Essay title: Compare and contrast pluralist and ruling elite accounts of political power in the UK and US.

Today there are pluralist influences as well as pluralist essences in both the US and UK politics. They both have social pluralism, according to sheer sizes of their citizens with different interests, ethnics or religions; this also prevents everyone from taking part in the government and instead, a representative is chosen to govern on behalf of the people. The two countries also acquire 7 necessary features: free and fair elections, elected officials, inclusive suffrage, right to run for office, free speech, associational autonomy and alternative sources of information. However, the US politics is said to be more pluralism than that of the UK. This can be seen in the fact that the US is bigger than the UK and therefore need a bigger system of government so as to put the whole country under easier control. All seven recognised features of a pluralist democracy are both embodied in the US written Constitution, which the UK does not have an official written one. American institutions are seperated; they share power disperse and fragmented government power. American power is shared between the national government in Washington and in the other 50 individual states. There is also a tripartite division of powers and functions between the Legislature, to create and pass laws, the Executive, to make decisions and put laws into effect and the Judiciary, to adjudicate in case of dispute or to determine whether the law has been broken. This suggests that a plurality of interests can be represented and ensures that not any person can monopolise powers. The system of staggered elections also prevents a single group taking possession of all three institutions at the same time. This is very different from the UK, whose Parliament can make or unmake any law due to the power monopolisation it holds. In addition, the US president cannot serve for more than eight years, which is an outstanding pluralist feature suggesting that a continuous or permanent ruling elite is impossible.

Whilst the US politics is refered as above as being more pluralism, the UK politics shows a more elitist characteristic to power in which it is both centralised and concentrated with only one group; that is Parliament. Above all, the British Parliament has the greatest possessing power and there are apparently no other equivalent groups to it. This UK's more elitist feature can be shown more obviously when looking at the two most important leading positions of the two countries: the US President and the UK Prime Minister. The US president could possibly be described as weaker in comparison to the British Prime Minister. This is due mainly to the powers of the US Congress and the sharing and separation of powers according to the American constitution. Even the foreign policy decisions have to be gone through and ratified by US Congress, namely foreign treaties and the deployment of American troops. In contrast, the UK Prime Minister is on both the executive and the legislature and also appoints judges and thus, can have some of his legislative agendas be passed without the need of ratification of his Parliament. With UK parliamentary majority, the cabinet can make any decisions they want. One very recent example was the raise of University tuition fees towards British undergraduate students regardless of the majority of British citizens opposing this. On the other hand, American constitution only allows Congress to officially declare war on other states while this right is not limited to the UK Prime Minister. This is shown with another example about the issue of the war in Iraq, in which many pressure groups disagreed with and campaigned against Blair's decision to go to war. This, in the end, left no lasting effect on his decision as he made the decision regardless of the opposing of many people. All of these facts seem to prove that the UK politics is more approaching to the ruling elite.

There are knowingly not only pluralist features in the US and UK politics, but also are there ruling elites features. Neither the US politics is totally plain pluralism nor the UK politics is absolutely ruling elites. The reason why the US is said to have some ruling elist features is due to the fact that a lot of money is spent in the preparation for campaigns and voting appeal for the Presidence elections; this limits the possibility that any other weaker Party or any individual competor could enter the competition. Therefore, there are only two American parties most capable and likely to compete with each other, which are the Democrats and Republicans. As Joseph Schumpeter has stated, democracy only equals to the fact that people have the chance to accept or refuse the men who are to rule them; indeed they can only choose among the existing possible ones. The pluralists fails to apply their theory on this situation as it assumes the equal possibility and politics equality on every group. In fact, it turned out that there are several leading elites which are stronger than the others. As also in the UK, there are three main political parties, but in the post war era, only the Labour and Tories have been in power. In this case, other parties such as the British National Party are excluded. Some groups, which are seemingly radical, in fact cannot be incorporated into the system of interest group politics, as they oppose the typical consensus of opinion of the majority. Ruling elite theory does also have its negative side, which is said to happen when the recruitment of new people into the ruling group is controlled by the elite itself and an entrance to elite positions equals to 'being sponsored' by the existing elite.

In conclusion, it can be seen that both the US and the UK share the characteristics of not only the pluralist but also the ruling elite. However, the US politics proved to be more pluralism whilst the UK politics approached more of the ruling elite. To be more accurate, the US and UK politics have the characters of pluralist elitism, as Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl synthesised the two theories, which means the government is ruled by a plurality of elites. In my own opinion, both theories have their positive and negative points. Nevertheless, the ruling elite seems to be more realistic to the world in which we are living, because while pluralism sees political parties as trying to share and serve their best for the interests of its citizen, progression means political organisations are increasingly trying to become more outstanding and to be better off than the others and thus becoming more ruling elite, not to mention arguably they have always been.

Bibliography

Dunleavy, Patrick, Theories of the State, London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1987.

Jones, Bill, et al., Politics UK, Edinburgh: Pearson Education Limited, 2001.

Schwarzmantel, J. John, Structures of Power: An Introduction to Politics, Brighton : Wheatsheaf, 1987.

Singh, Robert, Governing America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Young, Ralph, Introducing Government: a reader, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Patrick Dunleavy and Brendan O'Leary, Theories of the States (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1987), 194