Suchergebnisse

CENTRAL TO THE STUDY OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IS THE IDEA of popular control over the activities of elites. More specifically, how can the preferences of citizens be aggregated into a political choice for a government policy or government personnel? Popular control, the effects of citizen participation in political life, is the basis of a major value orientation in the discipline: the notion of participant democracy. The degree of citizen participation becomes the key to the nature of democracry in a society : the more participation, the more democratic the political life of a country becomes. Political participation may take a variety of forms, e.g., running for office, holding office,voting, soliciting votes, and campaigning for, or contributing funds to, I the party of one's choice. However, voting is the most emphasized aspect of citizen participation, since it is the only form of active participation many engage in. The limitations placed on voting as a mechanism for popular control over political choices are well documented. Voters do not choose when to vote, nor the agenda. They have minimal input into the selection of candidates and the choice of issues which divide the parties at elections. Public participation in the selection and resolution of important policy issues between elections is severely restricted.

THIS ESSAY CONSISTS OF A COLLECTION OF ARGUMENTS WHICH have been more fully developed elsewhere but are presented here in rather summary form in order to point towards a fundamental problem concerning the present status of political theory in the discipline of political science. This problem is not easily defined; but the difficulty recalls Alfred Cobban's complaint twenty-five years ago that political theory had become disen aged Lom 'political facts' and 'political practice' and transformed into an 'academic discipline'. My concern is with the 'philosophization' of political theory. By this I do not mean simply that political theory is not relevant to politics or has become detached from actual political issues – although this is probably quite true – but that it has tended to become a residue of arguments in academic philosophy. The bios theoretikos and the bios philosophikos have become indistinguishable.

Most concepts of ethnicity are unsuitable for political analysis because they ignore either subjective or objective aspects, and because they ignore the fluid and situational nature of ethnicity. The approach flowing from the concept proposed here permits the observer to examine empirical variations that tend to be treated as rigid assumptions by modernization analysts on the one hand and class analysts on the other. The concept is applied to a study of the Nubians of Uganda because of the intermixture of class and ethnic features involved in their fall from status at the beginning of the colonial period and their subsequent sudden rise following the 1071 coup d'état of Idi Amin. The fairly recent creation of the Nubians as an ethnic category and the relative ease with which others can become members illustrate other features of the proposed concept of ethnicity. Finally, this concept is used to examine and criticize overly restrictive notions of ethnicity found in theories based upon both cultural pluralism and consociationalism.

The decision to use and develop a low-status language in translations and creative works is often based on a desire to provide symbols that will assist the efforts of political leaders to challenge existing national and ethnic frontiers and to create new groups loyal to different institutions. New frontiers alter the relationships between peoples and also affect patterns of access to power and wealth within a group. Writers, translators, dictionary makers, and other literary figures who innovate for this reason should be called "language strategists." Although primarily moved by a creative and artistic spirit, these persons are often intimately associated with national and ethnic movements because they share the interests of the political elites who lead them. This conscious or unconscious alliance is essential in the creation of ethnic and national identities.