Chapter Summary for Chapter 22
The scope of politics is broader than that of government, taking in many activities (such as social movements) outside of formal government. The latter can be restricted to the activities of state officials. The nation-state exists if there is the exercise of sovereignty; the population has rights and duties as citizens, and there is a shared sense of nationalism.
Political sociologists are fundamentally concerned with power and its effects, though there are differing views on exactly what power is and how it is related to the exercise of authority. Weber saw power as the chance that people can exercise their own will even against resistance from others.
Lukes developed a three-dimensional view of power taking in the ability of some social groups to set the political agenda by keeping certain issues out of public debate altogether. Foucault’s general theory sees power as flowing throughout society, but he also linked power with knowledge, arguing that one implies the other.
Most societies purport to be democratic in the limited sense of rule by the people. Authoritarianism and democracy are contrasting ideal types and there is an additional distinction between participative democracy and representative democracy. Some argue that liberal democracy triumphed over communist societies because of its association with capitalism’s ability to create wealth, the clamour for greater openness in an increasingly globalizing world society and the provision of more information through mass communications and the Internet. However, despite this, there are still undercurrents of discontent with the political process in democratic societies.
The global spread of democracy coexists with the paradox of voter apathy, cynicism and low levels of formal political participation. For example, turnout in the UK general election dropped below 60 per cent in 2001. However, election turnout tends to be much higher in systems which use mandatory voting.
Old patterns of party allegiance seem to be giving way to new forms of political engagement and political parties have had to change as a result. A good example is the creation of ‘New’ Labour’s ‘third way’ politics in the UK, which can be seen to comprise:
- more dynamic restructured government;
- strengthening of civil society;
- a mixed economy with a mix of regulation and deregulation;
- welfare reform;
- sustainable economic development;
- international regulation of global affairs.
National governments face problems of legitimacy because of the limitations of geographical scope. In short, borrowing from Daniel Bell, the nation-state is at once too small and too large for the problems which most concern people. Welfare state retrenchment in the developed societies has also had a negative impact on people’s assessment of national government’s usefulness.
Social movements are collective attempts to further a common interest through actions outside of established institutions. They are one aspect of a wider sphere of politics beyond that of national government which can bring about major social changes. This can be seen in the successes of the American civil rights movement and feminist campaigns for equality, for example.
Sociologists have used several approaches to study social movements. Interactionist studies initially focused on social unrest and collective behaviour. Smelser’s theory joined social action to social structure, arguing that six elements were necessary for a social movement to emerge: structural conduciveness, structural strain, generalized beliefs, precipitating factors, mobilization, and the failure of social control.
Resource mobilization theory (RMT) developed as a counter to the perceived irrationality of movements within the social unrest tradition. RMT’s central insight is that social unrest is ever present within capitalist societies, but what turns this into a social movement is the acquisition and effective use of resources.
Since the 1980s, the wave of 1960s social movements such as environmentalism, anti-nuclear movements and gay rights movements have been theorized as new social movements (NSMs). NSMs are said to represent a new type of social movement, characterized by: new issues, loose organizational forms, new action repertoires, and new social constituencies. The World Social Forum is a recent example of a ‘movement without borders’.
It has also been suggested that in our age of globalization and information technology, we may be seeing the emergence of a ‘social movement society’ in which political issues increasingly find expression through social movements rather than via established political institutions. This may suggest that people in democratic societies may be becoming tired of politicians but not necessarily of politics.
