Module 1: What is Politics?

Figure 1-1: Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gandhi_smiling_R.jpg Permission: Public Domain.

The above quote exemplifies the contemporary debates around politics. Politics is… everything. It surrounds every aspect of our lives. It defines our rights and obligations as citizens of particular states. It decides how much we pay in taxes. It defines the cost and access to health care and education. It decides which industries are supported, subsidized, and regulated. It decides who has authority over us, in what ways that authority can be exercised, and to what effect. It decides how to treat the ‘other’: refugees, migrants, and minorities. Less formally, it influences who we can date, marry, and build our lives with. It influences what is morally right and wrong. It influences who should be a nurse, teacher, doctor, and firefighter. It even influences who washes the dishes, puts the kids to bed, and takes out the garbage.

Yet, when asked, many people say they are not interested in politics. These people are the proverbial men and women who are drowning while insisting they are not interested in water. There should be nothing more important to someone drowning than the water around them – and, arguably, there should be nothing more important to a citizen than the politics that define who they are and the communities they live in. This module will seek to define politics and its constitutive elements: power, authority, legitimacy, and the common good.

Politics has been defined in different ways by different people over time. These definitions all struggle with questions of how to organize human activity and usually try to account for relations of power. A good working definition of politics is built on the work of David Easton (1953): politics is the authoritative allocation of scarce resources in a given political community. Let us break this definition down. Authoritative allocation means some system of decision-making that has the right to make such decisions. Scarce resources refer to finite inputs, such as money, time, labour, and natural resources. Since these resources are finite, difficult decisions need to be made as to where they should be used. Finally, the context of decision-making happens within a bounded, or given, community. The given political community can be as large as a country, a religion, the international community, or even race. Or it can be as small as a couple, a family, the workplace, or one’s place of worship. Put more simply, politics is about who gets what, when, and how.

Some concrete examples of this definition are useful in contextualizing what politics means. At the federal level should the government put more resources into national defence, international development, environmental protection, or debt reduction? Provincially should the government put more resources into health care, education, or transportation? Municipally should the government put more resources into debt reduction, roads, healthcare, education, public transportation, or bike paths? Where should a family put its resources, into the education of its children or into the family business? How should a couple determine who is responsible for doing the dishes or taking care of the kids? How cognizant are individuals of the political impact they have by how they spend their resources? From our time spent volunteering or giving to charitable organizations to our culpability in supporting coercive workplace practices by purchasing a 5 dollar shirt sourced from an under-regulated manufacturer in the global south, political questions are part of our daily lives.

Power is another concept that everyone intuitively understands but can be notoriously difficult to define in precise terms. There is a sense that power is related to imposing one’s will or asserting oneself over another, whether it be individuals or states. A classic example of the problematic nature of defining power is the Vietnam War. Which of the two states was more powerful? Clearly, the United States was quantifiably more powerful than North Vietnam in terms of military and economic might. But in the end, who prevailed? So if the US was quantifiably more powerful than North Vietnam, why were they unable to impose their will or assert themselves over a measurably less powerful actor? This quandary is replicated to a lesser degree in narrower political communities. The Canadian federal government may have the power to sign environmental treaties and to legislate environmental policy but the provincial governments have power over natural resource development and issues like pipelines. And any attempt to change this jurisdictional balance would require constitutional amendments and need to take heed of provincial rights/wishes. Even at the level of families, a parent may have the power of the purse strings over their university-age children, but if those children opt to fund their own studies, that power can quickly evaporate.

A working definition of power in the field of political science is offered by Joseph Nye (2004): the ability to achieve an objective by influencing the behaviour of others, particularly to get them to do what they would not have otherwise done. From this definition we can discern that quantifiable resources are often a necessary component of power but that the exercise of power itself is more qualitative, contextualized through relationships between individuals and groups. A first step in understanding how power may operate is to look at different kinds of power. Coercion is a form of power that utilizes threats, capitalizes on fear, and seeks to intimidate actors into compliance. Explicit examples of coercion include the use of Canadian-made arms by Saudi Arabia, both in Yemen and more importantly against its own citizens. Inducements are another form of power that seeks to tie some benefit to how one behaves or the achievement of some outcome. An example of inducements in Canadian politics can be seen by offering benefits to stakeholders if they approve pipeline projects, whether they be provincial governments or First Nations. Persuasion is the third facet of power, whether it be the legitimate dissemination of Public Service Announcements (PSA) or the deliberate crafting of ‘fake news’. While PSAs are an important means to inform the public of issues ranging from health to taxes, persuasion also has a dark side. For example, there is a growing body of evidence that ‘fake news’ stories have played a role in the increasing popularity of the alt-right movement, an attempted rebranding by racist and white supremacist groups. These are tied into ‘echo chambers’, where people increasingly only listen to those who share their ideological perspectives. Another form of power comes from leadership as others may be persuaded to follow or emulate those who have demonstrated successful outcomes due to their leadership qualities. While it is easy to see the leadership of strong states such as the US, medium and small states are often able to use leadership to achieve their goals. For example, Canada led a coalition of like-minded states to establish the Anti-Personnel Landmine Ban in 1997 against the express preferences of states like the US and China. Likewise, a politician or community leader that is seen as being honest and civic-minded may be able to exercise leadership on specific issues. All of the above forms of power, but most especially the last, lead to arguably the most pervasive form of power, agenda-setting. The ability to set the agenda is the power to decide which issues are important and which are not; which will receive attention and which will not. Going back to our definition of politics, which issues will have resources devoted towards them and which will not. This power has been clearly demonstrated in issues ranging from gender and race to economic and social policy. Beyond the facets of power, understanding its application requires understanding the distribution of power. Distribution of power can be determined by formal rules, like federal versus provincial jurisdictions or the constitutional form of government. Other issues of distribution revolve around societal relations and the relative influence of various groups on decision-makers, the consolidation of media in Canada being a good example. There are only a handful of players, like Bell/Rogers in digital media and Postmedia in print, and these actors play an important role in setting the tone of political debate. Finally, questions of power in politics must address how it is to be used. While it is argued that human nature is to abuse power for selfish purposes, the use of power is sometimes necessary to achieve necessary societal goods. An example of the use of power towards a collective good is an environmental policy whereby individual self-interest is checked by governmental power. However, the use of power is linked to two more constitutive elements, authority and legitimacy, which will be discussed next.

Authority is defined as the right to exercise power. Those with political authority are therefore staking a claim on the right to govern. If that right to govern is accepted by the political community over which that power is to be exercised, it can be said to have legitimacy. According to Max Weber, there are three means by which authority may be legitimated. Charismatic Authority is based on the personal qualities of the leader. Much like a good team captain can inspire devotion from the players, in politics, charismatic authority can lead to a cult of personality whereby the legitimacy of the government is based on the people’s perception/devotion to the leadership. The Kim dynasty in North Korea or the historical examples of Mao Zedong in China, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Stalin in the USSR, or even Charles de Gaulle of France are often cited as examples. Traditional Authority is based on the customary right of certain people, groups or families to rule. European monarchs, for example, base their legitimacy on a traditional authority derived from the divine right to rule; they are chosen by the Judeo-Christian God to rule over their people. Legal-rational Authority is based on the impersonal application of legal rules and procedures. Authority is not vested in Justin Trudeau or Scott Moe but rather in the roles of the Prime Minister and Premier respectively. PM Trudeau and Premier Moe were elected via rules and procedures. Their ‘powers’ are proscribed by these rules and procedures. And if they break these rules and procedures, there are other rules and procedures to remove/replace them.. Therefore, the legitimacy of the Federal and Provincial governments is rooted in these rules and procedures.

The importance of legitimacy brings us full circle to the issue of power. If the authority of the state is deemed legitimate by the majority of the people, the state will need to exert less power, particularly coercive power, to attain its goals. And vice versa – the more illegitimate a state is perceived, the more resources must be utilized to force compliance. Therefore, the nexus between politics, power, authority, and legitimacy are crucial to understanding contemporary society.

Politics, in its ideal form, is the pursuit of achieving the common good: working towards the betterment of the community as a whole. What exactly this entails is a matter of dispute. For those who advocate an individualist perspective, it means a minimalist state that limits state activity to the issues of security, dispute settlement, and protection of private property. For others, it is a more expansive state which provides access to universal education, healthcare, environmental protection, and even actively supports these same issues in other states. In Canada, there is a general consensus on a more collectivist definition of the common good but the debate can be seen in geographical terms and federal versus provincial jurisdictions. Equalization payments for example, where the federal government transfers money from ‘have’ provinces to ‘have not’ provinces in order to balance their fiscal capacity, can be contentious. Similarly, the deplorable state of many Indigenous reserves in Canada is a serious critique of Canada’s collectivist ethos. Remember, at the most basic level, these debates are about politics: who gets what, why, when, and how.

Beyond the issue of a more minimalist or more expansive state, how are we to achieve the common good? The most efficient path to the common good is Plato’s Philosopher King whereby a wise philosopher-king is trained by birth to act as a benevolent dictator in the name of the common good. This is efficient as there is no need for consultation or debate. However, as we have learned through the real world, this efficiency comes at a potential cost – totalitarian rule, corruption, and a lack of checks and balances. Contemporarily, democracy, defined as some form of rule legitimated by the people, is judged to be the most likely form of government to deliver on the common good. However, democracy is also prone to costs – partisanship, ideological rigidity, legislative gridlock, and potential harm to the rights of minority groups. In the end, there is no one uncontested way to seek the common good. Rather, it requires people who are willing to work together towards the goal of the common good and use the tools provided in classes such as this to find the means to achieve it. Perhaps, in the end, it is the journey towards the common good that is more important than the destination itself.

In order to go beyond merely descriptive accounts of politics or any other social science for that matter, we need to develop our critical faculties; to read critically, to think critically, to engage in critical discourse with others. This requires a degree of self-reflection. Paideia embodies this goal in that it defines education as both practical knowledge, such as that required by an engineer or doctor, and socialization to create good citizens. This is the main argument posited in the short video of Cornel West speaking at West Virginia University’s “Festival of Ideas”. He argues that education, both formal and informal, should facilitate self-interrogation, the formation of attention, and our struggle with ideas of truth, justice, sorrow, sadness, and joy.

Let us think back to the quote at the beginning which compared the drowning man’s disinterest in water to a person’s disinterest in politics. By now, the sarcasm of the quote should be biting. Politics surrounds as would a person adrift at sea – it is all around us. It defines us. It empowers us. It limits us. It is a vehicle for both the powerful and the powerless to have their voices heard. After reading the text and having done the learning activities, you should be able to confidently identify the role politics and power are operating in your life as well as the means they claim the legitimate authority to do so.