The following essay by El Inglés is the third in a six-part series that examines the sociopolitical effects of mass immigration into the Western democracies.
Ethno-Religious Diversity and the Limits of Democracy
by El Ingles
Part Three: Homogeneous and Polarized Systems
The first post in this series introduced a statistical analysis of political systems that includes various terms referenced by abbreviations in later parts of the text. For the reader’s convenience, a list of those abbreviations and their meanings is below:
Abbr |
|
Term |
|
Explanation |
PP |
|
Policy Point |
|
Policies actually being implemented by a government at any point in time |
IPP |
|
Individual Policy Point |
|
Policies preferred by an individual |
DI |
|
Discontentedness Index |
|
Distance between the PP and an IPP |
MDI |
|
Mean Discontentedness Index |
|
Average of the DIs of individuals in the population |
TD |
|
Threshold Discontentedness |
|
The level of DI above which an individual considers the government illegitimate |
CZ |
|
Contented Zone |
|
The interior of a circle having a radius of the value of TD |
DZ |
|
Discontented Zone |
|
The area outside the CZ circle |
DZF |
|
Discontented Zone Fraction |
|
The fraction of the population occupying the DZ |
See Part One and Part Two for a more detailed explanation.
Homogeneous and Polarized Systems
Political Systems for Dealing With Moderate Polarization
That a more diffuse distribution of IPPs and the greater political disagreement they represent create problems for democratic polities is well understood by political theorists, even if not in these terms. It is in response to them that democratic polities usually have multi-tiered political systems, systems that can allow these problems to be ameliorated to some extent. Let us consider this important point here by considering a hypothetical two-tier system.
In this system, there are two levels at which democratic politics operates: a national level and a regional level. At the national level, the system works the same way as the systems we have already described. However, at the regional level, the system is split up into two parts. Each part corresponds to a different region of the polity, and each has its own PP and jurisdiction (represented by the straight lines). In these regions, each of which contains only part of the population of the polity as a whole, people are exposed to a regional set of policies too.
Diagram 11 shows this polity at the national level. Here, IPPs are spread out in a band concentrated around the horizontal axis. The DZF is 25%, and we will take the MDI as being 1.8.
Diagram 11
However, we have stipulated that this is a two-tier system, with a regional level of government with its own policies applicable only to people in the region. We represent this regional level in Diagram 12, Here, the blue circular area on the left represents Region A, the green circular area on the right Region B. We see that all IPPs in the regional system diagram are within the regional CZs of their respective regional PPs, set by regional governments. We see that DZFs are now zero for both regions, and we will say that both MDIs have a value of 0.8.
Diagram 12
What is the significance of this? We simply assign a weighting to each level, which represents its political authority as a fraction of all political authority in the system. Using percentages, we will stipulate that in this initial hypothetical example, the weighting is 50:50, meaning that political authority is equally distributed between the two levels. The MDI is therefore 50% of the national MDI plus 50% of the population-weighted average regional MDIs, or 1.3 for the system as a whole, less than the 1.8 it would have been in a single-tier system. The DZF is the average of the national DZF and the regional DZF, and represents a composite picture taking both levels into account. In this case, it is 12.5%, which is (25% + 0)/2.
Thus, by introducing regional autonomy, the system has created greater political stability, with the MDI falling from the original 1.8 to 1.3, and the DZF falling from 25% to 12.5%. If the split were 60:40 national to regional, these figures would be 1.4 and 15% respectively, as the more polarized national politics took on more precedence. If it were 40:60, the figures would be 1.2 and 10% respectively.
Another way of seeing this is to draw the two regional system diagrams independently of each other. Region A looks like this:
Diagram 13
Region B looks like this:
Diagram 14
This makes it clear that, at the regional level for both regions, the systems are fairly politically homogenous, with low MDIs and DZFs equal to zero. Hence their contribution to the political stability of the system as a whole.
The obvious problem with this model as stated is that we have assumed that the distribution of political diversity in the polity is such that political beliefs correlate very strongly with geographical location. What reason is there to expect the people in Region A, for example, to have such similar opinions?
In reality, there is no reason to assume that political beliefs and geographical location correlate so strongly, if at all. Let us make this point clear by re-drawing the two diagrams above in one diagram. Now, the positions of the IPPs have the same significance as always, but instead of fairly arbitrarily drawing a line on the system diagram to create two separate areas, one green, one blue, let us use green and red IPPs to represent which of the two component regions of the country the people represented by the PP live in: Greens live in Region 1, Reds live in Region 2. We stress again that the colours do NOT correspond to political affiliation. Political positions are represented by the positions of the IPPs, as always; it is geographical location that is represented by colour.
In our first version, which is simply Diagram 11 redrawn with colour, the political heterogeneity is matched very well by geographical distribution; people of like political beliefs live in the same regions. The regional diagrams will be the same as Diagrams 13 and 14. MDIs and DZFs for this system will be as they were in the above calculations, as, we say again, this is simply the same system presented differently.
Diagram 15
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