TOPIC 1

INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY

Origin and Growth of Political Sociology

Political sociology is the study of power and the relationship between societies, states, and
political conflict. It is a broad subfield that straddles political science and sociology, with
“macro” and “micro” components.

The macro-focus has centered on questions about nation-states, political institutions and their
development, and the sources of social and political change (especially those involving large-
scale social movements and other forms of collective action).

The micro orientation, by contrast, examines how social identities and groups influence
individual political behavior, such as voting, attitudes, and political participation. While both the
macro- and micro-areas of political sociology overlap with political science, the distinctive focus
of political sociologists is less on the internal workings or mechanics of the political system and
more on the underlying social forces that shape the political system.

Political sociology is the product of cross fertilization between sociology and political science. It
studies the impact of society and politics on each other. Political sociology studies the
interrelations between state and other social structures. In simple terms it can be called ‘study of
power in a social context’.

Bendix and Lipset define political sociology as that ‘political science starts with the state and
examines how it affects the state”. Smelser N. J defines political sociology as the study of the
interrelationship between society and polity between social structures and political institution. It
seeks to investigate and explain the interrelationship between politics, social structures,
ideologies and cultures.

Political sociology can trace its origins to the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx,
Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, among others, but it only emerged as a separate subfield
within sociology after World War II. Many of the landmark works of the 1950s and 1960s
centered on micro-questions about the impact of class, religion, race/ethnicity, or education on
individual and group-based political behavior.

Political sociology was not born by accident. Politicians, political scientists and sociologists have
played a major role in the evolution of this subject. There were a few important factors that
contributed to the growth of political sociology;

a) The growing dissatisfaction with the traditional nature of political science. Political
science was interested in normative prescriptions and political science had always viewed
the state as its star attention.
b) The growth of political sociology was made possible by political scientists who quietly
accepted the invasion of sociology into the sphere of politics without any protest.
Political scientists began to look at political realities from a scientific perspective or in an
empirical manner.
c) Extension of area of politics.
d) Distinction between state and society.

Nature and Scope of Political Sociology

Political sociology is a science like any other science. It employs systematic methods of
investigation, theoretical thinking and logical assessment of arguments.

Political sociology collects evidence about the selected subject matter using planned and
organized methods. Explanations and conclusions are drawn on the basis of carefully collected
evidences. Findings and conclusions are open to inspections, criticism and testing by other
researchers.

Political sociology involves systematic methods of investigation, analysis of data and the
assessment of theories in the light of evidences and logical argument.

The scope of political sociology is very vast;

Political sociology is concerned with the way in which political arrangements depend on social
organizations and cultural values. It studies the relationship between the state and society, party
system and its relations to society. Politics pervades the entire society.
The scope includes the effect of social attitudes on political participations, social classes and
their political attitudes, social implication of voting pattern.

Political sociology studies;

a) The nature of modern democracy and their forum in different socio- political contexts.

b) The impact of social groupings upon political activity, the nature of welfare state, the
effectiveness of propaganda and public opinion as means of informal political education.

c) All political and social aspects which arise time and again in contemporary societies.

d) Political sociology studies modern institution like bureaucracy, political parties, voting
propaganda etc, which are day to day issues in the life of modern masses.

Major Theoretical Approaches to Political Sociology

Although many scholars have contributed to the growth and development of political sociology,
Karl Marx and Max Weber are said to be the significant founding fathers of political sociology.

1. Karl Marx

Karl Marx was one of the most influential thinkers in the 19 th century, He was born in Germany
in 1818 and his parents were Jewish, the descendants of many generations of rabbis. He was a
man of enormous and obvious brilliance.

Marx devoted his life to the cause of socialist revolution. He and his family were, as a result,
hounded and spied on by the police forces of half of Europe. They lived in miserable poverty. He
is known to the world as the architect of socialism and the champion of communism. He was
trained lawyer, a historian, an economist, a political thinker, a journalist, a great humanist and a
philosopher.

He committed himself to the cause of the exploited working class. His views and thoughts were
so powerful that one third of the world’s population was under the grip of his views. Marx
developed the following concepts;
a) Historical Materialism

Historical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society economics and

history. It focuses on the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by
which humans collectively produce the necessities of life. The non-economic features of a
society (such as social classes, political structures, ideologies) are seen as being an outgrowth of
its economic activity.

According to Marx, for human being to survive and continue existence from generation to
generation, it is necessary for them to produce and reproduce the material requirements of life
like food, shelter etc. Marx thus extended this premise by asserting the importance of the fact
that, in order to carry out production and exchange, people have to enter into worry definite
social relations, most fundamentally ‘production relations.

However, production doesn’t get carried out in the abstract, or by entering into arbitrary or
random relations chosen at will. Human beings collectively work on nature but don’t do the in
which people not only do different jobs, but according to Marxist theory, some people live from
the work of others by owning the means of production like land, labour, capital and organization.
How this is accomplished depends on the type of society.

Production is carried out through very definite relations between people. In turn, these
production relations are determined by the level and character of the productive forces that are
present at any given time in history.

Marx identifies the production relations of society (arising on the basis of given production
forces) as the economic base of society. The economic base of the society consisted of two
aspects;

i) Forces of production-consisted of labour force, tools raw materials, technological knowledge

and scientific knowledge.

ii) Relations of production- these control and organize production.

b) Class Struggle

Marx conceived society consisting of classes and argued that classes are the most important
groups in almost all the societies. According to him different classes are antagonistic to each
other. Class is a social group where members share the same relationships to the forces of
production.

During the feudal stage two main classes are distinguished by their relationship to land, the
major forces of production. They are the Feudal Nobility who own the land and the Landless
Serf who works the land, similarly in the capitalist society there these bourgeoisies or capitalists
who own the forces of production and the proletariats or working class who own only their
labour.

Marx based his theory of class struggle on the inevitability on conflict of two opposing classes’
society. The interest of the capitalist class is to pay workers as little as possible, to exploit them
in order to make more profit whereas the interest of the working class is to raise wages, and
eventually to abolish capitalism entirely.

c) Alienation

Alienation refers to the sense of powerlessness, isolation and meaninglessness experienced by

human beings when they are confronted with social institutions or condition that they cannot
control and consider oppressive. For Marx the social arrangements in capitalist society alienated
the worker. They failed to provide him with the opportunities for a meaningful and creative
existence. The worker is alienated because he neither receives satisfaction from his work nor
receives the full product of his labour.

Marx’s theory of alienation is the contention that under capitalistic conditions workers will
inevitably lose control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any
significant sense under pre- capitalist conditions a black smith eg or a shoemaker would own his
own shop. Set his own hours, determine his own working conditions, shape his own product and
have some say in how his product is bartered or sold. His relationships with the people with
whom he worked and dealt had a more or less personal character. Under the conditions of
modern factory production, by contrast the average worker is not much more than a replaceable
cog in a gigantic and impersonal production apparatus.

Criticisms of Marx’s theories

1. He was criticized for regarding the sociological factors as dependent variables rather than
independent variables and subordinating them to economic interpretation of history.
2. He also failed to anticipate the adaptive capacity of capitalism. However his general
theories of economic determinism and dialectic materialism and his specific theories of
class struggle class consciousness and alienation have stimulated a great amount work.
3. Marx tried to give his theories a firm ground on the basis of evidence which he sought to
examine in a systematic and rigorous manner.

2. Max Weber

Max Weber was a great German sociologist who has left a deep imprint in political sociology.
He was one of the founders of modern sociology and began his interest in social sciences when
he was young. He was a man interested in the practical affaires of government and politics. He
was born in a comparatively rich protestant family and his father was quite active in politics.

a) Religion and Economy

Weber wrote extensively on the subject of religion. His essay on protestant ethic and the spirit of
capitalism is his major contribution to sociology. He observed a close connection between
religion ideas and economic forces, such as the Calvinists played a role in creating the
capitalistic spirit.

Weber first observes a correlation between being protestant and being involved in business, and
declares his intent to explore religion as a potential cause of the modern economic conditions.
Weber found that, according to protestant religious, individuals were religiously compelled to
follow a secular vocation with as much enthusiasm as possible. A person living according to this
worldview was more likely to accumulate money.

Further, the new religious, such as Calvinism and Protestantism forbade wastefully using hard
earned money and labeled the purchase of luxuries as a sin. This religion also frowned upon
donating money to the poor or to charity because it was seen as promoting beggary. The way
these issues were resolved, Weber argued, was to invest the money, which would give a large
boost to capitalism.

Capitalism evolved when the protestant ethic influenced large numbers of people to engage in
work in the secular world, developing their own enterprises and engaging in trade and the
accumulation of wealth for investment. The protestant ethic was therefore the driving force
behind the mass action that led to the development of capitalism while Marx argued that it is
economy that determined the nature of religion, Weber observed that it is religious conviction
and beliefs that determined the basic characteristics of the economy.

b) Bureaucracy

Weber’s another important contribution in his theory of bureaucracy was his interest in the
nature of power and authority and his realization of the inevitability of rationalization in the
operation of large scale enterprises in the fields of politics, administration and in business.

Bureaucracy is understood as large scale formal organizations of the modern societies with
specialized functions. Bureaucratization and rationalization go hand in hand because
bureaucracies are organized to rational principles.

Characteristics of Bureaucracy

1. A formal hierarchical structure: - Each level controls the level below and is controlled by
the level above. A formal hierarchy is the basis of central planning and centralized
decision making.
2. Management by rules: - Controlling by rules allows decisions made at high levels to be
executed consistently by all lower levels.
3. Organization by functional specialty:- Work is to be done by specialists, and people are
organized into units based on the type of work they do or skills they have.
4. An up-focused or in- focused mission:- If the mission is described as ‘up focused’ then
the organization’s purpose is to serve the stockholders, the board, or whatever agency
empowered it, if the mission is to serve the organization itself, and those within it. E.g. to
 produce high profits to gain market share, or to produce a cash stream, then them mission
is described as ‘in focused’.
5. Purposely impersonal:- the idea is to treat all employees equally and not be influenced by
individual differences.
6. Employment based on technical qualifications:- the employment is done on the basis of
technical qualification.

Merits of Bureaucracy

1. Bureaucracy is not only characterized by rational authority but is also endowed with
technical superiority and is therefore conducive to efficiency.
2. In bureaucracy there is greater emphasis on objectivity and impartiality. Bureaucratic
decisions are based not as personal considerations but as formal rules.
3. In a context of political instability and even immaturity in developing countries
bureaucracy may provide stability and efficiency in administration transcending the
changing character and composition of political elements.

Criticisms of Weber’s theory

1. Too much emphasis on rules and regulations. The rules and regulations are rigid and
inflexible.
2. No importance is given to informal groups. Nowadays, informal groups play an important
role in all business organization.
3. Bureaucracy involves a lot of paper work, this result in lot of wastage of time, effort and
money.
4. There will be unnecessary delay in decision making due to formalities and rules.
5. Bureaucratic model may be suitable for government organizations. But it is not suitable
for business organizations because business organizations believe in quick decision
making and flexibility in procedures.
6. Too much importance is given to the technical qualifications of the employees for
promotion and transfers. Dedication and commitment of the employee is not considered.
7. There is difficulty in co-ordination and communication.
8. There is limited scope for human resource.
Importance of studying Political Sociology as Social Scientists

Specifically, political sociology studies politics at four main levels.

(1) Political conflict and struggle among nations i.e. the sociology of international relations.

(2) The nature and role of the state within various societies.

(3) The nature and organization of political movements and parties.

(4) The participation of the individual in politics.

From the foregoing the study of political sociology enables social scientists to understand the;

(a) General nature and functions of the state and its political system.

(b) Nature of political parties, pressure groups and all other political organizations and
movements.

(c) Patterns of political participation and political behaviour, including non- participation of the
people e.g., empirical research of popular participation in politics and voting behaviour.

(d) Power and domination in society.

(e) Political elites and masses and the extent to which modern societies can be said to be
dominated by a ruling class.

(f) Relations among nations.

Political sociology studies human being as a social-political being and his behaviour in society.
No one deny the fact that human political behaviour in just one aspect of human behaviour in
environment, particularly in society.

Political behaviour is always influenced by social behaviour, economic well-being and morality.
More particularly it is deterministically influenced by the system of social relations and
interactions among all the members of his society.
Man is born in a family and gets all his initial values and pattern of behaviour from his family
and peer groups. This provides him with the roots for his political behaviour and relations.
Hence, the study of human political behaviour can be systematically pursued only by studying it
in its social context. Political Sociology serves this necessity.