Political Science
Lecture 1 – Introduction to Political Science
What is political science?
- Political behaviour (why are people left or right)
- Political processes (why do some parties get into government)
- Political institutions (actors related to government, the rules of the game)
- Empirical: explanations, not judging.
- Comparative: comparing across countries and contexts.
Social science: the study of human society and of the structured interactions among people
within society.
Sub-fields political science:
- Comparative politics: comparing government and politics in different settings.
- International relations: studying relations between and among states, including
diplomacy, foreign policy, international organizations, war and peace.
- National politics: studying government and politics in individual states, including
institutions and political processes.
- Political philosophy: studying the way we think about government and politics,
addressing topics such as authority, ethics and freedom.
- Political theory: studying abstract or generalized approaches to understanding
political phenomena.
- Public policy: studying the positions taken or avoided by governments in response to
public needs.
Government: the institutions and processes through which societies are governed.
- All the institutions endowed with public authority and charged with reaching and
executing decisions for a community.
Institution: a formal or informal organization or practice with rules and procedures, marked
by durability and internal complexity (in political science, institutions are usually the bodies
of national government).
- Institutions of government: executive, legislature, judiciary and courts, bureaucracy,
political parties.
Defining politics:
- The process by which people negotiate and compete.
- The process of making and executing shared or collective decisions.
It is a collective activity, occurring between and among people.
It involves making decisions regarding a course of action to take or avoid, or a
disagreement to be resolved.
Once reached, political decisions become policy for the group, binding and
committing its members even if some of them continue to resist.
,Another definition of politics: a competitive struggle for power and resources between
people and groups seeking their own advantage, and perhaps aiming to impose their values
on everyone else.
Political systems (actors):
Governments play a central role in political systems:
- Governments have the monopoly on violence to ensure safety.
o Hobbes: government is needed to avoid a war of every man against every
man.
- Governments have to produce collective goods.
Core concepts in politics:
- Power: the capacity to bring about intended effects.
- Authority: the right to exert power/rule, the people accept that the person in
authority has the right to make decisions.
- Legitimacy: power and authority of a government are accepted by those subject to its
rules and by the community (other governments).
Three dimensions of power (how to measure power?)
- Who prevails over political outcomes (who gets their way)?
- Who controls what preferences are expressed?
- Who shapes preferences?
First dimension of power: political outcomes
- Who wins the elections (winners vs. losers); influence over outcomes and behaviour.
- In practice: voting behaviour and parliamentary debates.
,Second dimension of power: control
- Control over the issues/policy alternatives discussed during the decision-making
process, preventing the discussion of some topics.
o Agenda setting powers.
- Control over the expression of preferences (whose preferences are being expressed).
- Non-decision-making: decisions are prevented from being taken on issues over which
there is an observable conflict of interest
- In practice: government, initiatives by parliament and citizens, issues with high
salience for society, state-owned media restricting the air time of opposition leaders.
Third dimension of power: formation of preferences
- Control over the formation of citizen preferences.
- Manipulated consensus by manipulating the flow of information.
- Social cleavages, political ideology, political communication & media.
- Ideological: potential issues are kept out of politics altogether, whether through
social forces, institutional practices, or the decisions of individuals.
- In practice: public debates and open deliberation processes, propaganda through
state-owned media.
Three types of authority (Max Weber):
- Traditional: sanctity of tradition, accepted way of doing things.
- Charismatic: perceived extraordinary characteristics of an individual.
- Legal-rational: formalistic belief in the content of the law (legal) or natural law
(rationality), based on the rule-governed powers of an office, rather than a person.
Political regimes and concepts of political science:
Political system: the interactions and institutions that make up a regime.
Regime: a political type, based on a set of principles, norms, rules and decision-making
procedures, and including – for example – a democratic regime or an authoritarian regime.
- Authoritarian regimes: centralisation of all three dimensions of power in one party or
a leader.
- Democratic regimes: power over the three dimensions is dispersed and there is
competition for control in each dimension.
This distinction does not necessarily apply to authority and legitimacy.
, Lecture 2 – Political regimes
Trends (waves of democratization)
- Three waves:
o 1828-1926: emergence of the earliest representative democracies (slow
changes, ongoing struggles of those who fought and sometimes died to bring
about change)
o 1940-1960: defeat in war, followed by allied occupation, helped inaugurate
and promote democracy.
o 1947-1991: dictatorships came to an end, the military retreated from power,
democracy spread and communism collapsed.
- During the second world war, democratic systems became less popular
- First world war and decolonisation made the democratic system more popular
Critics:
- Numbers of oppositions and voters have risen, which show an incline of the
democratization, but the quality of democracy has declined.
Political typologies
Typology: the system by which the types of something (e.g., states, languages, personalities,
buildings, and organizations) are classified according to their common features.
- There are multiple typologies from which to choose, none of which is generally
accepted by political science.
First attempt at developing a system of political typologies: Aristotle’s.
- Generation of six classes of government, ranging from democracy to tyranny.
- Dimensions: the number of people involved in governing and the form of
government (common interest or the own interest of governors).
Another attempt: The Spirit of the Laws: Montesquieu, three regime types:
- Republican systems: (part of) the people had the power.
- Monarchical systems: one person ruled on the basis of fixed and established laws.
- Despotic systems: a single person ruled on the basis of their own priorities and
perspectives.
A more recent typology: Three Worlds system (Cold War):
- First world: western alliance, wealthy, democratic industrialised states.
- Second world: communist systems.
- Third world: poorer, less democratic and less developed states.
Other typologies:
- The Democracy Index maintained by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a UK-based
organization related to the news weekly The Economist.
o Full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid, authoritarian.
- The Freedom of the World index maintained by the US-based research institute
Freedom House.
o Free, partly free, not free.
