Political Science in Western Europe
Lipset and Rokkam's freezing hypothesis, published in the 1967, approached the political spectrum from their experiential paradigm. The party system in Europe, and indeed most of the western world, had evolved through a homogeneous process which had experiences little in the way of social upheaval. The economies of the West were based on societal evolutions form agriculture to industry which had smoothly transitioned, and formed the basis for social prosperity and order.
However, in the late 60's and 70's, the cradle of prosperity gave birth to other forces by which citizens wanted to identify themselves. Social caused, and religious ethics, which had been somewhat ignored by secular social system became important to the individual. Lipset and Rokkan based their theory on the assumption that if men were given equal right to vote, then a level of social freezing would take place, limiting the emergence of oppositional parties. However, as society became increasingly diverse, leaving the homogeneous order of the 50's and 60's, their hypothesis no longer held valid. Hence, political trends began which challenged their theory.
What Lipset and Rokkan failed to take into consideration was that the social order, which evidently based on the stable economic structure, was actually based on a shared cultural belief system. As a group, citizens of the West have collectively been drawn through the World War 1, the Great Depression, and then World War 2. These cataclysmic events shaped the value system of entire generations. Collectively the citizens believed in...
However, the system is much more representative. Thus, in the British Parliament there are representatives from the Scottish parliament as well as from the Northern Ireland Assembly. Even so, the proposals for the reform of the electoral law and program have tried to ease the access of the population to the voting system, to increase the public awareness in relation to the political representation. This would determine a better
Party Machines and Immigrants For more than a century, party machines dominated the political process in many parts of the United States where William "Boss" Tweed and his Tammany Hall henchmen and their ilk controlled the outcomes of elections in many major American cities by manipulating the immigrant vote. Although these political figures were eventually displaced by other politicians, they left a legacy of corruption, back-scratching and double-dealings that persists to
" However, despite legal change meant to reach all corners of European office and family life, former Italian Equal Opportunity minister said, "Laws are very far from reality." To achieve any real power in the civic realm, the law has to mimic the driving forces for social change in a manner accessible to the layman; equality has to be felt, and forced, on both sides. While British women are able
American System Henry Clay gave his famous speech in support of the American System to the House of Representatives in 1824, although Alexander Hamilton had used the same term decades before. It rested "on the idea of harmonizing all the segments of the economy for their mutual benefit and of doing so by active support from an intervening national government" (Baxter 27). Clay's conversion to this policy was surprising since Hamilton
Supremacist ideals apparently made it possible for people to ignore existential theories in wanting to adopt discriminatory attitudes against those who were considered to be part of a minority. Franco instructed people concerning the damage that the Spanish civilization was undergoing as a consequence of hosting a great deal of individuals who respected and even promoted ideals that challenged the stability of Spanish cultural values. The Franquist regime basically
In the older forms, people could live and work in relative independence if they disengaged from politics. Under a modern totalitarian government, people are completely and utterly dependent on, and submissive to, the rule and whims of a political party and its leaders. Older forms of such a government ruled by divine right, while the modern totalitarian state is ruled and run by a dictator who controls a political
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