Psychological behaviourism is driven by the belief that the mind is unexaminable, except in anatomical specimens. The only proper subject of study, in humans or other animals, is their behaviour in response to external stimuli. This led some psychologists, notably B. F. Skinner in his briefly notorious Beyond
Freedom and Dignity (1971), to reject the whole of political philosophy and ethics in favour of producing desired social effects by conditioning. A similar gritty positivism underlies economists' insistence that their proper study is revealed preference: what people do as revealed by their choices, rather than what they say they do.
Behaviouralism in political science emerged in the 1940s, was dominant in the United States until the early 1970s, and is still influential. It was driven by similar but less extreme impatience with studying what people said or (said they) thought. Armed with the newly developed tools of survey research, it turned away from the study of constitutions and from saying how states ought to be ruled to the study of the behaviour of political actors and to statements about how states actually were ruled. Behaviourists were mostly drawn to subjects about which quantitative data could be obtained, and thus the study of mass political behaviour was promoted at the expense of studying élites. Behaviourism and rational choice were initially hostile to each other, but have become reconciled.
Top Back - New Search beltway
‘Inside the beltway’ is used to refer to the often inward-looking and selfabsorbed political community of Washington. Events in the country directly affecting ordinary Americans are referred to as ‘outside the beltway’. The term is taken from the sixty-four-mile ring road which encircles Washington, DC and is known as the beltway (Interstate 495).
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Back - New Search Benelux
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Since the foundation of the EEC (now the European Union) the three countries have frequently acted as a bloc.
Back - New Search Bentham , Jeremy
(1748–1832)
Economist, political and legal philosopher, and social reformer. Born in Houndsditch in London, the son of a prosperous attorney and entrepreneur, baptized in Aldgate, sent to Westminster school at the age of seven and then to Queen's College, Oxford at the age of twelve, Jeremy Bentham took his Bachelor's degree four years later in 1763 at the age of sixteen. To further his legal education, he attended the Court of Kings Bench in the student's seat secured by his ambitious father. The law, however, was not his sole concern, despite a lifelong commitment to legal reform, and to penal reform in particular. And, although he was admitted to the Bar, he did not actually practise law. Instead, he became an eclectic, studying the experimental sciences of chemistry and physics as well as the classics, ranging widely from Cicero to Homer. He also read widely in European philosophy, particularly perhaps in Hume , Montesquieu , Joseph Priestley , Hartley , and Beccaria , adopting as a consequence a familiar and orthodox empiricism.
In 1768, during the course of this reading, he came across the expression ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’ in Priestley's Essay on Government. This discovery led to a kind of inner ecstasy. From this point, Bentham became the leading and tireless English advocate of utilitarianism. It was part of Bentham's utilitarianism that each person was to count as one and no more than one, a form of radical egalitarianism which made him unpopular with many contemporaries, a radicalism both confirmed and developed by his association with James Mill which began in 1808. And, although Bentham did not write or campaign publicly for universal suffrage until 1817, after this point he was firmly committed to representative democracy, open government, and annual parliaments, even though he never wavered in his critique of French revolutionary radicalism and its classic doctrines of imprescriptible natural rights and
of a revocable social contract. In the hands of the French, these doctrines were not only politically dangerous, but also philosophically nonsensical. As a liberal constitutional thinker, Bentham can also be plausibly interpreted as a precursor of those who defend the modern welfare state. In his view, the ends of legislation quite properly included subsistence, security, abundance, and equality, and, at different times and in different places, Bentham can also be found advocating sickness benefit, free education, and minimum wages. Perhaps the final word, however, should be left to John Stuart Mill , a radical who was specifically educated to fully develop the legacy of Bentham. In his view, Bentham was the great questioner of established and customary procedures. With his restless and questioning mind, he had been primarily responsible for breaking ‘the yoke of authority’ and for making it necessary for each person to have reasons for his opinions and not merely impulses derived from tradition, habit, or authority. In fact, before Bentham and his utilitarianism, no one had really dared to question the habits of the British constitution and the idiosyncrasies of the English legal system. Bentham's own massive enthusiasm was the instigation of much beneficial practical reform. Without him, and despite his obsessive concerns with the model prison the Panopticon, the cause of liberal-reformism would have been so much weaker and would certainly have rested upon far less substantial intellectual concerns.
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Back - New Search Bentley , A. F.
(1870–1957)
American political scientist; founder of pluralism. Bentley argued that every interest would form its interest group and that the interplay of these interest groups was definitive of democracy: ‘when the groups are adequately stated, everything is stated. When I say everything, I mean everything’, he wrote in The Process of Government (1908). Bentley's approach was refreshingly empirical and pragmatic for its time, but it is no longer accepted that to every potential group there corresponds an actual group. Some
‘groups’ never come into existence, for various reasons; therefore Bentley's normative justification of interest-group lobbying cannot be sustained.
Back - New Search Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was erected in September 1961 to prevent the outflow of skilled manpower from the German Democratic Republic and other Soviet bloc countries into the Western controlled sectors of the city and thence into the West as a whole. It came to symbolize the Cold War and the rigid division of Europe into two armed camps. Its removal in November 1989 had precisely the opposite implications, culminating in the unification of Germany and the end of the Cold War.
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Back - New Search Bernstein , Eduard
(1850–1932)
Leading member of the German Social Democratic Party before 1914. Initiated the debate on revisionism. His The Premises of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (1899—sometimes known as Evolutionary Socialism) argued that socialism was already being realized and there was no need for revolution.
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Back - New Search Beveridge (Report)
William Henry Beveridge , 1st Baron (1879–1963) was author of the ‘Beveridge Report’ (‘ Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services’ 1942), which proposed a comprehensive ‘cradle to the grave’
scheme of social insurance covering all citizens irrespective of income, and which shaped much
subsequent British legislation. Beveridge also wrote two influential reports on unemployment (1909 and 1944) and directed labour exchanges while a civil servant at the Board of Trade. See also welfare state.
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Back - New Search bicameralism
The view that a legislative chamber should be properly composed of two houses. In the majority of states, the second or upper house has a more restricted role, for example limited to checking or delaying legislation introduced in the lower house, but an important exception is the United States where both the Senate and the House of Representatives play an important role in the legislative process. In such a system where the two houses have broadly equivalent power, it is necessary to provide a mechanism to resolve differences between them, such as joint committees. In federal systems, the upper house often represents the units of the federation, which may be given an equal number of seats regardless of their size, as in the United States. In Germany, the consent of the upper house, the Bundesrat, which is not directly elected, is necessary in those areas which directly affect the competence of the federal units or Länder. Purely appointed bodies such as the Canadian Senate, whose members are appointed by the federal prime minister, may lack legitimacy, although one function of that institution has been to provide ministers from provinces where the governing party is weak. The United Kingdom's hereditary and appointed House of Lords has sometimes served as a source of opposition to unpopular government policies. Second chambers differ considerably in their methods of appointment or election, legitimacy, powers, and effective political role, making it difficult to advance a coherent philosophy of bicameralism.
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Back - New Search Big Brother
In George Orwell's 1984, the embodiment of state power is ‘Big Brother’, a middle-aged man pictured almost everywhere and said to be always watching the people. Big Brother was, thus, a powerful, literary image of totalitarianism. His power over the mind is such that the dissident, Winston Smith , finally comes to love Big Brother at the end of the book. For Orwell , he combined elements of Hitler and Stalin, but perhaps also Lord Reith (the first chairman of the BBC), God, and Winston Churchill . The image of Big Brother has entered political language and propaganda and is used to connote the all-embracing power of the state.
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Back - New Search bill
Proposed legislation which has not yet been enacted. In the United Kingdom there are two types of bill:
public and private. Public bills presented by ministers in the House of Commons, which take up the most parliamentary time, follow a set procedure, which is also followed for other public bills and private bills but with some variations. A bill in its original form is merely a short title, usually with an explanatory memorandum signed on the back by the minister in charge. It is read for the first time in the House of Commons. Upon passing, a complete draft of parts or chapters, classes, and schedules is drawn up and submitted for a second reading in the House. Here members debate the general principle and purposes of the bill. If the vote to confirm the second reading is won the bill is then committed to a standing committee to debate the detail. Complex bills may be referred to a select committee first, which then passes its recommendations to the standing committee. For some bills, notably finance bills, the detail is debated by a committee of the whole house and/or a standing committee. A bill is then reported to the House complete with suggested amendments from the committee stage. During the report stage these and any further amendments are debated in the House. Ultimately, the bill complete with agreed amendments is then given its third reading, and upon passing is submitted to the House of Lords. Generally, the Lords
agree suggested amendments to the bill after which it is returned to the Commons. Members may then debate only the amendments suggested by the Lords and pass on their views. This continues until agreement is reached. The bill in its final form is then taken to the monarch by the clerks of the House of Lords for royal assent. When this is received the bill becomes an act and a date of commencement for the act coming into force may be set. A bill may be defeated on a vote at any of the three readings in the House of Commons and by the House of Lords. A bill may also be lost by being talked out in the Commons and in committee. Governments anxious to prevent this resort to the guillotine procedure, by which a time limit for each stage of a bill's passage is set. Ultimately, the Commons has supremacy under the 1911 and 1949 Parliament Acts and can override a Lords' veto by passing a bill twice in successive sessions.
Similar procedures are in force in the US Congress, whose procedural rules were derived from eighteenth-century British parliamentary usage, except that the separation of powers ensures that there is no such thing as a government bill. However, Congress, like other genuinely bicameral legislatures, requires a conference procedure to reconcile versions of bills produced by the two houses.
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Back - New Search bill of attainder
A law that indicates the guilt of an individual without trial. In effect, this transfers the functions of ascertaining guilt and sentencing from the judiciary to the legislature. Under Article One, sections nine and ten of the US Constitution, ‘No Bill of Attainder shall be passed by either Congress or State legislature’. Acts of Attainder were employed by the British Parliament between the fifteenth and early eighteenth century, but have not been used since.
Back - New Search bill of rights
A statement of the privileges, immunities, and authorities to act that may be legally and morally claimed by the citizens of a state within the bounds of reason, truth, and the accepted standards of behaviour.
Written constitutions normally include clauses designed to protect fundamental human rights against encroachment by the state. In France this was the purpose of the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 and the Preamble to the Constitution of 1946, both of which were incorporated in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic of 1958. The first ten amendments to the United States Constitution provide one of the best-known examples of a bill of rights. The First Amendment, for instance, enshrines the freedom of religion, the right of free speech and of the press, and the right of the people to assemble and to petition the government for the redress of grievances. The Second Amendment concedes the right ‘to keep and bear Arms’ while the Fifth protects individuals against self-incrimination and requires that no one ‘be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law’. Originally, these provisions were added to the Constitution to ensure that the rights of the people were not violated by the federal government, but in the twentieth century the US Supreme Court has drawn on the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, to apply the bill of rights to the governments of the states. The provisions of a bill of rights such as those found in the United States, Germany, and France cannot be altered by statutory law; like the rest of the constitution they are part of the ‘higher law’ not subject to change except by the extraordinary processes of constitutional amendment.
The idea of fundamental, inviolable, human rights is rooted deep in the history of Western civilization.
Magna Carta (1215) was, in part, a statement of human rights, including most famously in clause 39 the right to due process: ‘No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor send upon him, except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.’ But Magna Carta was an accord between King John and his barons rather than constitutional or even statutory law. On the other hand, the Bill of Rights, enacted
by Parliament in 1689, was a statute concerned primarily with curtailing royal prerogative and asserting the rights of the legislature while also including some provisions designed to protect individual rights.
Subjects were accorded the right to petition the monarch; provided they were Protestants they were allowed to retain arms for their defence and they were granted immunity from excessive bail or fines.
However, this was not a bill of rights comparable to those that later emerged in other countries in that it could be overturned by an Act of Parliament. A better precedent was provided by the Charter or Fundamental Laws of West New Jersey (1677). This secured the right to due process and trial by jury and protected religious freedom while specifically excluding the possibility of such rights and privileges being denied by legislative authority.
It is frequently argued that a bill of rights is needed in the United Kingdom to defend the rights of the individual against overbearing public authorities. Opponents of this view argue that human rights are adequately protected by common and statutory law. Others claim that the introduction of a bill of rights would lead to a politicization of the judiciary and express concern that the entrenchment of such rights in a written constitution would compromise the sovereignty of Parliament, supposedly one of the cornerstones of democracy in this country.
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Back - New Search Black , Duncan
(1908–91)
Scottish economist; one of the modern pioneers of analytically rigorous political science. From his time as a student of physics and economics in Glasgow (1929–33), he dreamt of formulating a ‘Pure Science of Politics’ in which any political system could be represented by a set of definitions and axioms. His most important contribution, the median voter theorem, came to him while firewatching in 1942. The median voter theorem states that if all members of a voting body (committee, legislature, or electorate) recognize one main dimension in politics (left-right, for example, so that all leftists like the rightmost option least, all rightists like the leftmost option least, and everybody else dislikes an option more the further it is from their favourite position), then the median voter's favourite position will win in any reasonable voting procedure. Hence the median voter may stand for the whole voting body. The median voter theorem does not necessarily hold in more than one dimension, as Black was the first to see, because then there is always the possibility of majority-rule cycling. But where one dimension dominates the others, as in Congressional committees or (probably) UK voting behaviour in general elections, it is a powerful predictor of convergence on the median voter's position. In the long run, politicians who diverge far from this are unlikely to be successful, even if protected by an electoral system for some time.
Back - New Search Black Caucus
An informal organization of African-American legislators found in the United States Congress, and in some state legislatures. The Congressional Black Caucus, established in 1969, exists to influence the making of public policy and to advance the interests of black Americans.
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Back - New Search Black Panthers
The Black Panther Party, formed in California in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale , comprised a relatively small body of vociferous black militants, who dabbled in Marxism—Leninism, made some use of revolutionary rhetoric, and became involved in shoot-outs with police in California and New York.
Despite a great deal of wild talk, however, the published programme of the Black Panthers was moderate, non-Marxist and non-revolutionary. By 1975 the party had become small and insignificant and fully committed to working within the existing system.