Political Decision-Making in a Democracy

All the factors which influence political decision-making may (reasonably) be integrated into a model which combines operational concepts of power, influence, and authority. The problem-solving approach is applied to one class of decisions, defined here as those made for social situations involving both technical and political factors. Political power seems necessarily to be engaged in a twofold form of activity. On the one hand it formulates the content of decisions to be made and is thereby affected by both the technical and political definition of the problem to be resolved. On the other hand, power is both an agent and an object of influence at every stage of the decisional process. Political power appears, then, to be a more comprehensive concept than either authority or influence. Its basic constituents are found in a fusion of the function of influence with the function of defining issues authoritatively. Authority is but one kind of influence while influence itself is simply one of the two chief functions of power.

Power, before it is influential, is creative, inventive of ideas, and of solutions. Incorporation of these different categories into a model provides us with a systematic representation of the decision-making process of formulation, adoption, and execution. Particular attention is devoted to differentiating those components of behaviour on which authority is based from those which make the assessment of authority possible. On the whole, authoritative decision-making seems to be circumscribed by the original definition of the problem and by the decision-maker's personal under-standing. Up to a certain point this permits us to distinguish the part played by the force of given circumstances from that attributable to the free choice of the actors in a democratic political system.

The Backbenchers and the Administration in Quebec

This study uses two sets of data, one provided by an opinion survey of the backbenchers and the other by an analysis of the debates and questions in the Legislative Assembly of Quebec. The purpose of this lengthy description was to establish the representativeness of the Assembly and of the administration.

Members of the Assembly belong to “superior” strata of the population, but less so however than the higher civil service. Those who consider themselves as “legislators” come generally from urban districts with a relatively high proportion of people with superior occupations, while the “delegates” are generally older and represent rural districts. According to the majority of the backbenchers, the main purpose of their relations with the administration, as well as of their debates in the Assembly, is to obtain goods and services for their constituents. Debates in the Assembly are oriented neither towards what members consider important areas of governmental activity nor to what they perceive as their constituents’ main interests but to day-to-day events and political strategy.