DRIVE FALL 2013

PROGRAM
BA ENGLISH
SEMESTER III
SUBJECT CODE & NAME BAE 302 POLITICAL THEORY
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Q.No1Critically evaluate the Institutional Approach.

Answer: Criticisms of the institutional approach in comparative political analysis have come in
consecutive waves, in the early part of the twentieth century and later in the 1950s. A refined
version of the approach reappeared after each wave of criticism
The approach was criticized before the study of institutions attained a comparative nature
(however restricted) at the turn of the century. It was said to be not only (i) speculative but also
(ii) prescriptive and normative.
(ii)It was concerned with only irregularities and regularities and ignored relationships. (iv)It
focussed on individual countries and therefore was non-comparative. It was said to be (v)
ethnocentric as it focused on western European democracies.
(vi) As it focussed on formal structure, both constitutional and governmental it was said to be
descriptive. (vii) It did not focus on analysis but at the same time was historical. (viii)The
contributors tended to ignore the upper chambers of UK, the US and the USSR. (ix)
Methodologically, they were said to be incomplete, at least in part. Theoretically, however, they
were said to have failed to recognize the essence of political life. With Bryce and his
contemporaries, the nature and content of the institutional approach went through a phase of

transformation. The approach attained a comparative character and at the same time attempted
to combine theoretical contexts with governmental practices. In the 1950s, the institutional
approach, as it developed with Bryce, Lowell and Ostrogorski, once more faced severe criticism
by political scientists like David Easton and Roy Macridis. David Easton criticized Bryces
approach in his work The Political System (1953), calling it mere factualism. Easton claimed
that this approach had affected American Political Science admitting that although Bryce did not
neglect theories
his aversion to making explanatory or theoretical models, had led to a surfeit of facts and as a
result to a theoretical malnutrition. It will not be difficult to understand why Easton felt that
Bryces approach had misguided American Political Science in the wrong direction. Jean Blondel
defends the institutional approach from critics like Easton who attacked its factualism. Blondel
argued that the charge of surfeit of facts was incorrect since very few facts were actually
available to political scientists to analyse
politics comprehensively. Actually, there was hardly any knowledge of the structures and
activities
of key institutions of most countries, especially about the communist countries and the
underdeveloped countries. It was important, therefore, to collect more facts, considering that
governments tended to hide facts rather than pass them on.
Any successful study had to be based on facts. Reasoning would not be possible in the absence of
facts or data. This, along with the point that facts were not easy to get hold of, made them vital
to the study of political analysis. In 1955, Roy Macridis felt that the comparative study of
governments should be reoriented. He felt that in the present form, comparative study had been
comparative in name only. According to Macridis the orientation of the institutional approach
was non-comparative, parochial, static and monographic. He said that a fair amount of work
was essentially descriptive.
He owed this to the analysis being historical or legalistic, and therefore quite narrow. In the
1950s, it became obvious that there was a dearth of facts which was a cause of concern. It was
not possible to make proper generalizations. According to Blondel, there was, a surfeit of
models instead of a surfeit of
facts. He pointed out that building models without basing them on facts would lead to
misinformation. It was not easy to obtain information about certain countries. Also, wrong
information was likely to influence and reinforce preconceptions about those countries. In 1971,
while writing about Latin American Legislatures, W.H. Agor stated that legislatures in that part

of the world were not strong. With no facts available for the purposes of the study, the reliance
was more on evidence which was
impressionistic. Thus, those who followed the institutional approach emphasized the need for
collecting and coming up with ways of collecting facts. The criticisms were, however, followed by
works that had a more comparative focus and included non-western countries.

2What are the five bases of power as developed by social psychologists French and
Raven?
The five bases of power ( Each point carries 2 marks, 2 x 5 = 10 marks)
Answer: The five bases of power were proposed by the social psychologists French and
Raven, in a now-classic study (1959). They developed a scheme of five categories of power which
reflected the different bases or resources that power holders rely upon. Two additional bases
(informational and connectional) were later added.
(i) Coercive power
Coercive power means the application of negative influences onto employees. It might refer to
the ability to demote or to withhold other rewards. It is the desire for valued rewards or the fear
of having them withheld that ensures the obedience of those under power. Coercive power tends
to be the least effective form of power as it builds resentment and resistance within the targets of
coercive power. (ii) Legitimate power
Legitimate power refers to power of an individual because of the relative position and duties of
the holder of the position within an organization. Legitimate power is formal authority
delegated to the holder of the position.
(iii) Referent power
Referent power means the power or ability of individuals to persuade and influence others. It is
based on the charisma and interpersonal skills of the power holder. Here the person under
power desires to identify with these personal qualities, and gains satisfaction from being an
accepted follower.
(iv) Expert power
Expert power is an individual's power deriving from the skills or expertise of the person and the
organization's needs for those skills and expertise. Unlike the others, this type of power is
usually highly specific and limited to the particular area in which the expert is trained and
qualified.
(v) Reward power

Reward power depends upon the ability of the power wielder to confer valued material rewards;
it refers to the degree to which the individual can give others a reward of some kind such as
benefits, time off, desired gifts, promotions or increases in pay or responsibility.
3 Explain the ways to safeguard liberty.
Answer: The importance of individual liberty cannot be stretched too far as it would result
in anarchism or an irresponsible individual for whom liberty would mean license to act
according to his whims. Democracy is considered to be the best available form of government
for safeguarding liberty as each individual has the right to freely express his thoughts, and if he
does not like the government, he is free to influence public opinion in democratic ways in order
to affect a change in the
government. However, now, even in democracies, individual liberty is not safe because of the
increasing tendency for governments to allow more and more power to the states. The problem,
therefore, is how to safeguard the freedom of the individual from both the conscious and
unconscious encroachment made
by the state. It is correct to say that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. No mechanical
device can safeguard the liberty of the people if they do not have the courage to resist willful
invasion made on their liberty by the government. It is argued that the fundamental liberties of
the people should be defined and categorically mentioned in a constitution to prevent
encroachment by the government. This necessitates an independent and impartial judiciary to
interpret the constitution and to decide disputes arising out of conflicts of jurisdictions. It
should, however, be mentioned that neither a written constitution with fundamental liberties
enshrined therein, nor an independent impartial judiciary can be adequate safeguard of
individual liberty. Lastly, the liberty of citizens can best be safeguarded when the state action is
unbiased. People should be able to get a remedy for all their reasonable grievances. All class
privileges should be abolished because there can be no liberty in a society where the rights of
some depend upon the pleasure of others. No group or class of people should be discriminated
against in the matter of enjoyment of rights or privileges.

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4Communitarianism is the belief that the self or person is constituted through the
community. Analyse the concept in view of this statement.
Answer: The term community stands for a form of society whose members are informed
by the community spirit or a sense of community. It denotes a network of relationships which
are characterized by intimacy and durability. It may be distinguished from association, which is
based on impersonal and contractual relations. Liberal theory equates society with association,
whereas
communitarian theory equates society with community to determine the nature and extent of
social obligation. Communitarians argue that an individual cannot assure full development of
his personality unless he is committed to the spirit of community toward his fellow-beings.
Communitarianism is the belief that the self or person is constituted through the community, in
the sense that individuals are shaped by the communities to which they belong and thus owe
them a debt of respect and consideration; there are no unencumbered selves. Although it is
clearly at odds with liberal individualism, communitarianism has a variety of political forms.
Left-wing communitarianism holds that community demands unrestricted freedom and social
equality (the view of anarchism). Centrist communitarianism holds that community is grounded
in an acknowledgement of reciprocal rights and
responsibilities (the perspective of Tory paternalism and social democracy). Rightwing
communitarianism holds that community requires respect for authority and established values
(the view of the New Right). Communitarianism is a contemporary philosophy. It marks a
departure from the philosophy of liberalism because it places the relation between an individual
and society in a new perspective. The communitrianism repudiates the picture of the selfimplied in
the liberal theory. Liberal theory implied an unencumbered detached from preexisting
social form, as exemplified by the concept of possessive individualism. It postulates that an
individual is the sole proprietor of his own person or capacities for he owes nothing to society.
Such a view denies his commitment to other individuals, traditions, practices and conception of
the good. It holds that self is

prior to its ends. It is fully competent to choose its ends as well as its roles and dispositions. In
contrast to this atomistic view of individual, communitarianism advances the concept of
situated self, as constituted by social role, practices and situations, in other words,
communitarianism holds that an agents identity
is constituted by specific commitments to his social situations.
While liberalism insists on liberty of individual, his interest and rights, communitarianism
focuses on his social identity and upholds acceptance of authority because it expresses our
common will or reflects our common identity, our shared values and believes. It is significant to
note that liberalism had one
liberty of the individual but atomistic view of society held by liberalism let to the erosion of the
sense of responsibility and the moral standards attached thereto. Communitarianism seeks to
restore that sense of responsibility and reconstruct moral standards on that basis.
A major critique of contemporary Anglo-American liberalismcertainly the critique that
resonates most in East Asia has been termed communitarianism. The basic themes of the
communitarian critique have a long history, but modern day communitarianism began in the
upper reaches of Anglo-American academia in the form of a critical reaction to John Rawls
landmark 1971 book A Theory of Justice. Drawing primarily upon the insights of Aristotle and
Hegel, political philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and
Michael Walzer disputed Rawls assumption that the principal task of government is to secure
and distribute fairly the liberties and economic resources that
individuals need to lead freely chosen lives. These critics of liberal theory never identified
themselves with the communitarian movement (the communitarian label was pinned on them
by others, usually critics), much less offer a grand communitarian theory as a systematic
alternative to liberalism. Nonetheless,
certain core arguments meant to contrast with liberalisms devaluation of community recur in
the works of the four theorists named above, and for purposes of clarity one can distinguish
between claims of three sorts: ontological or metaphysical claims about the social nature of
the self, methodological claims
about the importance of tradition and social context for moral and political reasoning and
normative claims about the value of community. Each strand of the debate has largely evolved
from fairly abstract philosophical disputes to more concrete political concerns that may have
motivated much of the communitarian critique in the first place. Communitarian accounts of the
ontology of the self were rejected by early liberal critics as internally contradictory, but they are
now widely accepted as

essential to most forms of liberalism. Retrospectively, this communitarianliberal

merger makes sense, because close textual analysis shows that every argument made by the
major communitarian philosophers was, in fact, politicalnot metaphysical. To wit, all of the
communitarians arguments led to the conclusion
that communitarianism would provide a firmer political grounding for the liberal ideal of equal
individual freedom than was offered by the individualist ontologies.
The Politics of Communitarianism and the Emptiness of Liberalism traces this
political mode of philosophizing to the British New Left that shaped Alasdair
MacIntyre and Charles Taylor; and to the threat to Rawlsian liberalism represented
by Robert Nozick, against whom both Michael Sandel (Taylors student) and Michael Walzer
were arguing. Communitarianism points to the shortcomings of liberalism and attempts
to redefine the relation between an individual and the community. Liberalism
promotes individualism to focus on individual freedom, which undermines an
individuals affinity with the community. Liberals base their theories on notions of
individual rights and personal freedom, but neglect the extent to which individual
freedom and wellbeing are only possible within community. Once, you recognize
the dependence of human beings on society, then your obligations to sustain
the common good of society are as weighty as your rights to individual liberty.
Hence, communitarians argue, the liberal politics of rights should be abandoned
or at least supplemented by, a politics of the common good.
When every individual turns to seek his own good, no one is emotionally
attached to any one. An individual would manage to have many means of comfort at the expense
of his emotional security. In other words, if an individual devotes
himself to the pursuit of self-interest, he cannot secure good life in the fullest
sense of the term. Communitarians hold that only community is capable of
realizing the common good.

5 Explain any five merits and demerits of democracy.

Answer: Democracy has both merits and demerits. These are discussed as follows:
Merits (Strength) of democracy
In democracy, you agree upon certain common principles. You respect one
anothers point of view. Democracy provides the framework within which the
moral life of the individual is possible. A.D. Lindsay in his book Essentials of

Democracy, says that the end of democratic government is to minister to the

common life of society and remove the disharmonies that trouble it. Thus,
democracy is an ideal, a means and a way of life. The merits of democracy are
as follows:
A rational form of government: It is based upon the premise that no
man is infallible. Every man is liable to commit mistakes. As no man is
infallible, democracy adopts a process of discussion and criticism in which
every man is allowed to take part. The continuous process of discussion
and scrutiny acts as a necessary corrective of abuse of power.
It provides rights to the individual: Democracy provides political, social
and economic rights to the individuals. The right to vote, the right to life,
the right to religion, the right to education, the right of minorities, the right
to work, the right to a reasonable way and the right to rest and leisure are
some of the rights, which democracy provides. There have been some
movements for rights, such as the American War of Independence 1776,
the French Revolution 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Without
these rights, life would be meaningless.
Equality: Democracy not only provides rights but also provides equality.
All are equal in the political, social and economic spheres. All enjoy equal
rights. There is no discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, sex,
caste and place of birth.
Democracy is an efficient and responsible form of government: The
method of free election at certain intervals and the method of popular
control at every stage of administration, either through criticism inside the
legislature or outside through public opinion, make it extremely efficient
and responsible.
Democracy promotes the welfare of the people: It is clear from its
definition that democracy is the government of the people. It also provides
security to the individuals. Welfare is the yardstick of the security of the
government.
Demerits
Democracy has the following demerits or weaknesses:
Since the time of Plato and Aristotle democracy has been criticized:
Plato criticized democracy because it put his master Socrates to death.

Aristotle regarded it as a prevented form of government. It is the government

of average men and women. The average men, in the words of Maxey,
are sheep-minded, ape-minded and wolf-minded.
It is said that democracy is based on number: It counts the heads but
not the contents in the heads. So, it is based on quantity instead of quality.
Cult of incompetence: The French writer, Faguet, describes democracy
as the cult of incompetence. Bryce says that it is government by the
incompetent. It is the ignorant and inefficient men who come to power.
Such men are unintelligent, uninformed, prejudiced, emotional and
resentful of superiority of others. They are the most numerous in society.
Tyranny of the majority: The majority may impose their will on the minority.
The minority view is either suppressed or ignored. The majority in the
legislature walk like a colossus. Hence, it may ignore the view of the minority.
Expensive: Democracy is very expensive. There are frequent elections
in democracy. Besides, much money is spent on propaganda and
mobilizing public opinion. There is wastage not only of money, but also
time and opportunity. It is the most extravagant and indifferent system.

6Politicians who are already in office mistreat their powers to a huge extent.
Hence what is the role of ethics in todays political system?
Answer: Time and again, morality is described as the principle of actions, whether they
are right or wrong. Also, morality is synonymous with ethics. Morality cannot be
something which is wrong or simply convenient. In the same way, immorality
cannot be what is right and just, or born of sound principles and designed to
encourage the social good.
According to Jeremy Bentham, an English jurist, philosopher, and legal
and social reformer, The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the
foundation of morals and legislation. Generally, principles and convictions are
in conflict with expediency; but what is expedient is not moral, and what is moral
is almost always inexpedient. Taking this view into consideration, we therefore
see a conflict and a confrontation between morality and politics. Morality has a
strong influence on justice and fair play. Besides, according to Sidney Hillman,

an American labour leader, politics is the science of who gets what, when and
why.
Morality insists on an impartial distribution of goods and services. Politics,
on the other hand, signifies to take hold of whatever one can get, without
considering the requirements and requests of others. As opposed to politicians who are selfish
and self-centred, moralists are altruistic and advocate justice in
every sphere of life.
Therefore, morality in politics plays a vital role in evaluating the quality of a
State or society. If morals are strictly followed by the people, particularly the
politicians, they would help establish a healthy and sound society. However, if
they do not follow the morals and disrespect them, they would constitute an
unhealthy society, which will come to an end in a short time.
Today, the political scenario in several countries is deeply lacking the moral
fervour. Most of the politicians today are sacrificing the interests of a vast section
of the society in order to make their lives comfortable and to live a life of luxury.
This is even more evident when we see that truth, which is a significant facet of
morality, is poles apart from politics. The two are basically incompatible. Todays
politicians are mostly typified by deceit and duplicity, even after swearing by the
principles, ideologies and the remarkable precepts of the Constitution.
Corruption, and not morality, is the keyword in politics today. If morality
had been considered as the basis of modern society, then no one would have
had the courage to condemn politics and politicians. But we cannot blame the
modern age and its implications to be solely responsible for teaching politicians
to become immoral; such failings have existed for ages.
Plato, one of the most important Greek philosophers, in his historic Letters
VII and VIII relates how he envisioned a bright political career when he was
young and how he was quite confident of bringing about a revolutionary change
when the famous batch of Thirty Wise Men were placed in power. I expected
that this government would bring about a change from corrupt to an upright
administration. I found that it took these men no time at all to make the previous
government look like an age of gold.
Yet again, when Socrates, Platos great teacher, was assassinated, he
concluded that considering the kind of men who were active in politics, and the
principles on which things were managed, it was difficult to take part in public

life and retain ones integrity, and this feeling became stronger the more I observed
and the older I became.
As a matter of fact, on the basis of Platos political wisdom, several political
dictators took up merciless measures to achieve their ambitions. Although Plato
was not satisfied with the kind of politics of his time, he never encouraged the
removal of the Constitution or the government of his State from power. The basis of true
morality in politics is personal conduct and integrity. It is
evident that authentic social and moral progress cannot be achieved as long as
political leaders follow a dual personality, posing to be what they are not. It is,
therefore, attainable only when they sacrifice deception, double dealing and
stratagem of any type for their personal interests and actually work for the
development of the society.
Public opinion plays a very important role against corrupt persons who
are responsible for the disorder of both morality and politics. Morality can be
restored back in the public life of a democratic country in an effective manner
only when the prominent leaders of the country would trust the right instincts of
the free people, their capacity to differentiate between right and wrong, and
therefore, act accordingly. Only this consciousness and wakefulness can bring
about an improvement in the conduct of politicians, who are deeply embedded
in the iron grip of power.
Politics without Ethics
Most of the countries in the world today are referred to as civilized, with the
commencement of modern values that are based on scientific thought and
remarkable progress in the field of technology. The system of governance
worldwide has undergone a significant change over the past two centuries, and
currently we find that most of the countries are governed on the principles of
democracy. At present, India has more than 60 million voters, which makes it
the largest democracy in the world.
Therefore, it is evident that in the midst of corrupted and deceitful people,
there are several politicians across the country who are willing to actually serve
the people. However, not only in India, but politicians worldwide can go to any
extent to achieve the ultimate goal, i.e., the seat of power.
Those politicians who are already in office mistreat their powers to a huge
extent. At times, politicians order transfers of government officials as per their

personal interests. It is quite popularly known that money brings power and
politicians of India know it too well. A lot of money is spent during election
campaigns. Most of which has been attained through ill-gotten ways, which are
often termed as donations. The politicians never think that this money could
have been used for public welfare, which would have automatically attracted
votes of people for them.