Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

331----- ----- ---Civil Society and the Political Public Sphereing of politics-according to which political and administrativepower represent merely different manifestations of social powertobuild a bridge between the liberal model of democracy introducedabove and empirical science. Social power is measured interms of the ability of organized interests to have their way. Movingup through party competition and general elections, social poweris converted into a political power distributed between the incumbentGovernment and the opposition. This political power is inturn employed within the framework of constitutionally allocatedpowers and authorities so that, via the legislative process andadministrative apparatus, the policies emerging from the channeledinterplay of social forces can be converted into bindingdecisions and programs to be implemented. Moving back down inthe opposite direction, administrative power is deployed to affectparliamentary will-formation and the interplay of organized interests.These interests, for their part, also get the chance to have adirect influence on policy formation and the use of administrativepower. According to this model, a circular process is establishedthat connects the clients' social power with the parties' acquisitionof political power, the legitimation process with governmentalservices and administrative operations, and this implementationprocess again with the clients' initial claims. For the normativeevaluation of these processes, the decisive assumption is that socialpower is more or less equally distributed among the relevant socialinterests. Only then can the balance of social forces and pressureskeep political power circulating in such a way that the politicalsystem copes with the submitted claims as effectively as possible andsatisfies social interests as equally as possible.The sociological account of pluralism managed to link up withthe normative model of liberalism by means of a simple substitution,namely, by replacing the individual citizens and their individualinterests with large organizations and organized interests.2 Itassumed that all politically relevant collective actors enjoy roughlyequal opportunites to influence the decision-making processesthat concern them; that the members of the organizations determinethe politics of pressure groups and parties; and that the latterin turn are pushed by multiple memberships into a readiness forcompromise and the integration of interests. Under these conditions,pluralist democracies should project the social balance of