Applying a New Sub - Systems Model to Analyze Economic Policy and the Question of Systemic Persistence

Easton’s systems theory greatly contributed to the field of political science by providing a useful holistic framework, demonstrating how the political system functions, by meeting societal demands with policy outputs. Easton’s interest lay in the political system’s persistence, which in his model, merely required the existence of community. Communities, however, require state-provided security to survive in a hostile international environment. Hence, this paper builds a sub-systemic governance model able to explain domestic political system and state persistence. The model argues that large input generating groups require sufficient allocation of public goods for the long term maintenance of the domestic political system. Application of the model to the successful South Korean case demonstrated that the share of public goods increased along with the size of the input generating group. Long term disruption of this critical subsystem in countries with large input generating groups, however, can destabilize the state and its domestic political system with increased pressure from unmet societal demands. This new sub-systemic model seeks to advance understanding of the operation of the system and open up new areas of research into the persistence of the domestic political system. The systems approach has greatly contributed to the study of politics. David Easton’s seminal Systems Theory drew attention to important aspects of political life and provided a critical framework with which to understand and analyze inputs into the political system and policy outputs to the social environment. The advancement of systems theory in political science was hobbled, however by methodological shortcomings. Easton failed to operationalize key concepts, and as a result, the theory was neither applied nor tested. In addition, Easton’s all-inclusive system design was unable to give insight into several systems-related questions areas of interest to social scientists, including the survival or collapse of states and their domestic political systems, regime change, and variation in the nature of policy outputs or societal inputs. Combining Easton’s policy process framework with methodologically rigorous approaches sharing key system’s theory assumptions helps James C. Schopf Keimyung University, South Korea