Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies politics and government is referred to as political science.
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian polymath, whose areas of interest included sociology, civil engineering, economics, political science, and philosophy. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term "elite" in social analysis.
Right-wing politics is the range of political ideologies that view certain social orders and hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position based on natural law, economics, authority, property, religion, biology or tradition. Hierarchy and inequality may be seen as natural results of traditional social differences or competition in market economies.
In politics, a regime is the form of government or the set of rules, cultural or social norms, etc., that regulate the operation of a government or institution and its interactions with society. The two broad categories of regimes that appear in most literature are democratic and autocratic. However, autocratic regimes can be broken down into a subset of many different types. The key similarity between all regimes are the presence of rulers, and either formal or informal institutions.
Legal positivism is a school of thought of philosophy of law and jurisprudence which holds that law is constructed from social facts, without regards to the merits of such law. It was developed largely by legal philosophers during the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. While Bentham and Austin developed legal positivist theory, empiricism provided the theoretical basis for such developments to occur. Some of the most prominent legal positivist writers of the 20th century have been Hans Kelsen, H. L. A. Hart, and Joseph Raz.
Political sociology is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with exploring how governance and society interact and influence one another at the micro to macro levels of analysis. Interested in the social causes and consequences of how power is distributed and changes throughout and amongst societies, political sociology's focus ranges across individual families to the state as sites of social and political conflict and power contestation.
The left–right political spectrum is a system of classifying political positions, ideologies and parties, with emphasis placed upon issues of social equality and social hierarchy. In addition to positions on the left and on the right, there are centrist and moderate positions, which are not strongly aligned with either end of the spectrum. It originated during the French Revolution based on the seating in the French National Assembly.
Ernesto Laclau was an Argentine political theorist and philosopher. He is often described as an 'inventor' of post-Marxist political theory. He is well known for his collaborations with his long-term partner, Chantal Mouffe.
Robert Alan Dahl was an American political theorist and Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University.
Modernization theory holds that as societies become more economically modernized, wealthier and more educated, their political institutions become increasingly liberal democratic. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, most influentially articulated by Seymour Lipset, drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, and saw a resurgence after 1991, when Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of the Cold War as confirmation on modernization theory.
Norberto Bobbio was an Italian philosopher of law and political sciences and a historian of political thought. He also wrote regularly for the Turin-based daily La Stampa. Bobbio was a social liberal in the tradition of Piero Gobetti, Carlo Rosselli, Guido Calogero, and Aldo Capitini. He was also strongly influenced by Hans Kelsen and Vilfredo Pareto.
Particracy, also known as partitocracy, partitocrazia or partocracy, is a form of government in which the political parties are the primary basis of rule rather than citizens or individual politicians.
Seymour Martin Lipset was an American sociologist and political scientist. His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. He also wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. He was president of both the American Political Science Association (1979–1980) and the American Sociological Association (1992–1993). A socialist in his early life, Lipset later moved to the right, and was considered to be one of the first neoconservatives.
Radical democracy is a type of democracy that advocates the radical extension of equality and liberty. Radical democracy is concerned with a radical extension of equality and freedom, following the idea that democracy is an unfinished, inclusive, continuous and reflexive process.
Legal Positivism is a book by the Italian jurist Norberto Bobbio about one of the ontological elements of foundations of law — the jusphilosophical school called juspositivism or legal positivism.
Democratic socialism is a left-wing set of political philosophies that supports political democracy and some form of a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers' self-management within a market socialist, decentralised planned, or democratic centrally planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realisation of a socialist society. Although most democratic socialists seek a gradual transition to socialism, democratic socialism can support revolutionary or reformist politics to establish socialism. Democratic socialism was popularised by socialists who opposed the backsliding towards a one-party state in the Soviet Union and other nations during the 20th century.
Liberal socialism is a political philosophy that incorporates liberal principles to socialism. This synthesis sees liberalism as the political theory that takes the inner freedom of the human spirit as a given and adopts liberty as the goal, means and rule of shared human life. Socialism is seen as the method to realize this recognition of liberty through political and economic autonomy and emancipation from the grip of pressing material necessity. Liberal socialism opposes abolishing certain components of capitalism and supports something approximating a mixed economy that includes both social ownership and private property in capital goods.
People's democracy is a theoretical concept within Marxism–Leninism and a form of government which developed after World War II and allows in theory for a multi-class and multi-party democracy on the pathway to socialism. People's democracy was established in a number of European and Asian countries as a result of the people's democratic revolutions of the 1940s.
Liberalism and Democracy is a 1985 book by the Italian political scientist Norberto Bobbio.
Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction is a 1994 book by the Italian political scientist Norberto Bobbio. It is about the left–right political spectrum, which it argues is consistently useful. Bobbio equated political left and right with the distinction between equality and inequality.
