politics into pluralism, organizing their political life around fluid factions based on interests, or factions based on opinions and passions that cut across racial and ethnic lines. Dahl argues that the politics of Germans, Irish, Italians, and Russian Jews in New Haven and by extension, other cities followed this assimilationist trajectory.

Identity-based coalition politics might take a different form. Visionaries on the American left have promoted interracial working-class alliances ever since there were enough white laborers and free African Americans to make such an alliance imaginable. In their view, such coalitions are not a way station on the road to crosscutting cleavages or a melting pot; they are a means of gratifying interests and fulfilling moral commitments through the political resources generated by racial or ethnic identities.

A third type of coalition is a pragmatic interracial or interethnic alliance intended to enable small groups to win victory in a political system that rewards voting majorities and large influxes of resources. Pragmatic or log-rolling coalitions are pluralism at the group rather than the individual level; identity-based factions come together for particular purposes and then separate when they judge that they will gain more by working with a different group on another issue.

Other survey responses hint at the possibility of progressive interracial alliances based on the shared status of disadvantage. Perhaps more persuasively, we have no difficulty in finding examples of the three types of coalitions. Progressive coalitions have more cachet among academics, and here too successes can be found. The dynamic here is perhaps similar to that of a few decades ago, when some unions promoted civil rights claims in order to recruit newly-urbanized African Americans.

Wilson, , 87; Warren, In other words, racially- or ethnically-based groups provide the structure within with IAF activists emerge, but IAF itself carefully avoids racial claims or issues.

It is a brilliant, and largely successful, strategy for creating progressive pluralism out of identity politics. Self-identified black nationalists have allied with white Republican mayors and conservative foundations to create publicly-funded school voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland. Some Chicano activists allied with Republicans and conservatives in California to abolish what they perceived to be a failed and stigmatizing program of bilingual education in public schools.

Anglo libertarians have joined black nationalists to protest racial profiling and stringent controls on nonAnglo groups in the wake of the terrorist attack of September 11, On balance, progressive coalitions have proven harder to sustain and less likely to succeed than assimilationist or pragmatic coalitions.

Socialism and populism both foundered at the turn of the twentieth century at least partly because shared interests and ideologies were too weak to overcome ethnic conflicts in the first case or racial bias in the second. African Americans and Hispanics have tried for decades to unite behind mayoral candidates in New York and Chicago; despite occasional successes Harold Washington for two terms, David Dinkins for one , they have mostly failed.

These two cities are not unique; moderate or conservative white politicians have recently proven more adept at appealing to nonwhite immigrants than have liberal black politicians. In Los Angeles, Gary, Philadelphia, as well as in New York and Chicago, white conservatives have won enough support from Latino and other voters to replace or defeat black liberal mayors. The structure of American politics perhaps of all politics gives a powerful incentive to develop coalitions with some opponents in order to win a fraction of what a group wants.

Thus coalitional politics are not new; what might be new is a growing number and influence of coalitions in which the factions are organized around ascriptive identities rather than around individualistic opinions, passions, and interests.

Such factions would be astonishing to Madison, but not as fearful as a more pure identity politics. Such factions can also seem like a betrayal of what matters most or a reassuring step toward a safer political equilibrium, depending on whether one views them from the vantage point of identity politics or Dahlian pluralism.

Some analysts of contemporary American politics fear that the rising visibility of assertive racial or ethnic advocates is fragmenting at least the Democratic party Gitlin, and at most the whole polity Schlesinger, ; Bernstein, They endorse instead, variously, class-based coalitions, melting pot pluralism, or simply a focus on issues that really matter Jacoby, Whether their concerns are warranted depends on the trajectories of pluralism, identity politics, and the hybrids of coalitional politics.

I am not foolhardy enough to make clear predictions. The structure of American racial and ethnic interactions is too complicated and the evidence is mixed or even flatly contradictory. More importantly, too many outcomes are contingent on personal and political choices not yet made and circumstances not yet faced.

I will, however, conclude with observations about the nature of Madisonian constitutionalism. The American constitutional regime has not in fact, until recently, been very Madisonian. Nevertheless, American politics has been largely organized around the fact of white racial domination for most of our history. Majority factionalism, involving passions and opinions as well as self-interest, was not absent from the polity created by Federalist No.

They were propertied white men. This fact is in some sense obvious to any student of American history, but its importance has been insufficiently recognized by most analysts of democracy in America. At the time democracy was being established,. England was an Anglo-Saxon nation; America, during its founding period, was overwhelmingly English. Wilson, But the United States was not overwhelmingly English in and in any case, well over half of its English inhabitants lacked the franchise ; it simply practiced a form of identity politics that makes contemporary advocates look like pale surrogates.

During the succeeding two centuries, additional groups fought their way into the realm of legitimate political actors—first propertyless white men, then black men for a period, then white women, then Asian immigrants, then young adults, and finally black men and women.

For the first time in history, Americans now live in a polity in which virtually all adult citizens [16] can participate—thus eliminating the majority faction intrinsic to the first century and a half of American constitutionalism. The right question then becomes: is American politics moving toward the kind of factionalism that Madison envisioned but never saw? The question is surprisingly new. African Americans have been full members of the polity for barely a generation, about fifteen percent of the time that the United States has been a constitutional republic.

Asian immigrants have been allowed citizenship for barely two generations. Even now, the United States is not, and probably will never become, a colorblind nation with no racial or ethnic discrimination. But the political structure is now in place so that, for the first time in American history, members of all races and ethnicities can choose whether and how to move from identity politics to coalitions to pluralism, or in the other direction—as whites have been able to do for a long time.

The future of democratic politics in the United States might now be brighter than it has been at any point in the past. Abramowitz, Alan Barone, Michael Washington D. Bernstein, Richard New York: Knopf.

Economist , Brady, Henry Today Gallup, CNN, U. Today Poll. Connelly, Marjorie. Dahl, Robert Pluralist Democracy in the United States.