"A Better System of Prisons?" On Decentralization and Participation in America
Lipsitz, Lewis
Adieu Prince I have tasks a sewer project And a decree on prostitutes and beggars I must also elaborate a better system of prisons Since as you justly said Denmark is a prison... ....
...See the table entitled "Attitudes Towards Political Institutions...
...And there will have to be many solutions...
...Professional and guild autonomy has been readily sacrificed for narrow economic advantage...
...A BETTER SYSTEM OF PRISONS...
...In all such cases, various mixes of central-local initiative might be worked out, depending on the circumstances...
...Yet, we might conclude that they both should take extended vacations...
...From Lowi's point of view, such a development, like the rest of interest-group liberalism, will only serve to fragment governmental authority, to create laws without standards, and to undermine the legitimacy of the political order...
...The question here is, wouldn't some local organization among poor whites, on a nonracist basis, help to create the preconditions for a better life for the poor in America generally...
...In the meantime, localism can be a considerable virtue if it does not lose sight of the larger issues...
...Many, in all classes of society, feel the pinch and are not certain that the future will be better...
...Has it ever done anything to hurt you...
...The other ground is the resonance set going between leader and followers when communication "makes sense...
...How much participation does it take to create a healthy personality...
...In contrast to this bureaucratic conception of authority, Schaar describes what he calls "natural" or "human authority...
...8 Trans-action, December 1969...
...They could not reasonably hope, locally, to determine the size of the welfare budget or the definition of poverty...
...We hear about troubles caused in a particular town, or the pacification produced...
...That was welfare and old age benefits...
...276-327...
...They helped me with that, with her care and upkeep...
...But the local people would also recognize that the financing of the welfare system was a matter beyond local control, as would be the definition of eligibility...
...Perhaps he is communicating to us the emptiness of a politics that is without tragedy and inner questioning...
...As one further preliminary to answering these questions, we can turn briefly to some data on the attitudes of the poor in a city I have studied, Durham, North Carolina...
...That version of the essay will appear in Politics, Public Administration, and Neighborhood Control, H. George Frederickson, ed., and is scheduled for publication by the Chandler PublishingCompany of San Francisco for early 1972...
...This sort of authority involves a kind of knowledge which includes intuition, insight, and vision as indispensable elements...
...No...
...today will be a real improvement or simply create a "better system of prisons...
...In order to make up our minds, we would be wise to inquire about Denmark itself...
...Paul Goodman, an early advocate of decentralization and citizen participation, has cautioned that the present movement toward local control and self-determination could well be a dead end, leading to the development of enclaves of neglect, like the Indian reservations .8 Looking at the problems of the poor, for example, we can see that local control and decentralization will not in themselves avail much...
...It might ask that the office remain open on weekends when it would be easier for working people to get there...
...He can respond to this strain constructively or destructively, depending on who he is and what the situation allows.9 The demands for participation and decentralization have commonly put considerable strains on bureaucrats at many levels who, starting with inadequate resources, have found their routines s Michael Lipsky, "Street-Level Bureaucracy and the Analysis of Urban Reform," to appear in Politics, Public Administration and Neighborhood Control (op...
...Some real innovation is called for within bureaucracies, and clearly some of this is coming...
...In the end, however, Schaar, while recognizing a "crisis" of authority, e Legitimacy in the Modem State," in Power and Community, Green & Levinson, eds., (New York: Pantheon, 1970), pp...
...Second, the national majority willing to create and enforce new standards of social justice does not yet exist...
...6 Paul Goodman, "The Limits of Local Liberty," New Generation, Summer 1969...
...Fortinbras, just returned from battle, stands with him on the stage...
...But it is just this matter of degree that makes for sharp contrast between our political system and, say, the Scandinavian countries where Labor and Social Democratic parties have been able to incorporate a considerably larger percentage of working- and lower-class groups...
...They are upset by overwhelming external force.2 W W E MUST NOTE here that the Democratic party has, as Burnham himself notes, mobilized some of the less privileged groups in America...
...Arthur Waskow, for example, in a recent discussion of police argued that community control is both workable and a reasonable solution to many of the abuses that currently plague minority areas.8 But in Waskow's argument, as in much of the current literature about local control, it is not made clear how community power will serve other than essentially defensive functions...
...We must face the fact that without a significant restructuring of national priorities, without alterations in our social system, much local work will be in vain...
...Finally, we find that when asked whether the poverty program would help most of the poor, or only a few, 60 percent of the Negroes and three-quarters of the whites, perhaps wisely, said they didn't know...
...Yet, even if we knew these men better than we do, how should we decide between them...
...Many of these developments impinge most directly on the poor and the powerless who must bear the brunt of those changes they cannot halt...
...detachment of personal feelings...
...The sixties were a time for questioning the "legitimacy" that social scientists believed was so solid in the late fifties...
...Not that I know anything about...
...A BETTER SYSTEM OF PRISONS...
...In our time, Schaar writes, "the established processes and formal structures of control are at war with the conditions necessary for authority...
...Then we hear Fortinbras speak the words quoted above...
...It has also been marked repeatedly by redefinitions—by no means always broadening ones—of those who are permitted to play...
...Yet Lowi is missing part of the point...
...It is shot through with escalating tensions, periodic electoral convulsions and repeated redefinitions of the rules and general outcomes of the political game...
...Or the community might seek a say in hiring, hoping to get jobs for their own, or to make sure that the people who process applications would have a real "understanding" of local problems—perhaps even down to the first names of clients...
...The biggest problem I have is worrying about health and things like that...
...In addition to the strong dose of mistrust seen in these responses, we also find that two-thirds of these men believe that half or more of all Americans are poor...
...The answer is, clearly, yes...
...They obscure the limits of what is possible by defining the possible without context...
...Yes, my social security and the protection and all they give me in this country...
...It will increase chaos...
...What they seek is both control and control over something worth having, and these are not necessarily the same...
...How then can this be done...
...Here the economically useless, or the marginally useful, find that their condition is a secondary consideration in a profit-oriented economy...
...Approximately 40 percent of the whites and approximately 30 percent of the Negroes do not know about Operation Breakthrough, although this community ac tion program was extremely controversial and made the papers frequently...
...On these scores, much has gone wrong in our society...
...He appears capable of assuming power while Hamlet has seemed barely able to maintain control over himself...
...No, I can't say that it has directly...
...Until we can grasp the larger context, we cannot make a decision about who is to rule...
...They haven't hurt you...
...He points out that many of the most promising avenues of local initiative have not been developed very effectively...
...Poor whites, on the other hand, have rarely demanded any local control since they accept their situation fatalistically and, despite deep resentments, are unable to organize themselves...
...for example, altering national priorties in such a way that health care, housing, education, apprenticeship training, and the a See the discussion in Elizabeth Tornquist, "Standing Up To America," New South, Fall 1969...
...This means that a significant portion of the American population has not been educated about economic and class-related issues and that it does not see a clear relationship between its problems and politics...
...First, the bureaucrat's self-image, although it incorporates professional standards and norms of due process, also should involve a commitment to equality and dignity...
...The same contrast holds in regard to trade unionism...
...Has the state government ever done any thing to hurt you...
...Quotes are from the latter...
...As is well known, American political parties are not instruments of collective purpose, but of electoral success...
...Third, interestgroup liberalism has its reasonable aspects, and is not likely to disappear soon...
...This "rationality" involves: depersonalization...
...A BETTER SYSTEM OF PRISONS...
...In addition, over the last 20 years in this country, the distribution of wealth has re mained relatively unaltered...
...In any case, it seems reasonable to suppose that the failure to re distribute wealth in recent years, though not "A BETTER SYSTEM OF PRISONS...
...I don't ever want to talk about them crackers in Raleigh...
...Moreover, bureaucrats need to think carefully about the very programs they administer, whose content they cannot take for granted simply because they have proceeded down the line of command...
...One who possesses and values this kind of knowledge bases his claims to its validity on grounds which are quicksand to the objective and rational man...
...But the bureaucrat is himself, oddly enough, a person, and he often finds himself in a position of great strain...
...The temptation then is to forget about poor white power...
...The audience must choose which man will rule Denmark...
...This is one of the reasons that participation at the workplace might be fruitful and possible...
...Perhaps he is speaking for the dignity of that reformism which aims to obtain as much as it is possible to obtain...
...There has been little mention of workers' management and the kind of education and apprenticeship of the young that are necessary for this...
...Has the city government here in Durham ever done anything that helped you...
...a sense of potency and hope, and the possibility of correcting those priorities close to home...
...Though these are obvious examples, they make clear a more general point: that decentralized control cannot be complete control, that national and/or professional standards ought to prevail regardless of local sentiments in many situations...
...For poor whites particularly, political activity is suspect and political ignorance widespread...
...WHAT LIES BEFORE US then is a politics of slow chaos and possible constructiveness...
...Second, this means that bureaucrats must try to transcend the conflicts and look for a common ground—and often this must involve increased local decision-making...
...For example, here is a fairly typical, positive response, but an unusually revealing one: —What are the biggest problems you face...
...Nearly half of both racial groups have heard neither of the antipoverty program, nor of 4 The Durham survey, based on three- or four-hour interviews with a sample of poor whites andNegroes, was carried out in 1966 and 1967...
...so must police and civil servants...
...Mayakovsky, writing around the time of the Russian Revolution, talked about "crossroads crucifying policemen"—a line that conveys the implacable, tragic, and socially structured conflicts that set men against each other and themselves...
...Despite all of the loose talk about an "affluent society," most Americans are far from economically comfortable...
...Decentralization has already led, and will continue to lead, to a narrowed focus for protest...
...A certain self-awareness and sense of the citizen's potential "activity" comes through in this last answer...
...In contrast to Hamlet's terrible inner conflicts, we sense Fortinbras's blunt decisiveness...
...L L ET'S SAY WE GO TO DURHAM and ask some poor whites and Negroes how they feel about the relationships between themselves and the various levels of government...
...They are reATTITUDES TOWARDS POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS (McClosky, 1956) "` Durham data 1. Govt...
...It follows that once successful routines are established or reestablished for office-winning, very little motivation exists among party leaders to disturb the routines of the game...
...No, that's on the same footing...
...For example, we asked a series of questions about the political parties, the laws, and the relationship between "rich people" and the government...
...Calls for community control of police will not necessarily mean a more effective and intelligent police force, or a more honest one...
...Here considerable experimentation will have to be the rule, both for blacks and for the local bureaucracies with which they deal...
...second, the failure of a major party of the Left to develop in this country, leaving a "hole" in our political system...
...T T HERE ARE MANY PROBLEMS in America, not one...
...Teachers must retain professional standards of their own...
...pays more attention to rich: Yes No Don't know 2. Parties controlled by the rich: Yes No Don't know 3. Laws are rich-man's laws: Yes No Don't know Negroes % 28 41 31 45 41 14 62 35 3 4. Representatives not connected with citizen: Yes 53 No Don't know 21 26 S. Parties are too big: Yes 65 No Don't know 23 12 Whites % National Sample % 60 28 6...
...does not try to predict what new forms of authority may develop in the future...
...In addition, decentralization will lead to increased parochialism and, among blacks, to a focusing-in on the ghetto when it is the very existence of the ghetto that is the problem...
...Yeah...
...If we look at community control of the welfare system, we see a similar pattern...
...But how do poor Americans feel about these matters...
...Community-controlled, policy, for example, should have no power to discriminate among citizens...
...The poor in Durham, the white possibly more than the black, are in need of the effective national movement of the Left that we have lacked for decades...
...We do not know if the bureaucracy is reasonable and sensibly structured, or if it perpetuates its own privileges...
...There are many ambiguities here...
...How much hierarchy is necessary...
...For a fuller discussion, see Lipsitz, in Power and Community...
...Only one successful white neighborhood group was organized in Durham...
...More generally here, the question is, what particular forms of local participation and control might prove interesting and effective...
...A few of the questions just mentioned are, perhaps, real,' but when they are brought to bear on the issues of participation and decentralization in America today, they often function as a disguise for normative preferences...
...Yes, not helped me directly, but they helped when my mother was an invalid...
...LEWIS LIPSITZ Head Start...
...Nor should school boards be capable of resegregating a system...
...The trouble is that teachers, social workers, police and other civil servants get themselves locked into combat with militant local groups...
...In no case do even half of the men say that a particular level of government helped them, or hurt them...
...2 See Burnham's two articles: "The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe," American Political Science Review, March 1965, pp...
...We hear about a federal program undermined, or of small successes in making the bureaucracy knuckle under...
...52 24 24 43.7...
...they mask the real issues rather than unraveling them...
...Millions of American blue-collar workers are still not unionized, and the overall percentage of unionization is far lower than in most West European countries...
...Without a party that consciously aims to organize and politicize those with low incomes and little education, participation will remain low in these groups, and such people will be unable to relate their grievances to larger political questions...
...For example...
...LEWIS LIPSITZ signed to the existence of poverty and largely to their own poverty as well, though this is truer of whites than of Negroes...
...Again, this is talk that needs to be aired, but it does not in itself constitute a broad enough discussion...
...Blacks are attempting with limited success to get into the pluralistic ball game from which they have been effectively excluded...
...Negroes have fought on such issues as desegregation, housing code enforcement, representation on local boards, welfare regulations, health care, employment, and so on...
...We do not know the mentality of the population— if they are tired of war or of peace...
...This same issue of "context" plagues cur "A BETTER SYSTEM OF PRISONS...
...If we x For a discussion of some of these issues amongprofessionals in public administration see Public Administration Review, January-February 1970...
...I don't know anything specific, but they've never done anything to hurt me...
...This is only because it is associated with bureaucrats...
...The important point is not only that people must be engaged in the issues that affect them, but that they only have a chance of becoming engaged when they personally experience the connection between themselves and larger social questions...
...Has the state government ever done any thing to hurt you...
...Like the question about Fortinbras and Hamlet, without some understanding of the political context we cannot know whether decentralization in the U.S...
...Often the debate between proponents and opponents of decentralization and participation appears as if it were a debate over eternal truths...
...What sort of change is taking place...
...Such demands help ensure against a bureaucratic arbitrariness and a coldness that would limit the efficacy of welfare efforts as well as antagonize the local people...
...One way to create it may be through local organizing, as long as these local efforts are not antithetical to broader movements for change...
...Too many taxes, raggedy streets...
...A community predominantly of Chicanos, for example, might reasonably seek a say in the location and weekly schedule of a welfare T Bayard Rustin, "The Failure of Black Separatism," Harpers, January 1970...
...rent discussions of decentralization and participation...
...Burnham's picture of the American party system over time looks like this: . . . the reality of American politics appears quite different from a simple vision of pluralist democracy...
...These positions certainly look friendly to increased participation, but they do not tell us anything about where that participation ought to take place, nor do they tell us anything about the decentralization of bureaucracies and increased citizen involvement at the local level...
...Calls for community control of education, however, will not necessarily mean better schools...
...The changes needed are clear, and many of them cannot be made locally...
...One way to improve upon the obviously inadequate system we have is to bring into it precisely those groups that have been excluded for so long, rather than to freeze out such groups in the name of impartial bureaucratic standards...
...This can probably be accomplished only by more thorough training, better recruiting, and through those changes in the law and the penal system that both minimize and deal reasonably with criminality...
...This is why he ignores the realities of power that would compel him to be more sympathetic to locally, based movements for a voice in decision-making, even if such movements have their shortcomings...
...Here, ideology may be the largest stumbling block if it pits potential allies against each other in struggles for a crumb of the local pie...
...BUREAUCRACY HAS BECOME a dirty word...
...The problems then are different for these groups...
...Here he mistakes the form for the substance of change...
...Some policies must be immune from local decisionmaking, such as the notion of equal treatment itself...
...How fully should professional norms override popular preferences...
...At every turn, we are confronted with massive "unplanned" social changes with profound consequences: migrations from rural areas, environmental pollutions...
...12-22...
...know that libertarian principles are widely held, but opposed by elites, we might favor greater local law-making powers...
...What Goodman is emphasizing here is that concentration on political forms of power and participation provides too narrow a focus...
...Has the state government in Raleigh ever done anything to help you...
...This is not to denigrate what portions of the Democratic party have achieved...
...Bureaucratic action can, also, take on a nonbureaucratic character where needed—modeling itself on an example like Danilo Dolci's "reverse strike" which put unemployed men to work on socially constructive tasks and then called for payment and appropriate acknowledgment...
...But this defensive achievement, preventing abuse, does not reach the fundamental problem: that it is precisely the ghetto areas that need more and better policing...
...Lowi proposes instead the re-creation of a government of laws—the imposition of genuine standards in legislation, particularly standards that would thoroughly and effectively provide Negroes with first-class citizenship...
...And close to half the Negroes and two-thirds of the whites believe there will be the same number or more poor people 10 years from now...
...From the bureaucrat's point of view, there are several things to be done...
...It may be there is a polity for which Hamlet would be suited...
...If I have now established at least a portion of the context for a discussion of the issues involved in participation and decentralization, I have not shown how this context might help us come to some conclusions about these issues...
...Burnham traces the relatively low levels of political participation in America to two primary factors: first, the growth of oneparty systems in many areas of the country after 1896, a situation the New Deal did something, but not enough, to change...
...Just like everybody else, I go along with the state, the people in it...
...One major implication of this is that, as organizations, parties are interested in control of offices but not of government in any larger sense...
...Theodore Lowi, for example, argues in his recent book, The End of Liberalism, that the current press toward decentralization is only a further development of what he terms "interest group liberalism...
...This extends far beyond the immediate political arena itself...
...It is to note, however, the large problem of nonparticipation that America continues to have...
...How then do we establish a meaningful context for deciding about decentralization and participation in the United States today...
...It fought through a few small neighborhood issues.$ Though Negroes in the future may demand greater control over local bureaucracies and decentralization, poor whites are more in need of local organization and are more locked into the feelings of political futility...
...When asked if the governments in Washington, Raleigh, or Durham had ever helped or hurt them, these men responded as indicated in the table below: HAS THE GOVERNMENT EVER HELPED (HURT) YOU...
...Can poor people be rational...
...First, many issues are genuinely local and are rightly dealt with at the community level...
...On the whole, most of the help 588 received from the federal government was seen in terms of social security, public housing, unemployment benefits, and jobs...
...The growth and humanization of the welfare state, the creation of durable political vehicles for popular control, the righting of the blatant and subtle wrongs of our present domestic life, the establishment of a saner set of national priorities, all of these will probably require an interaction between national and local initiatives...
...and another, quite different, that would prosper under Fortinbras...
...4 First, we find a lot of ignorance, especially among poor whites...
...disrupted, their norms challenged, and their motives attacked...
...ZBIGNIEW HERBERT, Elegy of Fortin bras MAGINE, IF YOU WILL, Hamlet alive at the end of Shakespeare's play...
...Increased participation and decentralization have certain obvious virtues, especially when they provide hope to those who have been hopeless and an arena for action to those previously fatalistic...
...Perhaps something about the inevitability of "prisons," social arrangements that deform and punish our capacities for freedom...
...office in its area...
...The first question we need to answer is: how effectively are Americans now participating in political life...
...The future prospects of the Democratic party as a vehicle for social change will depend, in part, on its ability to reduce this problem to smaller dimensions...
...7-28...
...Much of this predominance, however, results from the fact that these men largely do not see the government as hurting them by what it fails to do, but only by the positive harm it inflicts, mostly in the form of taxes...
...And one other very basic characteristic of American party politics that emerges from an historical overview is the LEWIS LIPSITZ profound incapacity of established political leadership to adapt itself to the political demands produced by the losers in America's stormy socioeconomic life...
...Here people experience at firsthand the impact of social forces beyond their control...
...We have then a long-term fact about the American political system: the failure to fully mobilize the portion of the population that is most likely to support egalitarian so cial change...
...Is the distribution of privileges and deprivations felt to be legitimate...
...Close to 90 percent believe there will always be poor people...
...Here we must hesitate, for we do not know enough to pass judgment...
...Their picture of the world then is not an optimistic one...
...Perhaps, in the context of these examples of combining local and national initiatives, we can turn to the question of whether the usual democratic optimism about decentralization isn't altogether out of place...
...No doubt, I have already argued that participation is lower than it ought to be in America, and that many widespread grievances are not mobilized...
...This is what ranks as unusual...
...But it is equally possible to show that large numbers of Americans show strong mistrust of local and national governments, of courts, and of political parties...
...This criticism has most relevance to poor whites for whom, say, cooperatives might be a way out of passivity...
...LEWIS LIPSITZ But Lowi is right to some degree in his emphasis on standards, because community control cannot, in most cases, mean total control...
...We do not know of mass movements and agitations that may be occurring in the hinterlands...
...and they may also be attracted, when they are aroused, by demagogic or personalist appeals...
...I don't have any too big problems to worry about right now...
...Second, one sees a predominance of "helping" over "hurting," except in the case of Negro feelings about state government...
...Has the state government in Raleigh ever done anything to help you...
...Three quarters of the whites and between 40-50 percent of the Negroes do not know whether or not there is a neighborhood council in their neighborhood...
...PerA somewhat longer version of this essay was prepared for a conference on New Public Administration and Neighborhood Control, held in Boulder, Colorado, in May 1970, and sponsored by theCenter for Governmental Studies, Washington, D.C...
...But then, Hamlet has faced a different series of problems: matters of the inner life, of murder, guilt, love, and salvation...
...But participation is never universal, nor is it necessarily always the greatest value, nor is decentralization necessarily the healthiest or most significant method of solving political problems...
...No...
...What is he telling us...
...To make judgments about the issues involved in decentralization and participation, we have to know more about the polity we're talking about, and about the nature of the times...
...Producers' and consumers' cooperatives are in eclipse...
...All these attitudes exist side-by-side, and choosing to represent only one portion of them distorts both reality and the potentialities of the future...
...interchangeability of individual bureaucrats...
...consciously perceived, has led to feelings of discontent and a certain lack of hope...
...You can't find any one person that can come right out and say the state has done them any harm, any damage, but still, it looks like everything they do, everyone don't agree with it...
...This last point is most significant, Burnham argues, because it means that no party is attempting to mobilize the poorest sectors of the population in any sustained way...
...How to deal with this...
...Third, we see a sharp drop-off in the sense of receiving help from the government, once we focus on the state and local level...
...Can bureaucrats act like human beings...
...If we look more carefully at the comments these men make about the government we find a mix of feelings, ranging from deference, to cynical detachment, to specific criticism, to a sense of loyalty...
...If we look in other ways at their attitudes toward political institutions, we find a heavy dose of mistrust and feelings of alienation...
...John Schaar has argued that what we are seeing is a general crisis of legitimacy in modem societies, a crisis that has multiple roots.s Without exploring Schaar's argument here, let me note that he criticizes the Weberian model of the "rational-legal" form of authority and maintains that the bureaucratic style cannot be a genuinely satisfactory form of authority...
...In fact, I've never called on them to help me...
...In the table below we compare the Durham findings with those of a national sample...
...It is possible, with opinion data, to "prove" that most Americans believe in the "legitimacy" of the national government...
...Third and finally, we must ask about the "legitimacy" of authority structures in America...
...The "community" perhaps can make certain that local enforcement officers are "of" the community and accept the "mores" of the people they police...
...No, they ain't never done nothing...
...I do not propose to attempt a full answer, but only to set out a few main issues for discussion...
...Do people feel it is under reasonable control...
...Next, we find that most poor people do not feel that the government is helping them with their most important problems, which, in their minds, are overwhelmingly financial —problems of food, clothing, shelter, and health care...
...like have the resources necessary to help poor people, and others as well, restructure their lives.7 Local initiative and local conflict can supply, and have already supplied, the beginnings of political organization and self-help...
...Schools, local governments, police, national bureaucracies, major corporations, the military, the electoral process, all have experienced sharp challenges not only to aspects of policy, but to their very styles of functioning...
...It seems extremely quixotic to opt for the form in the absence of substance...
...The blacks, though less fatalistic and better organized, face the formidable barriers to effective access and have the problem of building a sustained movement...
...Lowi's case is convincing at several points...
...Washington Raleigh Durham % % % % % % Helped Hurt Helped Hurt Helped Hurt Negroes 48 21 7 21 21 14 Whites 42 15 23 11 17 4 We can see here, first, a relative absence of the sense of connection with government...
...Has the government in Washington ever done anything to hurt you...
...Herbert McClosky, "Consensus and Ideology in American Politics," American Political Science Review, June 1964...
...If we look at what has happened in Durham in the 1960s we see a history that has many parallels elsewhere...
...It is only the consciousness of this dilemma that may make it possible to break out of it...
...He emphasizes here the specific sort of "rationality" bureaucracies cultivate...
...53 43 4 33.3...
...The second point of reference concerns the rates and meanings of social change...
...Sometimes this combat is fruitful, but often it is not...
...in both theory and practice, the liberty of occupation and function have been neglected...
...We know something about each of them...
...Has the city government in Durham ever done anything to help you...
...For example: __Has the state government in Raleigh ever done anything to help you...
...Again, it is those at the economic bottom of society whose condition has improved least...
...These routines are periodically upset, to be sure, but not by adaptive change within the party system...
...79 17 4 67.5...
...But organizing among the white poor has had only the most limited success, though these people are in no less need of better chances...
...It will undermine authority by leading to differential applications of law in response to community pressures...
...How shall we go about making such a choice...
...In the United States, as Walter Dean Burnham has pointed out, the parties have not performed this function very effectively and, in fact, have deteriorated in these respects since the late 19th century...
...If we know that corporate and economic power is abusive and cannot be controlled locally, we might opt for national regulation...
...Paul Goodman again is a good critic here...
...Others have complaints in which one senses broader frustration: —Has the government in Washington ever done anything to help you...
...n WE LOOK BACK again at the Durham data we can see that local control is itself not simple to accomplish...
...Not that I know anything about...
...Altering political priorities in America will not be accomplished by getting clearer standards into legislation, or as Lowi suggests in a weaker moment, by encouraging the Supreme Court to return to its sick chicken ruling in the Schechter case...
...But this is precisely where Lowi's argument leads...
...One of the foundations is strength of conviction...
...Perhaps something about bureaucratic rule...
...Has the city government in Durham ever done anything to help you...
...Adieu Prince I have tasks a sewer project And a decree on prostitutes and beggars I must also elaborate a better system of prisons Since as you justly said Denmark is a prison...
...What do we find...
...Often people have a sense of governmental inadequacies without being about to pinpoint their own recommendations or complaints...
...haps he is asking us to face the boredom, craft, and tension which are a necessary part of rule...
...Negroes have become more organized and self-conscious and have been somewhat successful in pressuring local government and other local institutions...
...They don't fix the raggedy streets either...
...and 'the End of American Party Politics," Trans-action, December 1969, pp...
...Other discussions focus too narrowly on the more immediate political considerations...
...Has the government in Washington ever done anything to help you...
...51 40 9 32.1...
...Ordinarily, in more-or-less democratic societies, political parties serve as the main forums for political discussion and the main vehicles for participation...
...They have a heavy dose of distrust about government that has surely been thoroughly earned...
...If we know that religious cleavage is acute and destructive and being exacerbated by excessive central regulation, we might opt for greater local autonomy...
Vol. 18 • December 1971 • No. 6
