Chapter Summary with Key Terms

Politics is the struggle for power and resources in society--who gets what and how they get it. We can use the tools of politics to allocate scarce resources and to establish our favored vision of the social order as long as there is agreement that the way power is managed is legitimate.

Government is an organization set up to exercise authority over a body of people. It is shaped by politics and helps provide the rules and institutions that in turn continue to shape the political process.

Politics is different from economics, which is a system for distributing society’s wealth. Economic systems vary in how much control government has over how that distribution takes place, ranging from a capitalist economy (or regulated capitalism, like that of the United States), where the free market reigns but government may provide procedural guarantees that the rules are fair, to a socialist economy, where government makes substantive guarantees of what they hold to be fair distributions of material resources. Social democracy is in the middle, a market economy that aims to fulfill substantive goals.

Economic systems vary according to how much control government has over the economy; political systems vary over how much control government has over individuals’ lives and the social order. They range from totalitarian governments, where authoritarian government might make substantive decisions about how lives are to be lived and the social order arranged, to anarchy, where there is no control over those things at all. Short of anarchy is democracy, based on popular sovereignty, where individuals have considerable individual freedom and the social order provides fair processes rather than specified outcomes.

An authoritarian government might be a monarchy, a theocracy, a fascist government, or an oligarchy. People who live in such systems are subjects, unable to claim rights against the government. Theories of democracy--elite democracy, pluralist democracy, and participatory democracy--vary in how much power they believe individuals do or should have, but all individuals who live under democratic systems are citizens because they have fundamental rights that government must protect. The idea that government exists to protect the rights of citizens originated with the idea of a social contract between rulers and ruled.

The American government is a representative democracy called a republic. Two visions of citizenship exist in the United States--one puts self-interest first, the other emphasizes the public interest. The first is more common; the latter emerges most often in times of national strife.

Immigrants are citizens or subjects of another country who come to the United States to live and work. Legal immigrants may be eligible to apply for citizenship through the process of naturalization. Some people arrive here as refugees seeking asylum or protection from persecution, subject to permission from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Americans share a political culture--common values and beliefs that draw them together. The U.S. political culture emphasizes procedural guarantees and individualism, the idea that individuals know what is best for themselves. The core values of American culture are democracy, freedom, and equality, all defined through a procedural, individualistic lens.

Within the context of our shared political culture, Americans have divergent beliefs and opinions, called ideologies, about political and economic affairs. Generally these ideologies are referred to as conservative and liberal, but we can be more specific. Depending on their views about the role of government in the economy and in establishing the social order, most Americans can be defined as one of the following: economic liberals; economic conservatives, including libertarians; social liberals, including communitarians; and social conservatives. In a two-party political system like ours, it can be hard for either party to maintain the support of a majority when ideologies are so diverse.

The goal of this book is to teach critical thinking about American politics through the tools of analysis and evaluation. We will analyze how American politics works through the framework of our definition of politics--who gets power and resources and how they get them. We will evaluate how well American politics works by focusing on the opportunities and challenges of citizenship.

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should understand

the meaning of politics itself
the varieties of political systems and the roles they endorse for the individuals who live under them
the American founders’ ideas about democracy and citizenship, the ideas that hold us together as a nation, the ideas that define our political conflicts
the themes of power and citizenship that will serve as our framework for understanding American politics

Materials developed by Matthew J. Streb, Northern Illinois University