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What is Politics
Politics, in its broadest sense, is the activity through…
What is Politics
Politics, in its broadest sense, is the activity through which people make, preserve and amend the general rules under which they live.
- Concept linked to the ideas of cooperation and conflict
- Concept linked to "acting in concert"
- Concept linked to the ongoing process of concept resolution
Studying politics
Philosophical Tradition
- Preoccupation with normative questions
- Analytical study of political doctrines and ideas in classical texts
- Cannot be objective
Empirical Tradition
- Attempts to offer dispassionate and descriptive accounts of political reality to analyse and explain it
Behaviouralism
- Positivism/ empiricism
- Criticised for limiting political explanations only to what is immediately observable
Rational Choice Theory
- Draws on economic theory to build up models based on procedural rules about the rationally self-interested behaviour of political actors
- Criticized for assuming that all individuals are rational and well informed; ignores socio-historical factors while offering analyses
New Institutionalism
- Political organizations thought to operate based on rules that constrain the effects of actors
- Emphasis on the embeddedness of institutions in normative and historical contexts
- Accused of being overtly structuralist
Critical Approaches
- Seek to dismantle the status quo and bat for marginalized groups
- Emphasize the role of consciousness in shaping political conduct
Politics Definitions
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Politics in terms of power
- View sees politics permeating all aspects of human existence
Struggle over scarce resources, power as means to acquire the resources one needs
Marxists and feminists
- Class struggles between a powerful, organized class that forms the state against a dispossessed class