For an increasing proportion of the United Kingdom population, protests and direct action have now replaced voting as a way of achieving political goals.

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Assess the view that, for an increasing proportion of the United Kingdom population, protests and direct action have now replaced voting as a way of achieving political goals.

It is believed that for an increasing proportion of the United Kingdom population that protests and direct action have now replaced voting as a way of achieving political goals. However how true is this?

During the 1950s, it seemed like there was a degree of political consensus.

Functionalist argued that class struggle was on the decline and that the worst excesses of capitalism had been overcome by the mixed economy and the welfare state. 

Classical pluralism is a theory of political power that claims that in western democracies power is dispersed amongst many competing groups. Pluralists argue that Power is diffuse rather than concentrated and that in society a large number of groups represent all the significant and different interests of the population. These groups compete with each other for influence over government. All these groups accept the legitimacy of the decision making process and of its outcome, and the competition between groups ensures that no one group dominates.

This classical pluralist position is no longer regarded as an accurate description of the distribution of power in contemporary liberal democracies. Increasingly, theorists are adopting what is called the 'elite pluralist position'.

The development of the elite pluralist position has emerged in Dahl's, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, 1982. Elite pluralism is a version of classical pluralism, which accepts that power is unevenly distributed. They see power as shared amongst a small number of competing elites.

Marxists believe that throughout history power has been concentrated in the hands of a few people in society (The ruling class). Marxists believe that power of control is based on their ownership and control of the economic system and they hold a zero-sum approach of power (Which assumes that the total amount of power in society is fixed). The dominant group uses power to further its own interests, which conflict with the rest of society. The acceptance of ruling class dominance is an aspect of false consciousness and ideological hegemony. The inequalities that stem from the relation to the means of production extend into other areas of social life such as the legal, medical and education system.

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In Marxist theory, it was the 60s and early 70s that saw the debate focussed around the differing views of instrumentalists and structuralists. The instrumental position was associated with the work of Ralph Miliband, and the state was seen as an instrument of the ruling class. The state, according to Miliband, takes decisions, which directly favour the owners and controllers of capital. This is done for three reasons. Firstly the state personnel are drawn from the same social background, the state is capitalist and in order to protect it, they must encourage capital accumulation, and lastly in a capitalist society, the ...

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