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Why Political Systems Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

David Apter
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I INTEND TO FOLLOW AN ABSTRACT LINE IN ANSWERING THE question why political systems change. That is, I am not concerned with the infinity of descriptive reasons why change occurs in any concrete case. It may be argued that now is not the time to bother with such a trivial approach, particularly when the language of crisis is what must be used, and also understood, and not the language of abstraction.

I think the answer to this is that for too long the evaluation of politics, and of government in particular, has become a ‘pseudoactivity’ in which descriptive categories like ‘parliamentary control over the executive’, or ‘reform of the committee system’ are comforting shibboleths which, although meant to contain some inner profundity have lost much of their original meaning. The truth is that the balance between normative givens and structural conditions is becoming so altered that the common-sense foundations of the discipline seem almost irrelevant.

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Government and Opposition , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , 01 October 1968, pp. 411 - 427
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Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1968

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References

1 See the valuable discussion of typologies of government by Bernard, Crick, ‘The Elementary Types of Government‘ in Government and Opposition, Vol. 3, No. 1.Google Scholar

2 Weber’s distinction between Macht and Herrschaft, between the capacity to impose will and powers that are legally given is particularly relevant here. See also the extremely useful discussion in d’Entreves, Alexander Passerin, The Notion of the State, Oxford, 1967, pp. 1–81.Google Scholar

3 See the discussion of these matters in Apter, D. E., ‘Notes for a Theory of Nondemocratic Representation’ in Pennock, J. R. and Chapman, J.W. (eds.), Representation, Nomos X, New York, 1968.Google Scholar

4 These include The Politics of Modernization, Chicago, 1965; Some Conceptual Approaches to the Study of Modernization, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in press, and A Structural Theory of Politics, Chicago, forthcoming.

5 We are not talking here about the legal primacy of government and the right of a sovereign government to rule. All governments assume a certain priority. Rather, the limits of authority vary to the extent that the primacy of society is expressed through checks on executive powers of government, or whether these are feeble or non-existent.

6 We have stressed the predilection of mobilization systems for coercion and reconciliation systems for information. But there is a limit beyond which increasing coercion can create certainty, just as there is a limit beyond which increasing information can create certainty.

7 It is precisely this type of situation which we see emerging in certain socialist industrial countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the USSR. The result may be a far cry from democracy as we have come to understand that term. But certainly the move in that direction is underway.