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.
