A Word With Four Jobs
Politics has four main meanings in everyday and academic use:
| Sense | What it refers to | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Politics as arena | The institutions of government | "A career in politics" |
| Politics as process | Conflict and its resolution | "The politics of the housing bill" |
| Politics as power | Any relation of command and obedience | "The politics of the family" |
| Politics as the public | What concerns the collectivity | "This is a political question, not a private one" |
Narrow definitions restrict politics to the state. Broad definitions extend it to all power relations.
The feminist slogan the personal is political argues for the broad view. It brings domestic labour, reproduction, and family power into political analysis.
Two classical definitions are widely used:
- Harold Lasswell (1936): politics is who gets what, when, how. This focuses on distribution.
- David Easton (1953): politics is the authoritative allocation of values for a society.
The Study of Politics
Politics is the human activity. political science is its systematic study.
Political science relies on three core scientific commitments:
- Explicit concepts: clearly defined terms that others can apply consistently.
- Evidence: observable data used to test claims that could be proven false.
- Comparison: the discipline's substitute for laboratory experiments.
The behavioural revolution introduced survey data, statistics, and formal measurement in the mid-twentieth century. Critics responded that fundamental normative questions cannot be settled by data alone.
The Three Organising Concepts
The discipline builds on three primary concepts:
- power: the fundamental social relation of influence and control.
- The state: the dominant historical institution that concentrates power.
- The political system: the model showing how political processes interact.
Common pitfall: treating definitions as mere preference. Your choice of definition directly determines what counts as valid evidence.