Government, Governing, and Governance

Abstract

Government: the office, authority or function of governing. Governing: having control or rule over oneself. Governance: the activity of governing. Accordingly, governance is a set of decisions and processes made to reflect social expectations through the management or leadership of the government (by extension, under liberal democratic ideals, the will of ‘the people’ as they rule themselves). There are many issues implicit in this set of relationships whose core revolves around the notion of citizenship as this defines the body politic over which claims of self-rule apply. In the most general sense we have the difference between a liberal democratic view that the government (state) serves citizens who have a natural claim on services as a benefit and right of citizenship on the one hand, and on the other the counter enlightenment view often associated with fascism: that the citizen must serve the state and has no rights other than those granted by the state. In what may be called the American model citizenship is a broadly endowed set of rights representing potential claims for benefits, as defined by the state. The result is that in the USA what constitutes a valid claim of citizens is contested, and then the question of who qualifies to have claims met is debated. This offers us an opportunity to understand a number of pressing issues hotly contested: what is the proper role of government, who should have the right to make claims, how exclusionary or inclusionary we should be as a society, how are rights defined and defended, to name but a few. The current socio-political manifestation of these issues is struggles over immigration policy (and the recent reactionary policies passed in Arizona), the Tea Party Movement (if such a thing exists ‐ perhaps more properly, a right-wing populism mixed with aggressive libertarian views), the ongoing debates over health care reform, and election finance reform (the last speaking to the issue of whose voice is loudest, and by implication who is a citizen protected by these generic rights imparted in the American model). Add to this mix the BP ecological, social and political disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and oddly we have an opportunity to critically reflect on government and governing. Let us consider these separately. A recent US Supreme Court ruling found that corporations have the same legal rights as other ‘individuals’, and campaign finance laws