Politics

An Introduction

Barrie Axford, Victoria Browne, Richard Huggins, Rico Isaacs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317243748
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The eagerly awaited third edition of this highly respected and user-friendly text for introductory courses has been thoroughly updated to reflect the world today. Politics: An Introduction provides stimulating coverage of topics essential to the understanding of contemporary politics. It offers students necessary guidance on ways of studying and understanding politics, and illustration of the many different sites at which politics is construed and conducted. Ideal for students taking combined degrees at introductory level in politics and the social sciences, it emphasises the individual and social dimension of politics and covers theories and concepts in an accessible way. Fundamentally, it helps students see the political, and its relevance, in their lives.

Key features include:

• a revised introduction considering 'what is politics' and how we understand and approach its study
• clear and well-organised coverage of political theory, political behaviour, institutions and the policy process
• carefully crafted in-text chapter features such as 'consider this' thought-provoking scenarios, 'think points', keyword definitions, chapter summaries, and exercises designed to enliven and extend the learning experience
• stimulating, up-to-date examples and case studies from across the globe, such as 'fake news', online activism, the rise of populism, culture wars, 'fertility tourism' in India, hydropower in Cambodia, free speech in France, and personality politics in Turkmenistan
• detailed consideration of democratisation, authoritarian regimes, direct democracy, gender critical perspectives, minority rights, global capitalism, social movements, radical political change, post-secularism, and challenges and changes brought by social media.

Politics: An Introduction is a broad-ranging, accessible, and essential guide for all students studying, or beginning to study, politics.

Part I
People and politics

Chapter 1
The individual and politics

Studying politics from the bottom-up

Barrie Axford

Contents

• Introduction

• Three issues for analysis

• So, parts or wholes: should we study individuals or structures?

• Forms of individualist analysis

• The modern individual

• Individuals as utility maximisers: the myth of ‘economic’ man

• Conclusion

• Chapter summary

• Exercise

• Further reading

Consider this … As we will see, the idea of being an individual is complex and many-layered. At one remove it refers to what may be considered laudable attributes, like standing out from the crowd, not going with the force of opinion just because it is the easiest thing to do. The non-conformist is often portrayed in literature or movies as a cherished and enviable status. Doubtless you can think of many such examples. On the other hand the label also carries, or can carry, varying degrees of admonition, even opprobrium. Being called eccentric may attract only tongue-clicking reproof; or the sentiment that ‘it’s just her little ways’; but being pigeon-holed for not being a ‘team player’ may have negative consequences in work, leisure or politics. Politically, not being thought a good citizen may be only a statement about one’s lack of community engagement. But in limiting cases – and maybe in some that are not so limiting – this attribution can lead to harassment, imprisonment, and even death. All societies and systems of governance proscribe completely unfettered individualism. For students of politics the key questions are: to what ends, and with what consequences?

1.1 Introduction

In the Introduction to this book we learned that the concepts and ideas that are at the heart of political study are always intellectual battlegrounds. Key terms like ‘power’ and ‘freedom’ are semantic and often normative minefields over which the student of politics needs to pass with great care, and it is easy to confuse or else conflate the normative with the empirical, or to transgress seeming rules about the basis of scientific inquiry. So in the study of politics very little can be taken for granted, and this caveat extends to what we study and how we study it.

In this chapter we will begin our examination of the nature of political inquiry and the scope and content of politics by looking at the place of the individual in political life and the status of the individual in political analysis. In the following chapter we will rehearse the different kinds of politics where individuals confront collective actors, including the state and other versions of the collective. But let’s start with the word itself. The term ‘individual’ is in common use; so much so, that we tend to take its meaning for granted. We are all individuals in the sense that we are unique human animals, but while this is a necessary starting point for analysis, it is not sufficient to explain the importance of the concept in much political and social science. The idea of the individual and the quality of individuality suggest uniqueness and originality. Each of us is unique in certain definable ways but perhaps more significantly, in indefinable, perhaps un-measurable, ways too. What makes each of us different is very hard to explain, despite a great deal of research into what contributes to the making of an individual’s ‘personality’. A good deal of scientific (and not so scientific) debate has centred on whether personality is innate (genetic) or made through social intercourse and social learning. The important point for our purposes lies not so much in explanations of individuality, but in the status ascribed to the individual in political and social theory, as well as in everyday life.

For example, a society or any social unit which sees itself as made up of individuals is likely to be one where the virtues of autonomy are strongly embedded in custom and law. In such societies many, though rarely all, expressions of individuality are applauded, and attempts to constrain the free choices of individuals in lawful pursuit of their interests would require careful justification. In influential strands of Western political philosophy, the status of the individual has been enshrined in belief systems that assert both the centrality of the individual in explanations of social life, and the primacy of the individual relative to any or all collective forms – the group, the religion, the political party, the nation, the state, and so on. Needless to say such doctrines have been hotly contested on the basis of their theoretical premises and because of their political and legal implications. In what follows we will examine not only expressions of individualism but also consider the status of the individual as the appropriate unit for analysis in the study of politics, as well as discussing the pros and cons of pitching inquiry at the individual level of analysis.

unit for analysis

the concrete object of inquiry: the individual, the primary group like the family, voluntary associations, formal organisations like political parties, whole societies, nation-states, even the world as a whole.

level of analysis

the difference between studying individuals and collectives of different sorts. Choosing one level of analysis as opposed to another determines the kind of inferences which can be made from data.

Of course, in a discipline where little can be taken for granted, choosing the individual as a starting point for analysis is contentious, despite the common-sense assumption that in politics, as in all social life, people, as agents, are at the centre of things. But we should not be misled by the appeal of common-sense assumptions and explanations. While the study of politics is necessarily a blend of common sense, normative judgement, scientific knowledge, and professional technique, it remains, in Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) expression ‘pre-paradigmatic’, lacking in agreement on the fundamental questions for inquiry and on the rules under which knowledge can be generated. In this chapter we start with the concept of the individual, and with what motivates and influences political behaviour, and then work out to consider individuals as members of groups, political parties, legislatures, nation-states, and beyond. This is a valuable approach to the study of politics, but by no means the only one. Given the complexity of political life, how could it be otherwise?

1.2 Three issues for analysis

There are three main issues about the individual and politics that will be addressed in what follows. Some of the points discussed here will be re-examined in later chapters but from different perspectives. The issues are:

First, the question of the relationships between the individual (sometimes termed the agent or the subject) and wider social processes and institutions (often called structures or rules). Individualistic or agent-centred accounts of social and political life argue that ‘social wholes’; that is, institutions like social classes, communities, ethnic groups or nations, are reducible to, or can be explained by aggregating the motives and actions of individuals. Put simply, such an argument claims that the whole is no more than the sum of its parts. At the other extreme, structure-centred positions argue that individual identities and behaviour are formed and take place within social relations which are governed by rules, or by ‘history encoded into rules’ as the sociologists March and Simon say (1958). Because of this, to adapt Karl Marx, while people may make their own history, they do so in circumstances over which they have had little or no control. Between these poles lies a range of possible explanations that try to reconcile individualistic and holistic theories.

Second, is the extent to which the concept and status of the individual, along with related ideas about notions like individual rights, are rooted in a particular intellectual tradition known generally as Enlightenment philosophy which is associated with a historical pattern of social and political development, usually called modernity.

enlightenment

the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ‘project’ was based upon a belief in the universality of reason and the power of scientific explanation. The individual was at the centre of the philosophical and political project, with human emancipation seen as following from the spread of rational inquiry and decision-making.

modernity

refers to the distinct way of life found in ‘modern’ societies, although there is huge disagreement on what constitutes modernity and whether there is only one route to its achievement. For critics, the whole idea of ‘modernity’ has a very Western-centric feel to it and denotes a process by which non-Western societies are exposed to and, historically at least, compelled to adopt the diffused Western model. A process beginning in Western Europe in about the fifteenth century, the idea of modernity achieves its full intellectual flowering during the Enlightenment. It is usual to tie modernity, or becoming modern, to the emergence of the nation-state, industrialism and the institution of private property. It is also linked to the growth of bureaucratic organisations, secular beliefs, and, of course, to the value of individuality.

The spread of ideas and institutions associated with the Enlightenment around the world has been a feature of the ways in which many societies became modern, but not all have embraced its precepts fully. For example, societies and political systems influenced by Marxism-Leninism, like those of the former Soviet Union and, in different ways, the People’s Republic of China, have preferred to subsume individuality in wider collective identities and purposes – those of ‘the State’, ‘the Party’, or the idea of ‘the People’ as a whole. Moreover, Islamic societies such as Iran and Saudi Arabia reject the idea that secularisation is a necessary part of the modernising process, instead cleaving to a holistic model of religious community that draws no distinction between state and society; the foundation of many Western political cultures.

Cultures that have emphasised the collective good, or collective identity over the good of individuals and their autonomy, have often been very hostile to the concept of individual rights or to the idea that, in the last resort, the individual is arbiter of her own fate. Even within those mainly Western countries where individualism has flourished there are significant variations on how the individual is perceived, and in how far individualism is incorporated into customary practice, constitutional rights, along with notions like consumer sovereignty or freedom of expression. Even where individualism is applauded as a social and political good, routine state regulation of – some would say power over – individual discretion can be very extensive. Take the simple decision to go clubbing with friends. Here is a document issued in 2012 by the UK Electoral Commission. The Electoral Commission, is an independent body set up by the UK Parliament. Its main concern is the integrity of and public confidence in the democratic process. The intention in the following text is to encourage people to take an interest in politics and see how it affects them, and to encourage greater participation, not least through voting. The – presumably unintended – message in the blurb may look a bit more like ‘Big Brother is watching you’, so be careful …

What price clubbing?

The document text reads:

it (the state) decides where and when you can buy an alcoholic drink: says at what age you can buy an alcoholic drink; sets the amount of tax that you have to pay every time you buy one; decides where and when you can listen to music and whether it can be played live; controls how loud that music can be and whether or not you are allowed to dance to it; decides what is acceptable behaviour when you’re under the influence and what is liable to get you arrested; affects the number of police officers patrolling town centres at night; … says how much you can legally drink and still drive home; controls the licensing of taxis; controls the licensing of doormen and bouncers; decides how long you’ve got to finish the last pint.

Some commentators have argued that the dominant ideology of Enlightenment individualism has given way in the West to a postmodern version of individuality and new forms of politics and sociality to accompany it. This shift is sometimes discussed in terms of the implied transformation of modernity into postmodernity. Less abstract, but of great current interest, is the notion developed by sociologist Barry Wellman, which he calls ‘networked individualism’ (Wellman et al., 2003). Wellman argues that in a world that is increasingly connected by digital technologies, we are seeing a shift ‘away from groups and towards networked individualism’. The process is occurring not only at the interpersonal level, but at the organisational, inter-organisational, and even the global levels (2003).

postmodern

literally, beyond the modern, and suggesting a fragmentation of modernist beliefs, identities and certainties.

Think Point

• Wellman is talking about the ways in which information and communication technologies are having effects on the ways we interact and socialise.
• Think about your own habits and those of your friends. How much time do you expend on texting, tweeting, or on social network sites such Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram?
• Do you think that this has made you less or more of a social being?

Recent work conducted by Nancy Baym (2010) challenges the powerful ‘myth’ that spending lots of time in cyberspace can seriously transform personality and interpersonal relationships. Baym’s work reveals instead the various ways in which people manage social interaction online and offline without loss of social skills and disruption of social niceties. Research found on the website GlobalwebIndex reports that in 2016 consumers spent 10.7 hours per day with some sort of media, 5.6 hours of which (57 percent) is digital. Is worrying about this amount of usage just a form of designer anxiety or should we heed the dire warnings of philosopher Slavoj Zizek, that because of our love affair with digital communication we ‘live in an age of mechanistic, false individualism’ (1998)? Or if not his lament, the more familiar concerns of cultural observer Sherry Turkle that ‘(w)e live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection’ (2012).

The third of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Half Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I People and politics
• Part II Ideas and politics
• Part III Institutions and politics
• Part IV Politics beyond the territorial state
• Glossary
• General Bibliography
• Index