SOC260 Midterm

• The midterm exam assesses understanding of key concepts and phenomena from mandatory readings and lectures. It will focus on central arguments, not minor details.

Why Politicization?

• Politicization is a dynamic process, making it more interesting to study.
• The study of politicization seeks to understand what makes particular issues political at specific times.
• Topics can transition from political questions to technical ones, or become depoliticized (e.g., drunk driving shifting from a systemic issue to a personal one).
• Depoliticization impacts where the burden of responsibility falls.

Clemens on Political Sociology

• Political science studies theories, institutions, and regimes in the abstract.
• Sociology studies interactions and the process of creation/transformation in a less abstract way.
• The "political" concerns power relations between individuals and their organizations within society.

Hamidi on Defining Political Action

• Hamidi expands on traditional definitions of "political" beyond relationships with institutions.
• Critiques of existing definitions include legitimizing analysis, circularity, and neglect of informal political action.
• Unsatisfactory definitions make certain political activities invisible.
• Hamidi combines a realist conception related to institutional political spheres. Also includes: identification of shared problems calling for collective solutions, and a readiness to act.
• Important politics happen in informal spaces, not just formal institutions.
• The concept of "identification" replaces emphasis on conflict to rise in generality.
• Feminists view the "rise in generality" abstraction as discriminatory, biased toward specific profiles.
• Openness to others and individual experiences can be political, even without formal theory.
• Theoretical framework: pragmatist and feminist.
• Method/data: Based on three qualitative studies from France and Boston.

Three Ways to Understand Power

• Power over: Exercising control over another.
• Power to: Capacity to act, bring about outcomes.
• Power with: Collective action, exercising power with others for change.
• Weber and Mann have a vertical conception of power, while Foucault's is more relational.

Weber on Power

• Defines power as the chance of enforcing one's will within a social relationship, even against resistance.
• Clemens highlights three dimensions of power assumed in Weber's definition: differentiation of preferences, unequal resources, and inescapability.
• Rulership is a more precise concept than power, referring to the chance a command will be met with compliance.
• Ruling organization: An organization whose existence is guaranteed by coercion from an administrative staff.
• State: An institutionally organized political enterprise with a monopoly on legitimate physical force.
• Violence is emphasized as a defining means, not ends, of an organization.
• Legitimacy can be created rationally, traditionally, or charismatically.
• Class position: Chance of provision of goods, outer social standing, inner personal fate.
• Social rank: Includes manner of living, not same as wealth.
• Sociated class action occurs against those with adverse interests, with a mass of people in the same class position, technical possibility to come together, and guidance from outside the class.

Clemens and Mann on Power

• Michael Mann: Power is the containment of human beings behind social and territorial boundaries.
• Clemens analysis of Mann: Social cages: how boundaries restrict individuals within social roles and territorial boundaries.
• Inequality results from power: Temporary authority must become permanent coercive power.
• Power arises as individuals become reliant on collectives due to rising exit costs.

Foucault on Power

• Foucault disagrees with the Juridico-discursive model of power, which obscures its true operation.
• Power is not possessed, but a relational force, exercised. It's more than just laws.
• Power is created from below. The state results from many power relations.
• Power is a network of interactions, embedded in the everyday, constantly evolving.
• Power is everywhere because it comes from everywhere, present in all social relations.
• Power is intentional yet non-subjective, with objectives, but no one controls the end results.
• Macro-level institutions result from micro-level interactions.
• Power is exercised in the interplay of force and resistance.

Bourdieu on Power

• Social space is divided into regulatory fields, with rules decided internally.
• Power is a field where each holder of power is both controller and controlled.
• Mutual control exists among individuals in politics.
• Power is relational, connected to capital, and related to field dynamics.

Gerstenberger on State Formation in Europe

Feudalism

• Power is individual and personal, based on armed force, sacral power, and judicial power.
• Reproduced through land lordship, war, marriage, and privileged trade.
• Increasing costs of rule led to centralized power.
• Nobles sought to anchor privileges in law, strengthening monarchial power.

Ancien Régime

• Personal rule is the foundation, but restructured with stronger centralization.
• Generalization of royal, fiscal, and judicial power.
• Spread and formation of market structures.
• New legitimization through representation.
• Demand for escape from generalized power led to interest in private liberties and family as a private space.
• Invention of a "good order" in non-theological terms.

Bourgeois State

• "Bourgeois" because it serves the Bourgeoisie, focused on protecting private property.
• Personal rule is replaced by impersonal public rule.
• Scope of state power is limited by law/constitutions.
• Economic sphere is separate from the political sphere. Corruption is framed as a deviation.
• Reminiscent of Bourdieu: distinct social fields regulate relations among actors.
• Awareness of class transforms class into political fact.
• Legitimizes itself through creation of national and social state.

Anderson on National State

• State creates nationalism - nationalism comes after the founding of the nation
• Due to a lack of uniting forces, national imagination becomes essential.
• Nation: An imagined political community, limited and sovereign.
• Imagined because members won't meet all compatriots, so they must imagine them.
• Limited - Not coterminous with mankind.
• Community because of "horizontal comradeship" enables killing for the nation.

Social Reproduction and Welfare State

• Allows commodity production by workers and the maintenance/development of society.
• Shaped by class struggles, economic priorities, and historical legacies.

Federici on Primitive Accumulation

• Focuses on colonization, patriarchy, subjugation of women, and destruction of women's power.
• Procreation and child-rearing are portrayed as natural.
• Women were transformed into reproductive bodies controlled by the state and patriarchy.
• Women's autonomy weakened, relegated to private sphere, and excluded from recognized work.
• Labour in the home devalued, labelled "women's labor" or non-labor.
• Racial, gender distinctions are historically built politics of division as a tactic of political control.
• "Patriarchy of the wage": Men's wages used to control women's labour.

Patnaik on Colonialism

• Colonies of conquest aim to maintain dependence, linked to primitive labour exploitation.
• British capitalism relied on plundering wealth from India.
• Extraction of surplus prevented colonies from developing (through markets and preventing capital accumulation).
• Siphoning wealth out of the country hindered accumulation/industrialization cycle.

Esping-Andersen on Welfare State

• Welfare states are regimes, part of the political-economic system.
• Critiques literature focusing too heavily on expenditure.
• Class coalition thesis: Coalition dynamics determine the shape of the welfare state.
• Dimensions of welfare state analysis include de-commodification, social stratification, and state-market-family relations.
  • De-commodification: Extent to which people can maintain their livelihood without market dependence.
  • Social stratification: How welfare reinforces or reduces social hierarchies.
  • State-market-family relations: Who provides welfare?
• Liberal: Minimal state intervention, means-tested benefits, private insurance dominates.
• Corporatist: State ensures social stability, intervenes when family fails, preserves class distinctions.
• Social Democratic: Universal social rights, strong state commitment to employment, egalitarian.
• Criticisms: Ignores unpaid domestic labour (gender bias) and doesn't fully apply to developing countries (Eurocentrism).

Aspalter on East Asian Welfare States

• Prioritize economic growth over redistribution.
• They spend minimally, use productivist social policy, selective redistribution, and state regulation.
• Dominated by conservative elites.
• Used for economic growth, political stability, social peace, and human capital development.
• Purposes include promoting legitimacy, pacifying movements, and enforcing education/health investment.
• Cases:
  • Japan: Healthcare expansion, aging population challenges.
  • South Korea: Democratization led to healthcare/pension expansion, productivist.
  • Taiwan: Welfare as a tool of political legitimacy.
  • Hong Kong: Targeted and means-tested approach. Singapore: Highly regulated productivist approach.