Politics as a Science

A Prolegomenon

Philippe C. Schmitter, Marc Blecher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000180220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

In Politics as a Science, two of the world's leading authorities on Comparative Politics, Philippe C. Schmitter and Marc Blecher, provide a lively introduction to the concepts and framework to study and analyze politics.

Written with dexterity, concision and clarity, this short text makes no claim to being scientific. It contains no disprovable hypotheses, no original collection of evidence and no search for patterns of association. Instead, Schmitter and Blecher keep the text broadly conceptual and theoretical to convey their vision of the sprawling subject of politics. They map the process in which researchers try to specify the goal of the trip, some of the landmarks likely to be encountered en route and the boundaries that will circumscribe the effort. Examples, implications and elaborations are included in footnotes throughout the book.

Politics as a Science is an ideal introduction for anyone interested in, or studying, comparative politics.

"The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781003032144, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license."

1

The Subject Matter

Abstract

Politics is a (if not the) quintessential human activity – the “master science” of the sphere within which all other human activities must take place. Its goal is to domesticate the inevitable conflicts that arise from our need to live together in communities under conditions of scarcity. This requires coordination, which, in turn, necessarily involves the controlled exercise of power. Politics involves the development of mutually agreed upon rules, norms, institutions and/or reliably applied practices that permit conflicts to be resolved pacifically to preclude the resort to violence. Yet, it also produces constant contestation, which makes politics inherently dynamic and always unbalanced. It also involves units that are not equivalent, and that are conscious and themselves transformed as they interact. They do so through highly imperfect processes of communication. Politics is also inherently historical, since humans are always affected by their experiences and institutions. For all these reasons, politics is a very different kind of realm from the natural world, with its predictable regularities and objective processes. So is the “science” that studies it. Thus, it would be appropriate to give the study of politics its own name that captures its uniqueness as a science: politology.

1.1 The Core: Power and Politics

Politics is a (if not the) quintessential human activity.¹ It brings to bear on the relations between persons many of the qualities that are unique to the human species. Ever since they have lived together in communities large enough to require interdependent action in order to survive, human beings have, even when just hunting and gathering, had to do so in a social context. Often (and increasingly often, as they moved into more complex processes of production), they have had to coordinate their efforts and, therefore, to make decisions about what, how and how much to produce and how to distribute it. Just the existence of scarcity, not to mention innate differences in individual preferences and resources, has compelled them to attempt to resolve the inevitable conflicts of interest and sentiment that this requires. If all such decisions were so-called “Pareto Optimal” – i.e., benefitted everyone without harming anyone – politics would be unnecessary. They are very rarely so, and this means that some persons will have to either convince or compel others to contribute or to conform.

1 Should politics be singular or plural? In this text, we have tried consistently to use the former when referring to its generic properties and the latter when referring to its diverse practices.

Power is what we commonly call this process – the capacity to make others do what we want them to do which they would not otherwise wish or choose to do.² It always has at least “two faces.” The one that is easier to observe and eventually to measure involves coercion – the use or threat of physical force to bring about an intended outcome. The second is much less visible and, hence, potentially more insidious. It involves the multifarious ways in which the powerful manipulate the knowledge, preferences and patterns of thought of the less powerful in order to convince them to conform “voluntarily” to the “legitimate” demands of those in power. The study of politics is dedicated to making sense of both of these – and any of the other – faces of power.³

2 In a recent book, Stefano Bartolini has dedicated 27 pages in an effort to define what politics is. (Stefano Bartolini, The Political (London: ECPR Press/Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018), ch. 5.) The definition he proposes

(a) the process through which ordinary citizens unite their wills in the form of authority fields and constitute politically relevant actors (the politics of participation and collective action); (b) the process in which authority fields as politically relevant actors exchange support resources with factions of the elite competing for authority positions (the politics of support and pressure); and (c) the process in which these factions struggle among themselves for public authority (the politics of competition).

is not incompatible with our more parsimonious focus on the exercise of power and its consequences. Nevertheless, there is at least one way in which our approaches differ quite significantly. Bartolini focuses exclusively on politics in what we have called “real-­existing” democracies (hence, the reference to citizens, participation and competition). We are equally concerned with politics in “real-existing” autocracies, as well as a large number of “hybrids” of the two. He is also much more preoccupied with probing the ambiguity of the very concept of power itself:

[T]here is a world of difference whether bindingness over others is applied via a direct utilisation of power/resources in dealings with other actors or whether compliance is stabilised over time and generalised to the entire membership of a system, including those against which no ‘power’ has been used and no conflict has been waged (p. 125).

We raise the same questions in the rest of this paragraph and infra, but much more summarily.

3 Antonio Gramsci recognized as much when he focused on the dyad of dominio and direzione (coercion and consent). See his Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Since then, scholars have been competing to discover the most “faces” of power. For the original two, see Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (December 1962): 947–952. For three, see Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (New York: Macmillan, 1973); for four, see Peter Digeser, “The Fourth Face of Power,” Journal of Politics 54, no. 4 (November 1992): 977–1007; for all five, see Iris M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). By now, there may be a sixth that we have not yet encountered.

All of those involved in politics – be they politicians or ordinary citizens/subjects⁴ – are agents of some kind or another.⁵ Their actions are not completely pre-determined by the physical or social contexts in which they find themselves. They have, or at least believe they have, choices to make among alternative courses of action. Moreover, they are intrinsically “restless” with regard to their environment.⁶ Some agents are dissatisfied with their existing situation and, hence, willing to try to change it. In so doing, they are very likely to provoke a response from those who are not so dissatisfied. The latter will react to defend the status quo and, therefore, also become agents.⁷ To effect change or prevent it, both types have to be able to imagine future conditions and the alternative actions that might improve or threaten the quality of that environment and their existence within it.⁸

4 What concept should be used when referring to the political behavior of the vast majority of people who are not self-declared politicians or political activists? This genotype (i.e., generic concept) requires immediate specification into observable phenotypes (i.e., sub-types) that vary according to régime. Politologists usually refer to people who live in democracies in which people have political rights as citizens, and those living in those kinds of régimes which do not have such rights as subjects. We have adopted here the somewhat awkward term “citizens/subjects” when we have to refer to the genotype. (Even “subject,” with its connotation of those living under a royal sovereign, is not quite right – and somewhat ideologically loaded – when referring to “the people” of non-monarchical autocracies, especially state socialist ones.) We are convinced that a central objective of politology should be to focus more on the phenotypes, i.e., what they have in common. For further discussion of the problem of genotypes and phenotypes, and of its specific application to the problem of how to conceptualize and analyze politics involving ordinary people, see page 21 ff. and especially footnote 26 there.

5 N.b. Agents are not actors. They do not perform exclusively according to roles established by others beforehand. They are potentially capable of writing their own scripts, even though many politicians and citizens/subjects may in routine practice behave as they are told, trained or induced to do.

6 This encapsulated description of the generic nature of the political agent combines the very well-known observation of Aristotle that human beings are zoon politikon (political animals) and, therefore, intrinsically disposed to use power over others to realize their goals (or to protect themselves from the efforts of others to do so) with the much less well-known observation of the philosophical anthropologist, Arnold Gehlen, that human beings are distinctively “incomplete” with regard to their environment and, thus, intrinsically disposed to being dissatisfied with it and seeking to change it – by institutions if possible, by force if necessary. A. Gehlen, Der Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt, ed. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (Frankfurt: Verlag Vittorio Klosterman, 2016). The fact that Gehlen was a convinced and unrepentant Nazi no doubt has contributed to the reluctance to attribute this important observation to him. It also probably did not help that his brother, Reinhard, was a Nazi general in charge of intelligence on the Eastern Front who subsequently became a US intelligence asset and later the founder of the West German equivalent of the CIA.

7 Some would argue that those who passively support the status quo are also agents in that they contribute to the imposition of a system of domination that generates dissatisfaction in others. Even if their contribution is unintentional or unnoticed, they could be considered agents even before they react overtly to the actions of their dissatisfied fellow members. Thanks to Tony Spanakos for this point.

8 The implication here is that politics is never purely immediate and material, but is always affected by the capacity of individuals and groups to imagine different potential futures. The Chilean social scientist, Norbert Lechner, wrote similarly that politics involve not only the conduct of administration, the protection of life and the maintenance of economic security, but also “the common sense [notion] that politics is above all a project of the future, the design of a referential horizon which makes the present intelligible.” See Norbert Lechner, Obras Escogidas de Norbert Lechner: Volume II (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2007), 331. Thanks to Tony Spanakos for this point.

If these generic characteristics of agents are true, politics as a form of human behavior is likely to be in almost permanent violation of two of the foundational principles of the physical sciences: the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. First, the agents involved will not normally be able to contain their actions and reactions within a closed homeostatic system and, hence, will be continuously subjected to exogenously induced changes in their relative power resources to which they will have to respond by changing their behavior or preferences. Second, given that entropy – the tendency toward disorder – is inevitable in any system, even if agents do succeed in isolating, controlling and/or satisfying these disturbing outside influences, they will never be completely successful in sustaining an equilibrium between conflicting and competing forces. Proponents of change – whom we will call “progressives” in a generic sense⁹ – may tire of “the costs of politics” and be tempted to withdraw from the struggle.¹⁰ Their opponents – “conservatives,” by which we mean simply...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• The Cover
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 The Subject Matter
• 2 The Foundations
• 3 The Consequences
• 4 The Discipline
• 5 The Design of Research
• 6 The Purpose
• 7 The Promise
• References
• Index