The nature of American politics 21military-industrial complex when he came to the end of his term of office.
Thus, certain relatively small groups of men cease to be just part of an inter-
nal bargaining process and become, behind the scenes, the real rulers of the
country. The formal political machinery becomes less and less significant in
the taking of the really important decisions, so that the electorate, and even
the Congress, is bypassed. This interpretation of American politics, even
though it can degenerate into a conspiracy theory that attempts to explain
every important decision as the results of the secret manipulations of the
power elite, must be given serious consideration. There are elite groups in
the United States, as in any large industrial society, and they exercise great
influence in certain circumstances, a fact that will become clear when we
examine the way in which specific policy decisions are arrived at.
The final model of political behaviour we must employ in the analysis of
American politics is individualism. In the other accounts of the political system
to which we have referred, a class, a section or a group swallows up the indi-
vidual. Political behaviour is ‘determined’ by class ideology, regional loyalty
or group interest, and the individual has little or no significance in affecting
the outcome of political situations. Such interpretations of political life seem
to bear little relation to the mainstream of traditional democratic thought.
For theorists such as John Stuart Mill the individual citizen was the central
concern of writers on politics, and personality and individual choice were
crucial elements in the way in which political decisions are taken. It is ironic
that it is in America, the land of individualism par excellence, that students of
political behaviour have demolished the classical description of the demo-
cratic political system as composed of rational, informed individuals making
up their own minds. They have suggested that, in twentieth-century Western
democracies at any rate, the influence of family, class, local community or
other relevant social grouping is far more important in determining voting
behaviour than knowledge of the issues that face the electorate. In reality,
however, individualism plays a role of greater importance in America than
in the political system of any other modern democratic state. To attempt to
describe the working of the American political system without paying great
attention to the importance of personal factors in the choice of candidates, or
to the influence of personality on voting behaviour, would be to miss the very
essence of American political life.
Each of these ‘models’ of political behaviour and motivation has, of course,
very different implications for the type of party organisation that we would
expect to find in systems of government in which they play a dominant role.
They suggest very different opportunities for the exercise of leadership in
the political system, very different attitudes towards ideology and ‘issues’ in
the political process, and very different results in terms of party cohesion and
discipline, particularly in the legislature. Taken to extremes, these models
of the political system are mutually exclusive, each giving rise to a very dif-
ferent style of political life. The fascination of the American political system
lies in the fact that it represents a complex amalgam of all these different