Week 1 Flashcards
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.
How has politics been understood by various thinkers and traditions?
Politics as the art of government: the exercise of control within society and enforcement of collective decisions.
Politics as public affairs: the division between the political and the non-political lies between an essentially public sphere of life and the private sphere of life. Division between the state and civil society.
Politics as compromise and consensus: politics is seen as a particular means of resolving conflict: that is, by compromise, conciliation and negotiation, rather than through force and naked power.
Politics as power: politics is at work in all social activities and in every corner of human existence. The ability to achieve any outcome through any means.
What are the main approaches to the study of politics as an academic discipline?
The traditional approach: The analytical study of ideas and doctrines that have been central to political thought. It is interested in what other major thinkers have said, how they developed or justified their views, and the intellectual context in which they worked. It is not objective.
The empirical approach: Attempt to offer a dispassionate and impartial account of political reality. It is descriptive as it seeks to analyze and explain.
Behaviouralism: This gave politics reliably scientific credentials, as it provided objective and quantifiable data against which hypotheses could be tested.
Formal political theory: Building up models based on procedural rules, usually about the rationally self-interested behaviour of the individuals involved. It provides insights into the actions of voters, lobbyists and politicians and into the behaviour of states within the international system.
New institutionalism: political institutions are no longer equated with political organizations they are thought of as a set of rules which guide or constrain the behaviour of individual actors.
Critical approaches: They are critical in that, in their different ways, they seek to contest the political status quo, by usually aligning themselves with the marginalized. They have tried to go beyond the positivism of mainstream political science, emphasizing instead the role of consciousness in shaping social conduct, and therefore, the political world.
Concepts
A general idea about something. Concepts are the tools which we think, criticize, argue, explain and analyze.
Models
A representation of something. Conceptual models are analytical tools; their value is that they are devices through which meaning can be imposed on what would otherwise be a bewildering and disorganized collection of facts.
Theories
A proposition, it offers a systematic explanation of a body of empirical data.
How have globalizing trends affected the relationship between politics and international relations?
The spheres (local, regional, domestic and international) have become more interlinked.
The key ontological question
What are the form and nature of reality and, consequently, what is there that can be known about it.
Ontology
Our views about the world as it exits
The two different positions in ontology
Foundationalism and anti-foundationalism
Foundationalism
There is a real world out there independent of our knowledge of it.
Anti-foundationalism
The world is always socially constructed.
The key epistemological question
How do we know about the world
Epistemology
How can we learn about this world
Three positions in epistemology
Positivism, realism and interpretivism
Positivism
The world exists independently of our knowledge about it.
To the positivist we can establish regular relationship between social phenomenon using theory to generate hypotheses which can be tested by direct observation. The world is real and not socially constructed.
Foundationalist ontology
Realism
The world exist independently of our knowledge about it. Foundationalist ontology
Intepretevism
the world is socially or discursively constructed. They are based on an anti-foundationalist ontology.
