Politics: The Basics, 4th Edition

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POLITICS This chapter discusses what politics is and the ways in which scholars have attempted to understand it. The first serio ...

are both out of the control and beyond the understanding of ordinary people. Yet we have seen ordinary people bravely dismantlin ...

university, then your prospects for permanent employment will depend upon the government’s management of the economy. Pros- pect ...

of lacking scientific objectivity or of making unwarranted assump- tions, as is a writer on politics. One of the problems is ass ...

The definitions in Box 1.1 show very considerable differences, reflecting the viewpoint of the author. Most political scientists ...

Another contrast in these definitions is that between what has been described as ‘zero-sum’ and ‘non-zero-sum’ theories of polit ...

electoral politics in some countries necessarily indicate a decline in the importance of politics? The authors’ sympathies lie w ...

the study of politics, and within these various schools of thought. These should be thought of only as a sort of preliminary cru ...

our. Thus a typical American-style curriculum presents political science as one of a group of related social science disciplines ...

These writers saw the rise of democracy as the major political development of their time and sought to analyse not only the idea ...

of their role, with philosophically trained writers exploring concepts and the history of ideas, historians limiting themselves ...

really ‘knowledge’ which can legitimately be examined in univer- sities – or merely pragmatic common sense which can be used by ...

healthy society. But that is because there is more agreement on what an ill person looks like than on what is an ill society. Ho ...

these to whole societies is disputable. Statistical manipulation of existing sets of data about human societies may be a partial ...

an important part of every political system, every advance in poli- tical knowledge is potentially available to the members of t ...

than focusing on conventional liberal democratic institutions, they were creating the basis for a scientific approach: This is n ...

Easton (1979) are considered. He states that ‘political system’ is a purely analytical concept which can be applied to any colle ...

Theories, models, paradigms Faced with a thicket of rival approaches and theories, readers may be tempted to demand who is right ...

Clearly, as Deutsch (1963) points out, models are not in them- selves right or wrong, merely, helpful or unhelpful. Choice of mo ...