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Lecture notes Politics jaar 1
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lecture notes week 1-11 politics International Studies. Based on O'Neil's book Comparative Politics.
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POLITICS LECTURE WEEK 1 05-02-2024Final exam: 60% May 29, 09:00-11:00
Tutorial grade: 40%
What is politics
● O’Neill
- the struggle in any group for power that will give one or more persons
the ability to make decisions for the larger group
● Harold Lasswell
- who gets what and how
- overly focussed on the material
● David Easton
- the authoritative allocation of values for a society
- values: material and non-material
● summarised
- politics is about the ideas, the organisation, and the morality of
pursuing power at the public level, in all its forms and varieties
Key to every definition of politics: power
● The ability to get others to do something that they would not otherwise do
Definitions and varieties of powers
1. Power as ‘resource’ (capability): attribute, possession, soft and hard power →
suggests a causal relationship between resources and outcome
2. Power as ‘outcome’(relationship): about skills, strategies, and perceptions;
The Putin ‘example’
3. ‘Institutional’ power: to be able to define the rules of international institutions
4. The power to shape or determine individual and collective political thinking
and demands through influencing how people think and define their interests
(algorithm)
What is political science
● Political science concerns the systematic study of politics, to provide us with
the tools to generate knowledge and understanding of political behaviour, to
better understand the political world, to bring order in the chaos of real
political life, with its countless variables, including the unpredictability of
human behaviour
● Thinking theories about politics
- Empirical theory: what does occur - describing and explaining political
phenomena
- Normative theory: what ought to occur
- Prescriptive theory: what will occur
, ● O’Neil: dramatic historical events often take scholars, politicians, and even
participants by surprise
The subfields of political science
● Political philosophy
● Comparative politics
● International politics
● Public administration
Comparative politics
● Aims
- to study and understand domestic political phenomena; to explain
differences and similarities among states, regions, and other political
entities
● concepts
- Assumptions and theories that guide research
● Methods
- Comparative method
- Causality
- Deductive reasoning
- Discourse analysis
- Quantitative and qualitative research
POLITICS LECTURE WEEK 2 12-02-2024
Political theory: empirical, normative, and prescriptive
● O’Neil: for political science you need theory and methodology
- Theory = an integrated set of hypotheses, assumptions and facts
- Methodology = how best to gather and analyse data
● Three variants of theory
1. Empirical theory supports description and explanation → interest group
theory, rational choice theory, modernisation theory, totalitarianism
2. Normative political theory adds political prescription to analysis
- Is the oldest form of political theory, comes close to Political
Philosophy from Aristotle
- Examples: democratic peace theory, just war theory (when and
how can we fight in war), liberal theory, realist theory
- Robert W. Cox: theory is always for someone, and for some
purpose
- O’Neil: the most fruitful approach to comparative politics is to be
sceptical, not simply of others, but also of what we believe and
take for granted
3. Prescriptive theory
,Political ideology
● Political attitudes: views regarding the basic scope of political and social
change - about the circle (not continuum) from radical to liberal, conservative,
and reactionary
● Political ideologies: collectively held set of values about the fundamental goals
of politics, a set of ideas and beliefs that inspires, guides, directs politics and
policies - about the political ‘isms’ in the world: conservatism, liberalism,
socialism, Marxism, anarchism, populism, Islamism
Political culture
● Culture in politics dimensions
1. Creative culture in politics (arts, architecture, music, literature)
2. Culture as condition / a variable of good politics
- Which can be linked to another understanding of culture, as in
Huntington’s understanding of culture
- Cases: the extent to which democracy and authoritarianism are
determined by socioeconomic and cultural conditions → no
middle class = no democracy
● Political culture
- Political culture refers to society’s norms for political activity
- Political culture is about ideas and activities which are considered
normal, proper, preferable, which give from and substance to political
behaviour, and which can be linked to deeper collective religious,
national, ethical norms and values
- Examples: tradition of consensus and compromise vs strong
leadership; ‘gosuderstvennost’ in Russia; individualism and
collectivism, welfare state vs individual responsibility
Political philosophy: major features
1. Oldest form of political thinking - political science emerged from political
philosophy
2. Critical - systematically studies, discusses and questions relevant political
issues, revealing the origins, development and the challenges of our
contemporary political ideas, practices and institutions: sovereignty,
democracy, state and nation, political representation, religion and state,
citizenship and human rights
3. Practical - challenges, judges, and influences conventional ideas and beliefs,
practices, reaching for the best form of governance → ‘good governance’
- Political philosophy offers investigation into the nature, causes and
effects of good and bad government (David Miller)
, Political philosophy: great thinkers, books and ideas
● Plato: Republic
● Aristotle: Politics
● Machievelli: The Prince
● Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
● John Locke: two treatises of government
● Karl Marx: Das Kapital
● John Rawls: a theory of justice
● Michel Foucault: discipline and punishment
→ all male, white, western, and dead
The ‘West’ in political science
● The west is used in several senses: geographical, political-economic,
hegemonic , racial
● West and non-west is mostly understood as west-centric / euro-centric
- Caveat: a functional but often unduly homogenising notion, both with
regard to the non-west and the west - which is increasingly
problematic, also politically
● Mostly refers to the global south → colonialism
Niccolò Machiavelli’s work
● 1469: born in the city-staat of Florence
● 1498: head of Florentine Second Chancery and secretary to the Council of
Ten of Liberty and Peace
● 1512: dismissed, deprived, and totally removed
- Exiled to Percussina
● 1527: death
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