Note:  Read Box 3.3 but do not feel compelled to undertake the project.

Points to ponder

• Given the disadvantages of violence as a means of exercising power, an alternative worth considering is politics
• Politics includes the following means of exercising power (recall Dahl’s definition)
  • Persuasion, where A communicates a message which causes B to do something A wants him to, something that B otherwise would not do
    • Ex:  Under pressure from his party leaders, President Mbeki of South Africa resigns his post, something he would rather not do
    • Danziger’s discussion (143) of “mutuality (integrative power) would seem to implicate persuasion but, from what he writes, it appears that B does what A wants him to do because of A’s person, not the quality of A’s argument
  • Bargaining, an exchange where A gives something to B that B wants (and that A would otherwise not give up) and B gives something to A that A wants (and that B would otherwise not give up)
    • Ex:  The United States gives foreign aid to Colombia, in part to support agricultural projects which provide an alternative to coca production (the US would otherwise not give away US treasury dollars, and Colombia would otherwise not interfere in peasant coca production)
    • Bargaining is a very special way of applying power because both A and B get something, though they both end up giving up something, and the happily reciprocal character of bargaining probably accounts for its frequent use in resolving conflicts
    • This is clearly identical to Danziger’s (143) “exchange (economic power),” though the item(s) exchanged need not have a dollar value
  • Voting, meaningful only when there are three or more players, in which each player signals with a vote her preference, and the option chosen is the one that has the required number of votes (often this is the option with the most number of votes or the option that has votes of one-half-plus-one, but other decision rules are used)
    • Ex:  About 100 citizens of Townshend, VT, spent most of the day on 6 March 2007 at Town Meeting to decide school budgets and funding for the library, cemetery, and other services, to set due dates for property taxes, to debate whether the town should pay for repairing the gazebo on the town common, and to vote on forwarding to Congress a resolution to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
    • Ex:  Our interpretation of the US Constitution, at least in part, hinges on which side gets the most number of votes on the nine-member US Supreme Court; for example, can a city take a person’s property through the power of eminent domain in order to promote the efforts of private developers (Kelo v New London)?
    • Oddly, Danziger does not mention voting as a means for exercising power (p. 143)
• Having identified persuasion, bargaining, and voting as “political” means of applying power, we now formally introduce yet another of the many definitions of politics (Danziger 4), to wit    
  • Politics is the legitimated set of activities directed toward the making of binding decisions for any community
    • Persuasion, bargaining, and voting are all activities
    • There are three activities—persuasion, bargaining, and voting—and so they make a set
    • These activities are used for making decisions
      • Decisions of whose values are promoted and whose preferences are denied, “who gets what, when, how” (Lasswell  1936)
      • Decisions for any community—a state (as it has been defined) or some political unit within the state (say, a city or a province or Delaware), or a corporation or a social group (like the IOOF, Independent Order of Oddfellows)
      • Decisions which are binding on members of the community
        • Every member of the community, by virtue of being a member of the community, is a party to the decision
          • Ex:  In a community which has, by some means,  chosen to use the death penalty for those convicted of certain crimes, all members of the community are responsible for executions, even those who oppose the decision; community members cannot choose to opt in or opt out of community decisions
        • On the other hand, politics applies only to decisions which are res publica (Danziger: 116)
          • If you quit smoking because your doctor has convinced you that you will be better off as a result, this is persuasion but not a political application of power because the decision to smoke as a general matter is not binding on members of the community (though a vote by a legislative body to ban smoking in public places would be a political exercise of power because it is binding on all members of the community)
          • In settling on a purchase price for a car, the buyer and seller probably engaged in a cycle of bargaining, but again this is not a political use of power because the transaction decision applies only to those two people, not the community (though, again, there will be various rules or laws--say, regulations prohibiting resetting the odometer--which govern the transaction, and those rules and laws were established through a political process)
    • And, and this is critical, the legitimated set of activities directed toward the making of binding decisions for any community
      • Recall the definition of legitimate
      • Most people regard persuasion, bargaining, and voting as right proper, and appropriate means of resolving conflicts
      • In most circumstances, most people do not regard violence as a right, proper, appropriate means of resolving conflict
        • There are two important exceptions
          • Self-defense
          • Use of force by an agent of the state such as a policeman or soldier when that person is acting on behalf of the community to carry out community objectives
• There are a variety of means of participating politically, sometimes called “modes of participation”
  • There are what are sometimes called conventional political activities (Verba et al. 1987: 51 ff), including
    • Voting
    • Campaigning which is to say being active in political campaigns and party activities including such things as wearing campaign buttons, putting up yard signs on your lawn, contributing money to a candidate, distributing leaflets, etc.
    • Communal activity which refers to participation in the activities of groups other than political parties such as the Chamber of Commerce, the National Organization of Women, the National Education Association, or the PTA
    • Parochial contacting, which is making direct contact with government officials but only for the purpose of having getting a personal response rather than one that affects others (complaining to the Sanitation Department about poor service, not trying to get recycling program for the city; contacting your Senator because of a problem with your Social Security check, not trying to get him or her to change the Medicare prescription drug program)
  • Then there are unconventional political activities, unconventional because relatively few people engage in them
    • Many of the unconventional political activities are legal, just rarely undertaken—marches and boycotts are examples
    • Other unconventional activities, also rarely undertaken, involve illegal acts; examples here are sit-ins and property damage
  • Danziger (59; 61) provides some cross-national data on voting and other (conventional and unconventional) political activities
  • These modes of political participation can be compared along several dimensions
    • The amount of pressure they exert on government officials
    • The amount of information they convey; in other words, how clear it is to others what is the objective of the act
    • The scope of outcome—does a positive result only impact the political participant or does it have general application
    • Whether the act clearly involves conflict with others
    • How much initiative is required of the actor
    • Whether the act can be accomplished by an individual alone or requires the participation of others
    • How high are the costs of participation measured in terms of money, time required, the psychological effort demanded, and the level of personal exposure
    • Whether the act can be carried out at any time or only at set times (for example, at election time)
• An issue separate from the modes of participation in which people engage are the levels of activity, or extent of political participation, by different individuals; not only do individuals vary in the ways they participate but they also vary considerably in how much they participate
• Aside from voting and parochial contacting, political activity is collective activity in which individuals work together for some objective; the two types of cooperative organizations in which people combine for political purposes are interest groups and political parties
  • A political party is an organization which aims to put its members into government offices
    • From this definition, the principal function of a political party is electoral, to get their members elected (or appointed) to positions of government power; it is the exceptional party that doesn’t dissolve after repeatedly failing to win power
    • Political parties also have secondary functions (the following list is an alternative to Danziger [70-74] but one which covers the same territory)
      • They organize like-minded people in and out of government
        • Out of government, people who share similar political views are likely to become active in a party as a vehicle to secure their objectives
        • In government, elected and other officials frequently collaborate together for common ends
          • In the Austrian legislature, members of the Social Democratic Party vote together as a bloc to support their party leader who is Chancellor (prime minister)
          • In making appointments to the courts and to administrative agencies, US presidents appoint people from their own political party as a way to promote their policies
      • They provide information to citizens, many of whom don’t closely follow politics; the party name or label, itself, is often enough information for citizens to decide how to vote or how to feel about a particular policy or development
      • They identify and train future political leaders
  • Because political parties are principally electoral organizations, they are more interested in winning elections than in taking clear stands on issues (because clear stands run the risk of alienating potential voters); as a result, people form interest groups to advance their positions
    • An interest group is a group of people with a common interest who organize to influence government policy
      • Women, farmers, hunters are not interest groups
      • The National Organization of Women, the American Farm Bureau, and the National Rifle Association are interest groups
  • To stress the point, the principal goal of political parties is to win government offices while the principal objective of interest groups is to get their policies adopted by government
    • Because parties want to win control over government offices--one way of phrasing it is to say that they are “vote sucking” machines--they are inclusive in that they make it easy for citizens to affiliate with the party (in the US, for example, all one needs to do is to say “I’m a Democrat,” and you’re in) and, as a result of that, they tend to include people with an extensive range of opinions (in the 1960s the Democratic Party had no objection to including both northern African Americans and southern segregationists; and today’s Republican Party includes “social conservatives” and “economic conservatives” who share the label conservative but apply it very differently)
    • Interest groups, on the other hand, are composed of people who share a common interest (such that you don’t expect to see many gun control advocates joining the National Rifle Association) and therefore have a more intensive range of opinions and are exclusive, effectively keeping out who don’t share the common interest; moreover, membership in interest groups is also exclusive because these groups typically require dues and impose other obligations on potential members.

Questions to consider

• Would you say that lying is a political means of applying power?  What about bribery and blackmail?  Why?
• Voting is only one kind of political participation, but why might it be argued that the right to vote is required for the effective use of at least some of other modes of political participation, specifically parochial contacting, campaigning, and communal activity?
• Why are women, farmers, and hunters not interest groups but the National Organization of Women, the American Farm Bureau, and the National Rifle Association are?