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
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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 void
cotton company who's 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
is 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 and 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
wild-card 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 mobilize 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 irrational legal authority the
founding of the church after Jesus's
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
vapers model democracy as a form of
government and a rational legal approach
to Authority both emerge with
rationalization in 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 the 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 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 u.s. 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
u.s. 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 and 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 I
contrasts 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
organized around particular issues
rather than around a whole party
platform and beyond the formal
institutional politics there are also
social movements to 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 is 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 Busey's political power is 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 system
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 doctor Cheryl C Kinney
studio in Missoula Montana 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
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you can support the series at patreon a
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to all of our patrons for making crash
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