The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (277 page)

 
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The propensity of voters in the United States to simultaneously cast votes for the candidates of different parties (where straight-ticket voting is the opposite). This widespread practice is a mark of the weakness of party, the importance of personal appeals in American electoral politics, and the effects of
federalism
. It also helps to explain the prevalence of divided government, where one party controls the executive and another the legislature.
DM 

 
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(1907–73)
British sociologist who wrote extensively, both descriptively and normatively, on the welfare state. His main works, written during and in the decade after the Second World War, argue that entitlement to benefits should be a mark of citizenship (‘All collectively provided services are deliberately designed to meet certain socially recognized “needs”). As needs do not rise in line with income, Titmuss argued fervently for universal nonmeans-tested benefits.
Titmuss's most enduring book has proved to be his last, The
Gift Relationship
(1970). This made a powerful case against the involvement of the market in the supply of human blood for medical procedures, and was influential in a shift of US policy (and the maintenance of UK policy) away from market provision and towards voluntary provision.

 
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A variant of communism practised by Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), who led an indigenous partisan army to military victory over the German occupiers in Yugoslavia. This victory gave his party, unlike other governing Communist Parties in Eastern Europe after 1945, a degree of independence that allowed it to introduce a distinctive brand of socialism—Titoism—after the break with Moscow in 1948–9. Titoist socialism abolished central planning and created a form of market economy based on workers’ self-management in industry and private enterprise in agriculture; it transformed Yugoslavia into a genuine federal state; and it abandoned the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party (renamed the League of Communists). Tito himself played a vital role in overcoming regional political and economic difficulties that his policy engendered, as well as historic communal antipathies particularly between Serbs and Croats. None the less, Serbs continued to play the dominant role in the army and police force. After Tito's death, however, centrifugal tendencies grew and, with the crisis of communist rule across Eastern Europe, communists and anticommunists alike adopted extreme nationalist political strategies, leading to civil war in many parts of the country.
SWh 

 
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(1805–59)
French sociologist and political notable whose pioneering study of politics and society in the United States remains among the most empirically rich and theoretically innovative works in contemporary social science. After a spell as a junior magistrate Tocqueville travelled to America with his friend Beaumont , ostensibly to study the American penal system. Tocqueville spent most of the trip however gathering the impressions of American society that formed the basis of his classic
Democracy in America
(first part published in 1835, second part in 1840). Upon his return, Tocqueville entered the Chamber of Deputies, and served briefly as foreign minister under Louis Napoleon following the revolution of February 1848. After the dissolution of the Assembly in 1851, Tocqueville's efforts turned towards a planned multivolumed study of French history (from the eighteenth century to the present). The first volume, a study of the pre-Revolutionary
ancien régime
, appeared in 1856. Plagued throughout his life with ill-health, Tocqueville died in 1859 of tuberculosis.
Tocqueville's study of America was premised on the observation that the modern age had witnessed an ‘egalitarian revolution’—the spread of the normative ideal of equality and of steadily equalizing social conditions had undermined the former aristocratic order throughout Europe. Tocqueville sensed (and through his study, confirmed) that the most viable political form for such a radically new sociological climate was democracy, whose ‘image’ he found in the American republic. Tocqueville's book should thus be read as an essay for a European audience uncertain of its own political future, and its tone is that of excitement at a genuine sociological discovery.
Tocqueville's concern in the book is with the civic dimensions of democracy. Using the (perhaps unrepresentative) model of the New England township, he details an elaborate institutional design that grounds the principle of ‘popular sovereignty’. Power was decentralized to facilitate popular control, and participation promoted through institutions such as jury service and, most importantly, elections (which instil responsible citizenship and ‘rational patriotism’, and check the actions of public officials). Yet one of Tocqueville's most significant theoretical innovations was his observation of the democratic benefits of a rich associational life in sustaining the civic habits of self-government. More broadly, he understood that the vitality of democratic society rested on certain shared practices or republican ‘mores’. Religion, for example, is important to the degree that it promotes civic values. For the sake of republican stability, religion should assure its followers of their future reward in heaven, and discourage any striving for transforming the earth.
Despite his obvious admiration for American republicanism, much of Tocqueville's analysis is devoted to the sociological problems engendered by democratic life. Democracy ‘serves the well-being of the greatest number’, yet it brings with it a tolerance for mediocrity that disturbed the aristocrat within Tocqueville. In politics, the electoral mechanism means that the most able do not necessarily govern, and that present goods are rarely sacrificed for future benefits. Of most concern is the possibility of the ‘tyranny of the majority’. Tocqueville is worried not about majorities as persistent political factions in a Madisonian sense. Rather, he is referring to the oppressive effects of popular opinion, the contempt of the masses for the potentially enlightened minority. Tocqueville also laments the tendency to isolation (anomie) resulting from the destruction of the traditional institutions of the aristocratic order. The danger of ‘individualism’ is that citizens withdrawn from society are open to exploitation by potential despots. Participation in civic life should thus be understood as much more than altruistic activity—it is a necessary condition for sustaining individual liberty (‘self interest rightly understood’).
Tocqueville's second important work,
The Old Regime and the French Revolution
(1856), is as much a profession of personal belief and a commentary on his own times as an historical account of eighteenth-century politics. Its themes are familiar—the intention is to show the way in which the Revolution displaced the aristocratic order and replaced it with a society of anomic individuals ripe for despotism in the form of Bonapartism. Yet Tocqueville finds the disjunctures between the ‘old order’ and the Revolution less striking than the continuities (bureaucratic paternalism, a large and independent peasantry, and, most importantly, excessive administrative centralization, a theme that had been anticipated in his reflections on the history of the Second Republic in the
Souvenirs
). Tocqueville's account of the collapse of the old order is liberal in its attribution of blame. His main targets are a persistently corrupt nobility, a monarchy embroiled in ill-judged legal and fiscal manoeuvres, and lastly a wild utopianism inspired by the spirit of equality but spearheaded by irresponsible rogue intellectuals. He argued that the Revolution occurred not at the depths of misery but when rising political expectations had been dashed.
Although often accused of inaccuracy in his empirical work and confusion in his use of theoretical terms (in particular, his interchangeable use of ‘democracy’ for ‘equality’, and of ‘liberty’ for ‘self-government’), Tocqueville's conceptual and methodological innovations are undeniable. His insights on the relationship between the individual and society remain as brilliant and relevant today as they were 150 years ago. Put simply, Tocqueville studied politics by studying individuals and their associations, rather than constitutions. Tocqueville's work thus constitutes a vital landmark in the emergence of modern sociology and ‘a new political science’.
SW