POSC 10

• Politics is the activity through which people make, preserve, and amend the general rules under which they live
• Politics is linked to conflict and cooperation:

  • Conflict arises from rival opinions, different wants, competing needs, and opposing interests, leading to disagreements about rules
  • Cooperation involves working with others to influence or uphold rules, with political power defined as 'acting in concert' by Hannah Arendt
• The heart of politics is often seen as a process of conflict resolution, where rival views or competing interests are reconciled
• Politics is a search for conflict resolution due to the presence of diversity and scarcity, making it an inevitable feature of the human condition
• Conflict is the competition between opposing forces, reflecting a diversity of opinions, preferences, needs, or interests
• Cooperation is working together to achieve goals through collective action
• Chancellor Bismarck is reputed to have said, "Politics is not a science but an art," referring to the art of government and the exercise of control within society through the making and enforcement of collective decisions
• The word 'politics' is derived from 'polis', meaning 'city-state' in Ancient Greece
• Ancient Greek society was divided into independent city-states, with Athens being the largest and most influential, often seen as the cradle of democratic government
• Politics can be understood as 'what concerns the state', a definition perpetuated by academic political science
• In everyday use, people are 'in politics' when they hold public office or 'entering politics' when they seek to do so
• Polis, derived from Greek, refers to a city-state and is classically understood to imply the highest or most desirable form of social organization
• Authority can most simply be defined as ‘legitimate power’.

  Whereas power is the ability to influence the behaviour of others,

  authority is the right to do so.
• Weber (see p. 81) distinguished

  between three kinds of authority, based on the different grounds

  on which obedience can be established: traditional authority is

  rooted in history; charismatic authority stems from personality;

  and legal–rational authority is grounded in a set of impersonal

  rules.
• Politics is what takes place within a polity, a system of social organization centred on the machinery of government.
• Polity: A society organized through the exercise of political

  authority; for Aristotle, rule by the many in the interests of all.
• Anti-politics: Disillusionment with formal or established political

  processes, reflected in non-participation, support for anti-system parties, or the use of direct action.
• The adjective ‘Machiavellian’

  subsequently came to mean ‘cunning and duplicitous’.
• Power is the ability to achieve a desired

  outcome, sometimes seen as the ‘power to’ do something
• Aristotle declared that ‘man is

  by nature a political animal’, by which he meant that it is only within a political community that human beings can live the ‘good life’
• Science aims to develop reliable explanations of phenomena through repeatable experiments, observation, and deduction
• The 'scientific method' verifies hypotheses by testing them against available evidence, seen as a means of disclosing value-free and objective truth
• Normative refers to the prescription of values and standards of conduct, what 'should be' rather than what 'is'
• Objective means external to the observer, demonstrable, untainted by feelings, values, or bias
• Empirical knowledge is based on observation and experiment, derived from sense data and experience; the approach is descriptive
• Positivism is the theory that social and all forms of enquiry should adhere strictly to the methods of the natural sciences; the approach is prescriptive
• Behaviouralism believes social theories should be constructed only on the basis of observable behavior, providing quantifiable data for research
• Bias refers to sympathies or prejudices that affect human judgment, often unconsciously, implying distortion
• Rational-choice theory draws heavily on economic theory to build models based on the rationally self-interested behavior of individuals involved
• Institutions are well-established bodies with formal roles and status, ensuring regular and predictable behavior, known as the 'rules of the game'
• Constructivism (or social constructivism) is an approach based on the belief that there is no objective social or political reality independent of our understanding of it
• Post-positivism questions the idea of an 'objective' reality, emphasizing how people conceive or 'construct' the world they live in
• Postmodernism argues that there is no certainty, discarding the idea of absolute and universal truth as an arrogant pretense
• Discourse refers to human interaction, especially communication, which may disclose or illustrate power relations
• Deconstruction involves a close reading of philosophical or other texts to identify blind spots and contradictions
• An ideal type (or pure type) is a mental construct aiming to draw meaning from complex reality through the presentation of a logical extreme, serving as an explanatory tool
• A model is a theoretical representation of empirical data aiming to advance understanding by highlighting significant relationships and interactions
• Theory is a systematic explanation of empirical data, usually presented as reliable knowledge
• Paradigm is a pattern or model highlighting relevant features of a particular phenomenon, forming an intellectual framework for the search for knowledge
• Transnational refers to a configuration that takes little or no account of national governments or state borders