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GOVERNMENT/GOVERNANCE


Date: 2015-10-07; view: 462.


In its broadest sense to govern means to rule or control others. Government can therefore be taken to include any mechanism through which ordered rule is maintained, its central features being the ability to make collective decisions and the capacity to enforce them. A form of government can thus be identified in almost all social institutions: families, schools, businesses, trade unions and so on. However, ‘government' is more commonly understood to refer to the formal and institutional processes which operate at the national level to maintain order and facilitate collective action. The core functions of government are thus to make law (legislation), implement law (execution) and interpret law (adjudication). In some cases the political *executive alone is referred to as ‘the Government', making it equivalent to ‘the Administration' in presidential systems. Governmental processes also operate at supranational, regional and local levels.

‘Governance' is a broader term than ‘government'. It refers, in its widest sense, to the various way through which social life is coordinated. Government can therefore be seen as one of the organisations involved in governance; it is possible, in other words, to have ‘governance without government'. The principal modes of governance are *markets, hierarchies and networks. Markets coordinate social life through a price mechanism which is structured by the forces of supply and demand. Hierarchies, which include *bureaucracy and thus traditional forms of government organisation, operate through ‘top-down' authority systems. Networks are ‘flat' organisational forms that are characterised by informal relationships between essentially equal agents or social agencies.

Significance

Government has traditionally been the principal object of political analysis. Some, indeed, identify *politics with government in treating political activity as the art of government, the exercise of control within society through the making and enforcement of collective

decisions. This overriding concern with government has been evident in both *political philosophy and *political science. Political philosophers from Aristotle (384–22 BCE) onwards have evaluated forms of government on normative grounds in the hope of identifying the ‘ideal' *constitution. Similarly, social contract theorists focused political analysis on the nature of governmental authority and the basis of citizens' *obligation to government. Political scientists who adopt the once dominant but still influential constitutional–institutional approach to the discipline also accord government central importance. This involves either analysing the legislative, executive and judicial processes of government and examining the relationships between and amongst different levels of government, or comparing systems of government with a view to developing a broader classification or highlighting the distinctive features of each system.

Some political thinkers have nevertheless questioned whether government is centrally important to politics. In the case of *anarchism, government is rejected as fundamentally evil and unnecessary, political activity focusing upon strategies for its abolition. Liberals, who accept that government is vital, place a heavy emphasis upon the need to check or limit government in view of the potential tyranny it embodies. Marxists and feminists, for their part, tend to treat government as a secondary political formation derived from, or operating within, a wider system of, respectively, class politics or sexual politics. Academic political scientists have also in some ways looked beyond government. *Systems theory, for instance, examines not the mechanisms of government, but the structures and processes through which these interact with the larger society, while political sociology interprets the working of government in terms of wider social structures and power systems.

Governance has become an increasingly popular, if imprecise, term since the 1980s. This reflects a series of changes that have taken place within government as well as in the larger society. These include the development of new forms of public management in which government is increasingly confined to ‘steering' (that is, setting targets and strategic objectives) as opposed to ‘rowing' (that is, administration or service delivery); the blurring of the distinction between government and markets through the growth of public/ private partnerships and the introduction of ‘internal markets'; the recognition of the importance to policy formulation of so-called policy networks; and the emergence of multi-level governmental systems through the impact of *supranationalism and *devolution or *federalism. However, the term ‘governance' still has no settled or agreed definition, and, for some, it conveys an ideological preference for a minimal state or ‘less government'.

 


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