The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (233 page)

Defined in A. H. Birch's
Representative and Responsible Government
in terms of a government that is responsive to public opinion, that pursues policies that are prudent and mutually consistent, and that is accountable to the representatives of the electors.
WG 

 
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In general, any scheme for balancing taxing and spending between tiers of government, especially in federal systems. Without revenue sharing, rich regions of a country will be able to raise more than poor regions, but require to spend less. Therefore, any country in which there is pressure for redistributive politics will face pressure for revenue sharing, even if its constitution divides the power to tax among tiers of government. In particular, the term is used in the United States to denote arrangements whereby federal revenue is shared with state and local governments, with certain conditions attached.

 
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Any critical departure from the original interpretation of Marxist theory. The term originating during the Second International and associated with
Bernstein's
critique of the theoretical premisses and political strategies of
Marxism
. He argued that Marx's analysis of the inevitable crisis of capitalism was not in fact happening. Monopoly capital had proved resilient to crises of production and used imperialist expansion as a safety valve for surplus value. Social polarization was not occurring: the working class was not increasingly impoverished, a new middle class was emerging and the peasants were not disappearing. Bernstein believed that it would be possible to move towards socialism within the present democratic framework with mass socialist parties seeking electoral collaboration with other progressive forces. He was influenced by
Fabian
ideas concerning the permeation of the state. Bernstein contended that he was only giving a conceptual perspective to a situation that already existed in Germany and England. Subsequently, the revisionist label has been applied in a pejorative manner to any significant reinterpretation of classical Marxist theory which is seen to point in a reformist direction.
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The overthrow of an established order which will involve the transfer of state power from one leadership to another and may involve a radical restructuring of social and economic relations. Before 1789 the word often meant, truer to its literal meaning, a return to a previous state of affairs; since the
French
Revolution, the modern meaning has expelled this one.
Revolutions are processes incorporating both élite competition and mass mobilization. Their causes are long in gestation—so that they may appear to occur spontaneously—and will have both domestic and international roots. Their outcomes differ from the original objectives of their participants. It is difficult to identify when revolutions begin and end. There have been many revolutionary situations which have not resulted in revolutionary outcomes. The small number of recognizably ‘great’ Revolutions creates methodological problems for comparative analysis.
One can differentiate between political and social revolutions. A political revolution produces changes in the character of both state power and personnel. It lasts until the monopoly of control and force of the old is broken and a new hegemonic group reconstitutes the sovereign power of the state. It may provoke a counter-revolution and sometimes a restoration. Social revolutions (which are far rarer) involve political and social transformations, class struggle, and pressure for radical change from below. This mobilization may be manipulated by other actors to achieve their own objectives, which may be opposed to those of the popular classes. Revolutions are perceived and experienced differently according to the actors' positions within the process. The depth of social transformation will depend upon the intensity of class struggle, the nature of class alignment, the strategy, organization, and leadership of the revolutionary forces, and the resilience of the incumbent authorities.
Karl Marx described revolutions as ‘the locomotives of history’. The most succinct presentation of his views on how history progresses is found in the Preface to the
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(1859). New modes of production (feudalism, capitalism, socialism) were generated within the confines of the existing one. Revolutions were caused by the development within a mode of production of a contradiction between the social forces and the social relations of production, with the latter acting as ‘fetters’ upon the former. This expressed itself in the intensification of class conflict, ushering in what Marx called ‘the epoch of social revolution’. Each proto-revolutionary class developed consciousness of itself through economic and political struggles against the existing dominant class. The result would be the emergence of new relations of production and their accompanying ideological forms, and the eventual establishment of
hegemony
by the triumphant revolutionary class.
Marx stressed that no social order ended until all scope for the development of its productive forces had been exhausted and the new relations of production had matured within its ‘womb’. Although speculating on the possibility of peaceful transition in a few mature democratic states (Great Britain, United States), he argued that the bulk of socialist revolutions would be violent. His theory was based upon the premiss of revolutions occurring in highly industrialized states whereas the experience of this century has been of revolution in semi- and underdeveloped societies.
Rather than viewing them as progressive and inevitable, many writters have sought to understand the roots of social instability and political violence in order to pre-empt revolutions. Functionalism depicted society as being in a state of permanent, self-regulating equilibrium and viewed revolutions as profoundly anti-social—what Chalmers Johnson in
Revolutionary Change
(1966) termed ‘dysfunctional’—events which must be avoided. Political authority was legitimized by social consensus concerning political norms and roles. So long as this consensus persisted then governments could make necessary adjustments, even implementing quite radical reforms. A skilful government would be able to neutralize the impact of innovatory ideas, events, and processes (known as ‘accelerators’), but a government which lost its political nerve would revert to coercion and might provoke revolution. Charles Tilly also stressed the importance of conflict management by élites (for example, in from
Mobilization to Revolution
, 1978).
Another approach has been to depict revolutions as socio-political crises produced by the dislocations of modernization. For
Tocqueville
writing about the
French Revolution
of 1789, revolutions occurred when previously encouraged expectations that things would continue to get better were dashed. Revolutions could be fed by both rising and deflated expectations in societies undergoing transition. A modern version of this argument is called the ‘J-curve’ hypothesis (imagine a letter J turned 135 degrees anticlockwise). For Samuel Huntington (
Political Order in Changing Societies
, 1968), revolution was caused by the mobilization of new groups into politics at a speed which made it impossible for existing institutions to assimilate them. Revolution did not happen in established democratic systems, because they had the capacity to broaden participation and incorporate counter-élites whilst maintaining political control. This model defined revolutions as characteristic of developing societies, with modernization emerging on an evolutionary sliding scale.
Theda Skocpol (
States and Social Revolutions
, 1979) criticized earlier models for reductionism (although she herself focused upon only two main causes of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions: political crisis and peasant rebellion). Her structural analysis centred on the decisive and autonomous role the state could play in mediating between groups. There was no underlying logic to revolutionary processes, but rather a complex unfolding of multiple conflicts based upon contradictions inherent in the old regime. Specific revolutions must be analysed in depth before causal patterns could be identified. Skocpol gave little weight to human agency or revolutionary organization. Her somewhat ahistorical model also had little sense of ‘great’ Revolutions influencing each other or other movements.
GS