Politics: Crash Course Sociology #30

Summary

This script explores the sociological perspective on politics, defining it as the institution organizing decision-making and resource distribution. It delves into Max Weber's power theories, including coercive, traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic authority, and how they relate to different government systems like democracy and monarchy. The political spectrum's impact on power distribution in the U.S., including economic and social issues, is discussed. The video also examines sociological theories of power distribution, such as pluralism, power-elite, and Marxist models, emphasizing the importance of understanding these dynamics for a comprehensive view of politics.

Takeaways

• 🏛️ Politics, according to sociologists, is the social institution that organizes decision-making and distributes power and resources, encompassing government, political parties, lobbying groups, and social movements.
• 🗳️ Voting is a political action, but so are demonstrations, calls to representatives, and economic actions like boycotts, all aiming to influence societal decisions and power distribution.
• 💪 Max Weber defined power as the ability to achieve desired ends despite objections, with government power often backed by the threat of force, though not necessarily requiring its use.
• 🏢 Weber also described the state as having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, but under normal circumstances, state power is viewed as an expression of authority.
• 👑 Traditional authority is based on respect for cultural patterns and beliefs, rational-legal authority on legally enacted rules and regulations, and charismatic authority on the personal qualities of a leader.
• 🔄 Charismatic authority can become routinized, transforming into a combination of traditional and/or rational-legal authority, as seen in the founding of the Church after Jesus' death.
• 🌐 Different forms of government, such as democracies and monarchies, are backed by different types of authority, with democracies often associated with rational-legal authority and monarchies with traditional authority.
• 👥 Authoritarian systems, including monarchies and totalitarian regimes, deny mass participation in governance, with the latter centrally regulating people's lives through bureaucratic rules.
• 🌈 The political spectrum in the US ranges from liberal to conservative, with each side favoring different approaches to economic and social issues, reflecting their underlying beliefs about authority.
• 🤝 Political parties and interest groups organize around issues or party platforms, influencing the distribution of power and resources, while social movements mobilize people for political goals.
• 💭 Sociological theories of power, such as the pluralist, power-elite, and Marxist models, offer different perspectives on how power is distributed and how political change can occur.

Q & A

What is the broader definition of politics according to sociologists?

Sociologists define politics as the major social institution by which society organizes decision-making and distributes power and resources. This includes not only the government but also political parties, lobbying groups, and social movements.

What is Max Weber's definition of power?

Max Weber defined power as the ability to achieve desired ends over the objections of others. He also considered a government's power to be coercive power, backed by the threat of force.

What is the difference between traditional authority and rational-legal authority?

Traditional authority is power legitimized by respect for long-standing cultural patterns and beliefs, while rational-legal authority is power legitimized by legally enacted rules and regulations.

Can you provide an example of charismatic authority?

Charismatic authority is power legitimized by the extraordinary personal qualities of a leader. Examples include Jesus of Nazareth leading a new religious movement or Martin Luther King Jr. leading the civil rights movement.

What is the concept of the routinization of charisma?

The routinization of charisma refers to the process where charismatic authority is transformed into a combination of traditional and/or rational-legal authority, often after the departure of the charismatic leader.

How does democracy differ from monarchy in terms of the type of authority it relies on?

Democracy tends to be backed by rational-legal authority, where power is attached to legally defined offices rather than specific individuals. Monarchy, on the other hand, is based on traditional authority, legitimized by long-standing cultural patterns and beliefs.

What are some examples of political actions outside of voting?

Examples of political actions outside of voting include attending a demonstration, calling a representative, or boycotting a company whose CEO's ideas are disagreeable. All these actions aim to influence societal decision-making and the distribution of power.

How does the political spectrum in the United States typically range?

In the United States, the political spectrum typically ranges from liberal on the left to conservative on the right, with each side holding different beliefs and ideas that shape the distribution of power and resources.

What are some economic issues that left-leaning or liberal perspectives often favor?

Left-leaning or liberal perspectives often favor government intervention in the economy to ensure equality of outcomes, such as equal pay for women, equitable distribution of wealth among races, and regulations promoting workplace and product safety.

What is the pluralist model of power distribution in society?

The pluralist model sees power as being widely distributed, with politics being a matter of negotiation where everyone has some voice in the process. It suggests that demonstrations are irrational outbursts in a political system that already distributes power fairly.

What does the Marxist political economy model suggest about the cause of power imbalance?

The Marxist political economy model suggests that the cause of power imbalance is systemic, with the powerful few being products of a particular economic system. It posits that meaningful political change is only possible through a change in the underlying economic system.

Outlines

00:00

🏛️ Understanding Politics and Authority

This paragraph delves into the nature of politics and authority from a sociological perspective. It starts by questioning the viewer's civic engagement and knowledge of government workings, suggesting that while one might know how the system operates, understanding why it functions that way requires sociological insight. Politics is defined as the social institution for organizing decision-making and power distribution, encompassing not just government but also political parties, lobbying groups, and social movements. The paragraph introduces Max Weber's concept of power and authority, explaining coercive power, traditional authority, rational-legal authority, and charismatic authority, and how they manifest in different political systems. It also touches on the routinization of charisma and the forms of government, such as democracy and monarchy, and their relationship with types of authority.

05:04

🗳️ The Practicality of Politics and Sociological Theories

The second paragraph shifts the focus from theoretical discussions to practical applications of sociological understanding in politics, particularly in the context of the United States. It discusses the political spectrum, ranging from liberal to conservative ideologies, and how these beliefs influence the distribution of power and resources. The paragraph highlights the economic and social policy differences between the left and right, using examples like marriage equality and workplace regulations. It also covers the role of political parties, interest groups, and social movements in shaping politics. The discussion then moves to sociological theories of power, including the pluralist model, power-elite model, and the Marxist political economy model, each offering a different perspective on how power is distributed in society and the implications for political engagement and change.

Keywords

💡Civics

Civics refers to the study of the rights and duties of citizens, including knowledge about government structures and processes. In the video, it is contrasted with sociology to highlight that while civics can explain how a system works, sociology delves into the reasons behind it. The script mentions that a civics class might define politics in terms of government systems, but sociology offers a broader understanding.

💡Sociology

Sociology is the scientific study of society, patterns of social relationships, and the ways these patterns shape different aspects of social life. The video script uses sociology to understand the 'why' behind government operations, explaining that it can help uncover the motivations and influences on political systems beyond the structural knowledge provided by civics.

💡Politics

In the script, politics is initially defined from a civics perspective as systems of government, but sociologists broaden this to include any social institution that organizes decision-making and distributes power and resources. The concept is central to the video's theme, illustrating the various ways in which power is exerted and decisions are made in society, including through government, political parties, and social movements.

💡Power

Power, as defined by Max Weber in the script, is the ability to achieve desired ends despite opposition. It is a fundamental concept in the video, explaining the capacity of governments and other entities to influence societal outcomes. The script discusses different forms of power, such as coercive, traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic, and how they manifest in various political systems.

💡Max Weber

Max Weber was a German sociologist and is one of the founding figures of sociology. The script references his definition of power and authority, emphasizing his view of the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Weber's theories provide a framework for understanding the different types of authority and their impact on political structures.

💡Authority

Authority in the script is the legitimate power that a government or other entity holds, often based on societal acceptance. It is categorized into traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic forms. The video uses authority to explain how different political systems gain and maintain control, and how changes in authority can lead to shifts in power dynamics.

💡Traditional Authority

Traditional authority is power legitimized by respect for long-standing cultural patterns and beliefs. The script uses this concept to explain how certain political systems, like monarchies, derive their power from historical precedents and the acceptance of societal order, such as the Divine Right of Kings.

💡Rational-Legal Authority

Rational-legal authority is power legitimized by legally enacted rules and regulations. The video script highlights the US Constitution as an example, where the written rules determine the political and legal system, and changes in the Constitution, like the legalization of same-sex marriage, reflect shifts in this type of authority.

💡Charismatic Authority

Charismatic authority is based on the extraordinary personal qualities of a leader, as illustrated in the script by figures like Jesus of Nazareth and Martin Luther King Jr. The video discusses how this type of authority can be unstable and may transform into more stable forms of traditional or rational-legal authority through a process called routinization of charisma.

💡Routinization of Charisma

Routinization of charisma is the process by which a charismatic leader's authority becomes institutionalized outside of the individual, often transforming into traditional or rational-legal authority. The script uses the founding of the Church after Jesus' death as an example, showing how a movement based on personal charisma can become a structured institution.

💡Political Spectrum

The political spectrum in the script represents the range of political ideologies from liberal to conservative. It is essential to understanding the distribution of power and resources in a society, as different ideologies advocate for different approaches to governance and policy, as illustrated by the video's discussion on economic and social issues.

💡Pluralist Model

The pluralist model, as mentioned in the script, views power in a society as widely distributed, allowing for negotiation among various groups. This model suggests that everyone has a voice in the political process, contrasting with other models like the power-elite model, which posits that power is concentrated among the wealthy.

💡Power-Elite Model

The power-elite model, discussed in the script, sees political power as concentrated in the hands of a few, particularly the very rich. This model provides a rationale for political protests, as it suggests that demonstrations may be necessary for the less powerful to advance their interests in a society where power is not evenly distributed.

💡Marxist Political Economy Model

The Marxist political economy model, as presented in the script, argues that power imbalances are systemic and result from the underlying economic system. It suggests that the powerful are not just a political elite but are products of the economic structure, implying that meaningful political change requires an economic system overhaul.

Highlights

Civics can explain the workings of a system, but sociology provides understanding of the 'why' behind government operations.

Sociologists define politics as the social institution organizing decision-making and distributing power and resources.

Politics encompasses not only government but also political parties, lobbying groups, and social movements.

The government's power is special due to its role in making decisions for society and its ability to achieve desired ends.

Max Weber defined power as the potential to achieve goals despite objections, with the government's power often being coercive.

A state is characterized by a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, according to Weber.

State power is usually an expression of authority, with violence as a last resort.

Political power can manifest through traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic authority.

Charismatic authority can be unstable and may transform into traditional or rational-legal authority through routinization.

Different forms of government, such as democracy and monarchy, are backed by different types of authority.

Democracy is linked to rational-legal authority, while monarchy is associated with traditional authority.

Authoritarian systems like totalitarianism deny citizen participation and centralize power among elites.

Political attitudes and the political spectrum shape the distribution of power and resources in society.

Economic policies of the left and right reflect different approaches to government intervention and regulation.

Social issues often reveal the reliance on traditional or legal-rational authority by the political right and left, respectively.

Political parties and interest groups organize to influence the distribution of power and resources.

Social movements, such as Black Lives Matter and the Tea Party, aim to mobilize people for political goals.

Sociological theories of power, including pluralist, power-elite, and Marxist models, explain different views on power distribution.

The pluralist model suggests a wide distribution of power, while the power-elite model indicates concentration among the wealthy.

The Marxist political economy model sees power imbalance as systemic, linked to the economic system.

Understanding politics requires examining authority types, government forms, political beliefs, and power models.

Transcripts

You're a good citizen, right?

You voted in the last election, or you're looking forward to voting in the future.

You pay your taxes.

You're happy to exercise the full range of your civic responsibilities.

The point is, you might already know all about how your government works.

If you don't, and you're American, well, there's a Crash Course for that.

But even if you're an informed citizen who knows every line of your constitution by heart, that doesn't mean you know why your government works.

For that, we need a different kind of political knowledge.

Civics can tell you how your system works, but sociology can help you understand why.

[Theme Music]

So, what do we mean when we talk about politics?

A civics class can define politics in terms of the particular systems of government, but sociologists have a broader definition:

Politics is the major social institution by which society organizes decision-making and distributes power and resources.

By this definition, politics obviously includes things like the government itself,

but it also includes things outside of it, like political party organizations and lobbying groups, and even social movements.

Voting is a political action, but so is going to a demonstration or calling your representative.

Or boycotting a company whose CEO has ideas that you find disagreeable.

Because, these are all ways of trying to influence societal decision-making and the distribution of power.

That being said, the government does have special importance here, because it's the major formal organization that organizes and regulates politics,

so it’s responsible for making decisions for the whole of society.

And it can carry out these decisions, because it has a lot of power,

which our old friend Max Weber defined as the ability to achieve desired ends over the objections of others.

Now, Weber considered a government's power to be coercive power, or power that’s backed by the threat of force.

You might not think of your government as a threat, but Weber actually defined a state as the organization that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Of course – and thankfully – not every action that a government takes requires an overt use of force.

Under normal circumstances, people respect the political systems at work in their government,

and they tend to view state power as an expression of authority, where state leaders have the right to use legitimate power.

And so, while violence for Weber is always the ultimate last resort of the state, most of the time, it isn't necessary.

Weber also recognized that the power of a political system comes in a variety of forms.

Traditional authority is power that’s legitimized by respect for long-standing cultural patterns and beliefs.

It’s based on the same idea as the traditional mindset we talked about in episodes 9 & 17,

namely that the world has a basic order to it, and that order must be respected.

Another style of power is known as rational-legal authority, or power legitimized by legally enacted rules and regulations.

This is the power behind the US Constitution, whose written rules determine the entire American political and legal system.

When the Constitution is changed or reinterpreted, the rules change, as with when the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was legal in 2015, for example.

Finally, we have a kind of wildcard power: charismatic authority, which is power legitimized by the extraordinary personal qualities of a leader.

Jesus of Nazareth leading a new religious movement, or Martin Luther King Jr. leading thousands of people in the civil rights movement

are examples of personalities that mobilized precisely this kind of authority.

But authority that rests entirely on the qualities of one person can be unstable.

So sometimes that power becomes transferred to something outside – separate from – that one charismatic person.

This is called the routinization of charisma, and it’s where charismatic authority is transformed into some combination of traditional and/or rational-legal authority.

The founding of the Church after Jesus' death is a good example of this.

Now, just as there are different kinds of authority, so too are there different forms of government.

For instance, democracy – a political system that gives power to the people as a whole – tends to be backed by rational-legal authority.

This isn't terribly surprising, since, in Weber’s model, democracy as a form of government and a rational-legal approach to authority both emerged with rationalization and the rise of bureaucracy.

And we can see a certain affinity between democracy and rational-legal authority in the fact that leadership in democracies is linked to office-holding.

So, the power is attached to a legally defined office, not to a particular person.

By contrast, monarchy is a political system in which power is legitimized by traditional authority and held by a single family.

This is maybe most obvious in the feudal European idea of the Divine Right of Kings, in which the monarchs were held to be ordained by God from time immemorial.

And just as democracies are much more common in modern bureaucratic states, monarchies are more common in traditional agrarian societies.

But a certain type of authority doesn’t always reside in a specific form of government.

Monarchy, for example, is just one type of authoritarianism, which is any system that denies people participation in their own governance and leaves ruling to the elites.

And while monarchy relies on traditional authority, another variety of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, does not.

Totalitarianism is a centralized political system that extensively regulates people’s lives.

And it has some of the same affinities for legal-rational authority that democracy does.

Both are modern systems, for one thing, but it's also much easier to closely control a people through a system of bureaucratic rules.

For example, a totalitarian government might enact a law that, say, every household has to display a picture of the ruler.

It’s a small bureaucratic rule with major political implications.

And democracy isn’t always associated with legal-rational authority, either.

Take the United States!

The President has power because of the rules set out in the Constitution – which is a form of legal-rational authority –

but the President attains that power by winning an election, which can often rely on charismatic authority.

We can even see traditional authority of a kind at work in the reverence with which the Constitution and the "Founding Fathers" are invoked in political discourse.

Now, the US as an example can move us from what has so far been a pretty theoretical discussion of authority and politics, to seeing how sociology can help us understand what they look like in practice.

To understand power, authority, and politics, we need to understand the political attitudes of a population.

And to do this, we need to talk about the political spectrum, the broad array of beliefs and ideas that make up the politics of a society.

In the US, this ranges from liberal on the left of the spectrum to conservative on the right.

And again, this isn’t just a theoretical difference of ideas;

these beliefs shape the distribution of power and resources in the US in some very fundamental ways.

On economic issues, for instance, left-leaning or liberal perspectives often favor government intervention in the economy to help guarantee an equality of outcomes.

Equal pay for women, equitable distribution of wealth among races, and regulations that promote workplace and product safety

are all examples of economic issues that the left is frequently concerned with.

By contrast, conservative or right-leaning perspectives may tend to take a more laissez-faire or “hands off” approach,

in which government regulation is seen as hampering the natural flow of economic activity.

So, that’s how the political spectrum can look when it comes to economic matters.

On social issues, one way of understanding the gap between left and right is in terms of the different kinds of authority that each faction tends to support, or endorse.

Here, the right tends to build its arguments on traditional authority, while the left tends to look to legal-rational frameworks.

We can see this in the issue of marriage equality, for example:

The right has often described its opposition as a defense of “traditional marriage,”

while the left has argued that marriage equality was an extension of legal, civil rights.

Now, no matter where your political leanings fall on the spectrum,

in the end they’d be pretty meaningless without some way to give them form in the struggle for things like power and wealth.

That’s where political parties come in, as well as interest groups, like political action committees, which organize around particular issues rather than around a whole party platform.

And beyond the formal, institutional politics, there are also social movements that try to mobilize masses of people to further particular political goals.

Black Lives Matter and the Tea Party are both good examples of this.

But lobbying, special interest groups, and social movements all raise difficult questions about how truly democratic the American system is.

Why would you need to demonstrate in the streets if you’re supposed to be able to express your political beliefs by voting?

The answer lies in sociological theories of power – that is, the different understandings of how power is distributed in a society.

One common view is known as the pluralist model, which sees power as being very widely distributed.

In this view, politics is a matter of negotiation, but everyone has at least some voice in the process.

This model was closely linked with structural functionalist theory and dominated much of American sociology in the 1950s and early 60s.

In this line of thinking, demonstrations are seen as irrational outbursts, pointless gestures in a political system that already distributes political power fairly.

However, in the power-elite model, political protests make perfect sense.

This view sees political power as being concentrated in the hands of small groups, especially among the very rich.

If this is the case, protests may be the only way for many people to advance their interests and have their voices heard.

Finally, there’s the Marxist political economy model, which holds that both of the other two models really miss the point:

Here, power isn't evenly distributed, but it's also not held by a strictly political elite.

Instead, the cause of the imbalance of power is seen as being systemic, and the powerful few are seen as the products of a particular economic system.

So meaningful political change, in this understanding, is only possible through a change in the underlying economic system.

So to understand politics – in the United States or anywhere else – we need to look at all the aspects we’ve talked about –

the types of authority, the kinds of government, political beliefs, models of power, and how they all relate to each other.

Today we learned about the sociological approach to politics.

We defined politics and power.

We discussed the different types of authority and how they relate to different political systems.

And we looked at American politics in some detail, talking about demographics and political organizations.

Finally, we discussed different sociological theories of power.

Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT, and it’s made with the help of all of these nice people.

Our animation team is Thought Cafe and Crash Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud.

If you'd like to keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can support the series at Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love.

Thank you to all of our patrons for making Crash Course possible with their continued support.