what are the three theories of american democracy?

Answer 1

life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

Answer 2

1. Suppression of speech
2. Suppression of thought
3. Suppression of opportunity

America = fascist state!

Answer 3

LIFE LIBERTY & DEATH

Answer 4

try doing your homework on friday. Read your books. Contrasting Models of Democracy:
The American and French Revolutions



Daniel J. Elazar


The two most important revolutions of the modern epoch were the American and French revolutions. Each contributed a particular understanding of democracy for moderns, models that shaped the subsequent revolutions of the modern epoch and which we continue to draw on in the postmodern epoch. This paper will lay out the two models and the contrasts between them. It will examine the hidden perspectives and assumptions underlying each. Those perspectives and assumptions rest upon modern extensions of the three original theories regarding the origins of the polity, extensions that seek to adapt those theories to a democratic age and apply them to the details of governing.



The Three Models of Polity
All polities are organized along the lines of one or another of three models: they are either organized as hierarchies, as centers with peripheries or as noncentralized matrices. Each model is a classic expression of an ideal type. While the three may be mixed in a real polity, in fact every polity is constituted on the basis of one or another.

The pyramid is the classic expression of the hierarchical model, with organizational authority and power distributed among levels linked through a chain of command. Having its origin in some form of conquest, the use of force, a possibility in all polities, stands behind its constitution. Thus it is the military model par excellence. It goes without saying that, in the hierarchical model, the top level must be the most important and the place where decisions are made as to which level does what.

The center-periphery model is one in which authority is concentrated in a single center which is more or less influenced by its periphery, depending upon the situation in which it finds itself. Such polities or organizations tend to develop organically, either around a pre-existing center or through generating one over time. They tend to be oligarchic in character, with power in the hands of those who constitute the center. Power is either concentrated or dispersed according to decisions taken in the center which may or may not include significant representation from the peripheries.

The matrix model reflects a polity compounded of arenas within arenas held together by common framing institutions and a shared communications network. Its origins are to be found in the deliberate coming together of equals to establish a mutually useful framework within which all can function on an equal basis, usually defined by a pact. Consequently, it reflects the fundamental distribution of powers among multiple centers across the matrix, not the devolution of powers from a single center or down a pyramid. Each cell in the matrix represents an independent political actor and an arena for political action. Some cells are larger and some smaller and the powers assigned to each may reflect that difference, but none is "higher" or "lower" in importance than any other, unlike in an organizational pyramid where levels are distinguished as higher or lower as a matter of constitutional design.

Needless to say, each of these models carries with it certain implications with regard to the organization, distribution, and exercise of power and authority. The interorganizational relationships within each develop accordingly. At the same time, it is in the nature of politics that various groups, parties and interests which give the system life. The interaction between them and the institutional framework and among them represents the substance of the political process.

While the theories themselves require sophisticated treatment, as common currency they can be designated by their code words. The hierarchial model is authoritarian or, if democratized, managerial. The center-periphery model is Jacobin and the matrix model is federal. If those code words suggest that each has an ideological as well as a practical dimension, there is much truth in that suggestion.



Federalism: The Original American Theory
Federalism is derived from the covenant and compact theories of the polity and, in its modern form, represents the effort to democratize republicanism. For Americans, its immediate political sources were the Puritans, Calvinists, Locke, and Montesquieu. The foundations of modern federalism are to be found in the American revolutionary experience (including its constitution-making phase).

The model for federalism is the matrix, a network of arenas within arenas which are distinguished by being larger or smaller rather than "higher" or "lower." The organizational expression of federalism is non-centralization, the constitutional diffusion and shaping of powers among many centers. The most articulate expressions of federalism are to be found in The Federalist and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Federalism in America has been accepted (or criticized) as a practical response to the problems of nation-building, but from the first it also had a larger dimension, although it has never been offered as a form of secular salvation.



Jacobinism: European Import
For Americans, Jacobinism is a European import given democratic form in the French revolution and subsequently extended and reshaped by Marx and the various socialist movements of the nineteenth century. It is derived from the organic theory of the polity and represents an effort to democratize monarchic and, most particularly, aristocratic polities by conquering and transforming the center of power. Its original European political sources are to be found in Bourbon France, the works of French political theorists exemplified by Jean Bodin, and in the statist interpretation of Rousseau. In its revolutionary form, Jacobinism tends to lead to a conception of politics as all-encompassing, a vehicle for secular salvation.

The model for Jacobinism is one of center-periphery relationships whereby power is concentrated in a single center which is more or less influenced by its periphery. Centralization is the organizational expression of Jacobinism, which distrusts dispersed power because of the historical experience out of which it grew and in which localism was synonymous with support for the pre-revolutionary powerholders. V.I. Lenin and Harold Laski were perhaps the most articulate twentieth century proponents of Jacobinism, Lenin in its totalitarian collectivist manifestation and Laski in its social democratic form.

Jacobinism was brought to the United States in the mid-19th century as a form of liberalism. Francis Lieber, a German refugee -- a '48er -- and the first professional political scientist in America (he held a chair at Columbia University), was the first articulate proponent of Jacobin liberalism on the American scene. Beginning as a theoretical critique of the compact theory of the state (i.e. an attack on the theoretical basis of federalism), in the course of a generation it became linked with the new nationalism of the late nineteenth century in the development of a practical program of expanded national government activity. Woodrow Wilson then gave it a more Americanized form by suggesting that Congress was the national center of all political power.



Managerialism: An Organizational
Response to the Industrial Revolution
Managerialism is an organizational response to the industrial revolution, in many respects typically American but with strong roots in the authoritarian military and bureaucratic traditions of Russia and France. Politically, managerialism represents an effort to democratize (or, perhaps more accurately, republicanize) autocracy, whether in the immediate sense of the autocracy of the great entrepreneurs who built and ruled the great new industrial corporations, or in the older sense of imperial autocracy. In both cases, the founders can be considered "conquerors" who ruled autocracially but, in the end, unsatisfactorily, given changing times. The introduction of managerial structures was a means to transform autocratic rule without formally altering the hierarchical institutional structures built by the founders. For this reason, managerialism can be considered as derived from the conquest theory of the origins of the polity. In both cases, the proponents of managerial techniques could argue that what they proposed was politically neutral and hence not a threat to the existing system. In fact, as new generations of managers emerged and as management became a career in its own right, managerialism became an ideology in its own right.

The immediate sources of the managerial system and the ideology it produced were Bismarckian Germany and the scientific management theorists of the early 20th century United States. The model most characteristic of managerialism is the pyramid which reflects its commitment to hierarchical organization. The hierarchical form of organizational expression is implicit in the discussion of "levels" of government, a key feature of managerialism. Under such conditions, the political system has a "top level," a "middle level," and a "bottom level." It goes without saying that the top must be the most important level and the place where decisions are made as to which level does what. The most articulate expressions of managerialism can be found in Max Weber's discussions of bureaucracy and in the writings of leading American proponents of scientific management. Since proponents of managerialism never called it that and, indeed, believed that they were advocating a politically neutral means of increasing efficiency, the implications of its spread in the United States are just now beginning to be recognized. In fact, managerialism, for all its practical orientation and sincere commitment to neutrality in such matters, does reflect a political position as well, one no less real for not being articulated as such. Originally conceived to be a technique only, in a scientific age committed to the relativity of ends, it was transformed by some into a potential vehicle for secular salvation, one which offered a right process in place of a teleology.



Contemporary Syntheses
In the course of the 20th century, these three approaches have had