largest democracy in the world, India (Hasan, Sridharan, and Sudarshan 2005 ; Jain
1997 , 198 – 208 , Lijphart 1996 , 258 – 68 ).
Class, at any rate, is not irrelevant and shows up in bold divisions between those
who own and those who do not (Im 1987 , 231 – 57 ). Religion has been the second big
identiWer of those who are ‘‘in’’ and those who are ‘‘out.’’ It has been, and obviously
remains, a profound source of social division. But such social division, in
the countries to which political science has paid close attention, is not that of
preemptory exclusion, but of a variety of forms of discrimination. There have been
times, even in such a country as Canada, with its reputation for moderation,
when religion combined with class made representative government inert
(Gunn 1966 , 185 – 6 ).
The criterion that, in principle, is easy to change, but can be highly exclusionary,
is religion. The question is whether A is a member of a valid religious community is
not made easier by the fact that, under the United States Constitution, Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. As of 1787 , the principle
did not extend to the states: ‘‘Maryland and Massachusetts required a belief in the
Christian religion.’’ The same source says ‘‘Georgia, New Hampshire, New Jersey,
and North Carolina had Protestant tests.’’ Delaware required ‘‘faith in God the
Father, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, One God, blessed
forever more’’(Stokes and PfeVer 1964 , 37 ). It is obvious that such tests would have
been either exclusionary or negated, by non-enforcement. Even if there are no
formal legal tests, it is obvious that a variety of religious tests exist in civil society,
and that Muslim populations especially have become the foci of extraordinarily
intense issues.
6 The Legislative Institution
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
- 1 Two Cases of Inclusion-and-Exclusion and their
Handling in Congress
There are innumerable cases of inclusion-and-exclusion in human history, inclu-
ding a large number in the contemporary world. Wherever there are situations of
high exclusion, political scientists, from their own analyticalWrst principles, must
predict that a change from ‘‘outsider’’ status to some degree of inclusion will only
come after a protracted struggle. But weWrst present an historically oriented
account of two situations of high exclusion (gender, the status of women, and
‘‘race,’’ or the status of persons of African ancestry in the United States).
exclusion, inclusion, and political institutions 173