What is Political Sociology?
Examples of Political Sociology?
Characteristics of Political Sociology?
Lecture notes and slides containing Political Sociology.
Looking at where the power is exercised in The State and in Social Forces.
Also examining the role of the state and the key features of...
• Where is power exercised?
• The state:
• In whose interests is state power exercised? How does this occur?
1 • When does the state exercise legitimate power?
• When is there resistance to state power?
• Social forces:
• How does social change occur? How is the status quo maintained?
• How is power exercised in everyday life? How does this (or does it
not) connect to the state?
• How do people come together in a political movement?
,What is the role of the state?
• Are we in a society marked by conflict or consensus?
• Conflict – different groups have competing interests (class; religion; political)
• Consensus – we essentially share interests/aims.
• If there is conflict (or competing goals) what does the state do? [different answers below
1) Pluralist State: The state is a forum in which competing groups vie for power
2) Elitist State: The state is dominated by a small group (an ‘elite’) – either a
bureaucratic, political, social, cultural or economic elite.
3) Capitalist State: The state’s primary function is to facilitate the reproduction of
conditions that allow capitalism to prosper.
• Note - there are other ways of thinking about it.
,Founding fathers 1: Marx
• The ‘executive of the modern state’ ‘is but a committee for the management
of the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.’ (see: Communist Manifesto).
• Economic power political power.
• Class interests are represented in the state, not random preferences.
• If the economy is the ‘base’, the state apparatus is the ‘superstructure’ and
its job is to reproduce the power of capital.
• Later Marx/Marxists have suggested that sometimes politics is ‘relatively
autonomous’
allows arbitration between competing capitalists (e.g. finance vs
manufacturing capital, more or less global);
even gives a little to workers (e.g. welfare state) as concession to
maintain overall status quo.
,Founding fathers 2: Weber
• The state ‘claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a given
territory.’
• Very interested in Power: Modern states concentrate power in the hands of a monarch who
has ownership of the means of administration (bureaucracy).
• As bureaucracies (including the state bureaucracy – e.g. Civil Service) develop, they take o
a life of their own. Actors have limited power (n.b. not necessarily oriented to interests of
Capital).
• Democracy may, however, limit power of bureaucracy.
• Also looks at different types of authority in society
• Traditional authority – granted on the basis of tradition/norms (e.g. patriarch)
• Rational-legal authority – granted on the basis of rules/functional role (e.g. manager)
• Charismatic authority – granted by followers to leader, who’s seen as
exceptional disruptive.
,Founding fathers 3: Durkheim
• Doesn’t focus on the state.
• But interested in ‘normative integration’ – or what brings
people together.
• Requires consensus on cultural norms/symbolic meaning.
Believed that sociologists could discover functional norms.
• Later Durkheimians/Cultural sociologists:
• Focus on civil sphere as the space where people come
together (or feel excluded).
• See discussion in the readings this week.
, Hegemony – Gramsci
• Gramsci was a Marxist. Imprisoned by Mussolini in 1930s.
While in prison wrote The Prison Notebooks, published
posthumously. Died at 46.
• Hegemony = how the dominant class gains consent stable
rule.
• May involve compromise, but also social and cultural activity.
• Hegemony is not just about politics but about what we ‘take
for granted’ in our everyday lives. What is thinkable.
• Social norms, values, beliefs of the people are those of the
dominant group.
• e.g. persistence of meritocratic ideal: if you study/work
hard you can make it
• This reifies the status quo (what is) as what must be.
• Makes it harder to produce social change.
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