improvement. Following series of agreements on autonomy for some of the
Occupied Territories in the mid-1990s Arafat became President of the
Palestinian National Authority. Divisions within the movement began to re-
emerge soon after, however, and as conflict with Israel resumed at the
beginning of the 21st century, with an apparently impossible impasse over
Israel’s refusal to remove its settlers from areas the Palestinians regard as crucial
to their further development towards statehood, the dominance of Fatah over
the PLO, faced with both Islamist and secular opposition within Palestine, and
reduced credibility abroad following the resumption of violence, appeared
tenuous.
Pluralism
Pluralism is both a technical term in political science, and an evaluative word
for a form of government, often used as a defence of what might otherwise be
calledliberal democracyor representative democracy. Technically a
pluralist political system is one that has several centres ofpowerandauthority,
rather than one in which the state is the sole controller of people’s actions.
Thus medieval society in Europe, where themonarchyand the church were
co-equal rulers in their different spheres, and where craft corporations and
feudal landlords also had a claim to the obedience of citizens, was truly
pluralist. Nowadays, although the doctrine is slightly more complicated
because a modern state will not accept formally that there are rival but equal
sources of power and foci of legitimacy, it can be argued that societies like those
of the USA, the United Kingdom and Western European countries in general
are effectively pluralist. So, for example, trade unions and industrial associa-
tions, along with political parties and perhaps the administrative bureaucracy,
effectively share power with the official government and legislature. One
version of the pluralist thesis wants to attach major significance to the multiple
and cross-cuttinginterest groupsandpressure groupsthat exist in a
modern society, or even to the multiplicity of social and ethniccleavages,
to argue that power and authority are widely dispersed in a pluralist Western
democracy. In its modern form the theory of pluralism is rooted in thegroup
theoryapproach ofBentleyto the nature of society, but it was mainly
developed by American political scientists after the Second World War, during
the growth of thebehaviouralmovement. Such writers as RobertDahl
undertook studies of power in local communities, and when they were unable
to show that effectiveparticipatory democracycontrolled affairs, argued
instead that societies such as the USA were controlled by alternating and rival
e ́lites representing different interests. As power was disaggregated in this way,
and, according to the theory, all legitimate groups got some say in decision-
making, the essentially ‘democratic’ nature of the societies was claimed to be
Pluralism