| Description |
No matter how vigorous the pursuit of any one value at any given time, the other two are never obliterated. And no matter how determined the quest for any one value, it is never realized as fully as its most extreme advocates would like. Even after a century of efforts to strengthen neutral competence and executive leadership, partisan influence still retains great vitality and executive institutions at all levels of government are still remarkably fragmented. And after a century of denigration of politics, politicans, and special interests, representativeness is still a powerful force in American government. But in that century of building professional bureaucracies and executive capacities for leadership, the need for new modes of representation designed to keep pace with new economic, social, and political developments did not arouse equal concern. Partly for this reason, and partly because the burgeoning of large-scale organizations in every area of life contributes to the sensation of individual helplessness, recent years have witnessed an upsurge of a sense of alienation on the part of many people, to a feeling that they as individuals cannot effectively register their own preferences on the decisions emanating from the organs of government. These people have begun to demand redress of the balance among the three values, with special attention to the deficiencies in representativeness. (Description from Source) |