Votes Count, Resources Decide

Abstract

Modern political systems can be analyzed at two levels: at the level of mass citizenry, and at level of the corporate groups controlling major resources within the system. Political systems vary extraordinarily in the ways the votes of mass electorates count in national decision-making. But however weighty the decisions of electoral majorities, nothing is likely to get settled without the consent and the participation of corporate groups controlling key resources. To understand what is happening in modern political systems we clearly have to analyze sequences of pressures and counter-pressures in both these channels of decision-making: the electoral-territorial and the corporate-functional.