Suchergebnisse

First published in 1997, this edition of The American Political Process examines both the formal and informal institutions of government and analyses how these bodies interact I the making of public policy in the United States in order to provide an understanding of contemporary American politics. This Sixth Edition has been thoroughly up-dated, extended and substantially revised to take account of important events such as the Republicans winning control of Congress in 1994 and the 1996 Presidential and Congressional elections. It looks at the political developments of the 1990s against the background of a long-established constitutional structure and a distinctively American political culture. Each chapter includes a variety of useful tables and diagrams as well as suggestions for further reading and there is an extensive glossary of terms in American politics which provides an easily accessible reference for the reader.

Ostensibly theoretical disputes in political science often involve competing approaches to explanation, including skepticism, covering law arguments, reconstructions of propensities, system models, and explanations featuring causal mechanisms. Mechanism- and process-based accounts, including cognitive, environmental, and relational effects, deserve more attention than they have received in recent political science. Analyses of democratization illustrate these points.

The a priori basis on which this discussion rests is that individual human freedom is desirable. The defense of this thesis is not extensive nor profound-it is rather elementary and personal. There is a further assumption, for which limited historical argument is made, that freedom, the sine qua non of political life, is best achieved and cherished in the atmosphere of parliamentary democracy. There is recognition that such freedom is limited and controlled, but there is full acceptance that in degree it does and should exist. The argument then proceeds to the analysis of the essential element in a democratic system which makes even limited freedom possible. This element is compromise-accommodation. We are free not because we want others to be free but primarily because we can only achieve our own freedom and our own purposes by making agreements with others. ConHict of interests is the human condition-the peaceful conciliation of conHicts is the magnificent role of politics.

Despite occasional suggestions to the contrary, the Supreme Court has long since stopped interpreting the Constitution to afford special protection to certain groups on the ground that they are powerless to defend their own interests in the political process. From a series of decisions reviewing laws that burden whites under the same strict scrutiny as laws that burden racial minorities, to the more recent same-sex marriage decision based principally on the fundamental nature of marriage (rather than the political status of gays and lesbians), it is now an uncontroversial observation that when it comes to applying the open-textured provisions of the Constitution, the Court sees no distinction between the powerless and powerful. This Article challenges that conventional wisdom from a perhaps unexpected direction. I argue that the Court has gone further than to merely reject the political process theory of constitutional interpretation, under which powerless discrete and insular minority groups alone would be entitled to heightened judicial solicitude. In several doctrinal areas, the Court has reversed the theory's core prescription by conferring extra constitutional safeguards upon entities that, by any fair accounting, possess an outsized ability to protect their interests through the ordinary democratic process-all while withholding similar protections from less powerful counterparts. After describing these doctrinal developments, this Article offers a critical account of the Court's long and tumultuous relationship with political process theory. I conclude that although opponents of the theory may have been fair to question its ability to restrain judges as a positive principle of constitutional adjudication, political process theory ought to retain force as a negative command. That is to say, even if one believes judges cannot avoid substantive value judgments when deciding which groups are so powerless as to warrant extraordinary protection from the democratic bazaar, attention to the political process ...