Political Decision-Making in a Democracy

All the factors which influence political decision-making may (reasonably) be integrated into a model which combines operational concepts of power, influence, and authority. The problem-solving approach is applied to one class of decisions, defined here as those made for social situations involving both technical and political factors. Political power seems necessarily to be engaged in a twofold form of activity. On the one hand it formulates the content of decisions to be made and is thereby affected by both the technical and political definition of the problem to be resolved. On the other hand, power is both an agent and an object of influence at every stage of the decisional process. Political power appears, then, to be a more comprehensive concept than either authority or influence. Its basic constituents are found in a fusion of the function of influence with the function of defining issues authoritatively. Authority is but one kind of influence while influence itself is simply one of the two chief functions of power.

Power, before it is influential, is creative, inventive of ideas, and of solutions. Incorporation of these different categories into a model provides us with a systematic representation of the decision-making process of formulation, adoption, and execution. Particular attention is devoted to differentiating those components of behaviour on which authority is based from those which make the assessment of authority possible. On the whole, authoritative decision-making seems to be circumscribed by the original definition of the problem and by the decision-maker's personal under-standing. Up to a certain point this permits us to distinguish the part played by the force of given circumstances from that attributable to the free choice of the actors in a democratic political system.

Division of power and social integration

Explanation of some of the recent challenges to western democracy may be found in a re-examination of Montesquieu's thought. Here we find the theory of the separation of power to be far more complex than is implied in the simple divisions of legislature, executive, and judiciary. For Montesquieu, the separation of power is more a social division than a political or juridical one. He contemplated returning the organs of political power to various social forces, e.g. monarchy, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie, and that then the self-assertion of forces would be restrained by the resistance of other social groups. The realization of its goals would require every important social group to integrate itself both to society and to the state and to seek its goals through realization of the general good.

Since Montesquieu's time, political structures would seem to have been very little changed even though social structures have been greatly altered by the rise of economic powers. Political institutions have been losing touch with the vital forces of society and these have had to find other channels of expression. The personalization of power, the rise of the executive, violence, and increasing paternalism may be viewed as phenomena of compensation by which attempts are being made to bridge the gap between the structures of political power and those of a society which has been restructured.

Revigoration of parliamentary democracy would seem to require that all vital social forces be reintegrated into the political system and be given meaningful channels of political expression. Failure to make such changes opens the way to identification of the political powers with technocracy and the increasing general use of violence in the resolution of social problems.

The Backbenchers and the Administration in Quebec

This study uses two sets of data, one provided by an opinion survey of the backbenchers and the other by an analysis of the debates and questions in the Legislative Assembly of Quebec. The purpose of this lengthy description was to establish the representativeness of the Assembly and of the administration.

Members of the Assembly belong to “superior” strata of the population, but less so however than the higher civil service. Those who consider themselves as “legislators” come generally from urban districts with a relatively high proportion of people with superior occupations, while the “delegates” are generally older and represent rural districts. According to the majority of the backbenchers, the main purpose of their relations with the administration, as well as of their debates in the Assembly, is to obtain goods and services for their constituents. Debates in the Assembly are oriented neither towards what members consider important areas of governmental activity nor to what they perceive as their constituents’ main interests but to day-to-day events and political strategy.

A Scalogram Analysis of Election Returns

In this paper the author uses Guttman's technique, which has been called “scalogram analysis,” to show that there is one major dimension in election returns. The data submitted to analysis are Quebec provincial elections returns, by constituencies, from 1936 to 1966. Election years and constituencies are ranked in such a way as to form the best scale, that is to say, the scale where the number of “errors” is minimized. As a matter of fact, this number is small enough, in the present case, to conclude that election returns may be explained by one very major dimension. Moreover, many of the errors are quite significant. But the problem is to determine what is the major dimension in the scale. For that purpose, the author isolates four dimensions: the socio-economic, the partisan, the political, and the personal. After reviewing each of them, he comes to the conclusion that no dimension other than the political one can be the major dimension in the scale. It is to be noted that the late V. O. Key, Jr., came to the same conclusion, by another way, in his The Responsible Electorate. The last part of the paper contains some remarks on the limits of scalogram analysis, as applied to election returns, plus some clues on the practical advantages in such analysis for political parties.

Concepts and Analytical Techniques of Administrative Phenomena

Among the phenomena inherent in administrative activities, four key categories may be distinguished: (1) the “duties” of the administration which give rise to whole families of activities and operations; (2) administrative “roles” which facilitate execution of these duties and provide the functional means for their execution; (3) administrative “organs” or institutions, charged with exercising the executive powers and which organize the agents assuming various administrative roles; and (4) the administrative “process” or information exchange circuits which inter-connect administrative duties, roles, and organs.

It is argued that the roles emerge from the type of operation, that the organs are, in several forms, postulated by the types of roles, and that the administrative processes are brought into being by the differing outcomes of the work of the administrative organs. We have here the embryo of a structural-functional theory of administration.

The thesis is presented throughout as a method of analysing the organization and operation of administrative institutions and as a means which may be used for reforming them. Such an analytical system could serve as a bridge facilitating comparative analysis of different administrative institutions and as the administrative element of a general theory of politics.