Poli 100 - Theorists & Case Studies

Rudyard Kipling

Coined the term “White Man’s Burden” - the alleged duty of white colonizers to care for nonwhite Indigenous subjects in their colonial possessions.Coined the term “White Man’s Burden”. He used the term in a poem in which he tried to persuade the United States to colonise the Philippines rather than end the Spanish-American war.

Kimberlé Crenshaw

The pioneer of intersectional theorising and research, she named the phenomenon “intersectionality” after encountering the case of a Black woman named Emma DeGraffenreid.

Marian Wright Edelmen

An American civil rights activist who said “You can’t be what you can’t see”. 

Harold Lasswell (1936)

Wrote the book “Politics: Who Gets What, When, How”.

What do Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau and Bentham have in common?

All of these men are part of the canon (the foundational texts) of classical Western philosophical tradition.

Mary Hawkesworth

Feminist theorist, who notes that the male political theorists who are part of the canon make their generalisations about humans, society and politics, they generally “conflate the experiences of some elite, white, European men with all human experience.”

John Locke on the rights of Native Americans, Women and Enslaved Persons

Locke is often credited with founding the liberal school of political thought. But he considered Native Americans to be on the same level as “children, idiots, and the grossly illiterate.” Although he was more progressive on white women’s rights, he does justify women’s subordination to their husbands’ wills on the basis that men are stronger and more able. Locke also believed that the enslaver had “absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves'“. This “father of democracy profited greatly from his support of enslavement and the theft of land from Native Americans.

bell hooks

A Black feminist theorist who examined structural inequality. And how racist institutions oppress people of colour, especially women of colour. 

Mari Matsuda

Critical race theorist, who examined structural inequality. Meaning the ways in which society maintains patriarchal institutions that oppress women.

David McClellan

He said that “Ideology is the most elusive concept in the whole of social science.”

Lyman Tower Sargent

A scholar who said “An ideology provides the believer with a picture of the world both as it is and as it should be, and in doing so, it organises the tremendous complexity of the world into something fairly simple and understandable.

Affective Polarisation: A Danger to Democracy

For democracy to work, people have to be willing to talk about their differences and compromise on solutions, Increasing levels of affective polarisation in long-standing democracies are troubling because, as political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote, “Inherent in all democratic systems is the constant threat that the group conflicts which are democracy’s lifeblood may solidify to the point where they threaten to disintegrate society”. If people won’t even talk to their opponents, there’s no hope for compromise. Worse, as levels of affective polarisation increase, trust in government decreases among people whose preferred party is not in government, but democratic satisfaction increases in people who voted for the winners. Hobolt, Leeper and Tilley suggest, “political scientist, and political theorists, should move beyond trying to understand how to overcome political disagreements, and focus more on how those disagreements can be sustained without yielding deleterious social consequences.”

Ruud Koopmans

Social movements have expanded democracy in at least two ways: who can vote (suffrage) and which issues matter to politicians (the political agenda). 

Marc Hooghe and Anna Kern

“Citizens of liberal democracies may indeed …have stopped believing that they have a civic duty to take part in elections.”

Democratic Backsliding in Venezuela

“The poster child of democratic backsliding” (Levitsky and Ziblatt). When Chavez was elected, he first started following through on his campaign promises. However by 2003-4, his authoritarian tendencies were starting to show. He stalled to have a recall election, among other things, and chipped away at Venezuela’s democratic institutions until his death in 2013. Nicolas Maduro picked up where Chavez left off and by 2017, all pretence of democracy in Venezuela was gone.

Levitsky and Ziblatt

They note that one of the long-standing rules in American politics was institutional forbearance - the unwritten rule that politicians won’t use extreme tactics that are technically legal if using them violates the spirit of the law.

Slovik

In states as diverse as the United States, Turkey and Venezuela, “Ordinary people are willing to trade off democratic principles for partisan interests” and “voters are reluctant to punish politicians for disregarding democratic principles when doing so requires abandoning one’s favoured party or policies”. 

Timothy Snyder’s lessons for avoiding authoritarianism

1. not obey in advance

2. believe in truth

3. investigate

4. learn from others in other countries

in other words, don’t believe propaganda blindly, seek outside perspectives, vote.

5. make eye contact and small talk

in other words, increase willingness to talk to other people.

John Locke on the “Good Life'“

Argued that wealthy people can live the good life if they voluntarily give up some of their individual freedoms in exchange for laws to protect their money and property.

Anna Julia Cooper on the “Good Life”

Contended that Black women’s resistance to oppression at the crossroads of race and gender qualifies them for the “inalienable title to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Cooper contends that the good life is one in which Black women are free to occupy both of these spheres - be it as teachers and other public professionals and/or as morally uplifting mothers of the Black family.

Vine Deloria on the “Good Life”

Equated the good life with fellow Native Americans’ “familiarity with the personality of objects and entities of the natural world.”

Martha Nussbaum

“Basic human flourishing” is the benchmark or the basis of a life worth living”. Nussbaum’s particular claim that individuals’ ability and desire to engage in behaviours such as marrying for love, making their own reproductive choices, and engaging in political speech are key to “human flourishing” and, in turn, to “pursuing the good life.”

Deloria & David Wilkins

They cite Native Americans’ rejection of “separate spheres” ideology or the sexist idea that women belong to the “private world of the family” while “rational” men are intended to serve in the public labor market family as the family “breadwinner”. 

Deborah King

Suggests that intersectionality and its underlying logic is by Black women and for Black women. 

Women’s Suffrage

Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, and other prominent suffragists  used numerous means, including educational campaigns, picketing, and political lobbying, to convince the public and the government officials that women deserved the right to vote. During the early 1900s, these suffragists joined forces with the Jane Addams’ settlement house movement, which also regarded the advent of women voters as a new, important means of ensuring more government funded healthcare, childcare, and education for poor urban communities. On August 26, 1920, the US Senate ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the constitution, which allowed woman to vote. However, this campaign was mainly surrounded by white women. Frances Harper argued that as “much as white women need the ballot, coloured [Black] women need it more “to fight the harmful forces aligned against them. lack women in a racist patriarchy assumes (1) they are sexually promiscuous “bad” women, (2) their promiscuity is a sign of their racial inferiority, and (3) their sexual promiscuity and racial inferiority is evidence that they need to be discplined and controlled by white men.

John Stuart Mill

A classical liberal theorist, who said that a too strong state us a dangerous coercive force that “dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands” and, in doing so, denies them the individual “liberty” or to formulate a life plan that they deem to be in accordance with their “own character”

Karl Marx

Believed that capitalist economies always pay workers less than the price or value of what they make.

Claudia Jones

Makes two relevant claims. She contends, first, that working-class Black women’s capitalist oppression is racialised and gendered. In other words, while all working-class people earn less than the value of the products they make, racist and gender-biased stereotypes of Black women as promiscuous, lazy, and unintelligent mean that they earn less than the white-working class men and women. Jones concludes that the state is responsible for remedying this reality by providing Black women with access to the good life (e.g. unionised, earn minimum wage, etc). Jone’s ultimate goal is a world in which Black women “receive according to their needs” or live a life in which equality of outcome triumphs over intersecting racial, gendered, and other hierarchies of power. 

Gay Marriage

Charlie Gu - a gay, undocumented Asian Pacific Islander - defined the good life as gay people’s ability to legally marry and positioned immigration reform as a key means by which the state could and should make such a life possible. On the other hand, Spade and Willse reject state-sanctioned marriage, including state-sanctioned gay marriage, on the grounds that marriage, so defined, is a patriarchal, heterosexist institutions whose harmful effects intersect with and amplify racism (state should have little or no role in facilitating the good life). Both sides of the argument draw on an intersectional framework when considering the state’s responsibilities in facilitating the good life. 

Alexis de Tocquieville

Wrote about “social requisites to democracy”. One of his claims is that specific values about equality are prerequisites for the emergence of democratic institutioons.

Louis Althusser, Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

They argue that ideologies are not merely principles that underly our political preferences. Ideologies obscure reality by indoctrinating people into a set of beliefs that keep them complacent and unable to critique the conditions they live in.

Adam Smith

Argues that individuals’ rational economic choices produce a society where everybody is better off, because profit for any one person also creates value that is available to others. Smith proposes that an underlying force, which he called “the invisible hand”, motivates individuals to produce social value through their market transactions.

Daniel Lerner’s Passing of Traditional Society

Describes the transformation of how individuals understood themselves as part of their communities. Lerner argues that mass communication technology makes it possible for people to develop shared feeling with large numbers of other people. The development of empathy, he argues, is a prerequisite of modern government. 

Berneo

Describes democratic backsliding as the “state-led debilitation or elimination of any of the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy. 

Margaret Canovan

“Populism in modern democratic societies is best seen as an appeal to ‘the people’ against both the established structures of power and the dominant ideas and values of society”. 

Stanley

Argues that populism on its own does not consist of any specific values or beliefs, but it does “interact with the established ideational traditions of full ideologies. Put another way, “Populism is moralistic rather than programmatic.”

Me Too

The Me Too movements show that women’s experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace are not just about patriarchy, and they are not just about neoliberalism. These experiences are the result of both at once. The ideologies of patriarchy and neoliberalism combine together to justify persistent sexual abuse and harassment.

The Abolitionist Movement

It included activists from varied racial, gender, and class backgrounds. The abolitionist movement is sometimes uneven in terms of the specific goals sought and achieved. For instance, abolitionists were all opposed to slavery, but their support for Black equality varied significantly, with some abolitionists supporting granting freedom followed by immediate expulsion of slaves to Africa, others seeking the full equality of persons of African descent, and still others, holding positions at other nodes of the spectrum.

Kathleen Blee

Researched female participation in various white supremacist groups in the United States. All of the women she interviews came to the movement on their own free will, but not all feel they can leave or dissent without repercussions. 

Doug McAdam

Suggests the critical dimensions of political opportunity structures are as follows:

• The relative openness or closure of the institutionalised political system

• The stability or instability of that broad set of elite alignments that typically grid a polity. 

• The presence or absence of elite allies

• The state’s capacity and propensity for repression

Canadian Sex Discrimination - Compounding Unequal Treatment

In the 1960s-70s, Canadian women’s groups used the Liberal government’s openness to equality issues to secure a ban on sex discrimination in the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. However, First Nations women remained excluded because the 1876 Indian Act stripped them of legal status if they married non-Indigenous men and restricted status inheritance for their children. Through reforms in 1985 and later Bill S-3 (2017-2019) sought to fix this, the government resisted due to cost concerns and only after public pressure was equality restored. Compared to the earlier success of mostly white women’s groups, Indigenous women faced far greater barriers despite similar political opportunities - showing that “open” opportunities can still be shaped by race and inequality.

David Snow and Scott Benford

They break down the three main components of successful frames.

1. Diagnostic framing

2. Prognostic framing

3. Motivational framing

Monique Deveaoux

Commented on the shared space of marginalisation that poor social movements of the Global South and the anti-poverty and anti-globalisation movements of the Global North often share. Poor social movement actors in the Global South struggle with resource access in part because of a lack of language skills and access to basics like the internet and computers, which are necessary to make successful grant apps. Poor actors in the Global North experience similar struggles with resource access, such as limited virtual and physical access to transit and other effects of income inequality. Accordingly, we see shared states of uneven resource access that is experienced differently. 

The United States v. Windsor

United States v. Windsor (2013) was a Supreme Court case where Edith Windsor challenged the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) after being denied a tax exemption because her same-sex marriage wasn’t federally recognized. The Court ruled 5–4 that DOMA’s definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman violated the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee. Windsor decided to sue and did so successfully, but only after being turned down by multiple gay rights advocacy groups. These groups were worried that this high-profile case would scuttle their progress on another set of priority concerns. The case was a major win, even though it was a lesser priority of some social movement actors. 

Edmund Burke

Saw parties as a “body of men united”

Anthony Downs

Defined a party as “a coalition of men seeking to control the governing apparatus by legal means.”

Max Weber (1922)

“Parties live in a house of power. Their action os oriented toward the acquisition of social ‘power,’ that is to say toward influencing communal action no matter what its content may be.”

Giovanni Sartori (1976)

“A party is any political group identified by an official label that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office.”

Alan Ware (1995)

“A political party is an institution that (a) seeks influence in a state, often by attempting to occupy positions in government and (b) usually consists of more than a single interest in the society and so to some degree attempts to ‘aggregate interests”

Otter Kirchheimer

Argued that most modern European parties take the form of “catch-all parties”. 

Leon Epstein

Notably characterised American parties as akin to “public utilities” rather than private organisations.

Maurice Duverger

Famously categorised American parties as being similar to early cadre parties in Europe - in other words, seeing them as a grouping of elites who come together to contest elections. 

Gender, Informal Institutions and Political Recruitment

Research on gender and political recruitment now focuses on how party systems and informal practices shape access to political office. Elin Bjarnegård’s study of Thailand shows that male dominance in politics is reinforced through patronage and clientelism, which rely on personal networks. These networks are male-dominated, as men tend to cooperate with and support other men. Women lack access to this gendered “homosocial capital,” making it harder for them to build the networks and resources needed for electoral success.

Intersectional Representation – Party Quotas in the UK Labour Party

The UK Labour Party has increased representation of women and ethnic minorities in Parliament more than other major parties. Labour uses strong gender quotas (“all-women shortlists”) but only a soft rule requiring BAME candidates to be shortlisted, not selected. This has led to better outcomes for women overall but weaker results for BAME candidates. However, when both measures are used together, they significantly improve the representation of BAME women in Parliament.

Miki Caul Kittilson

finds that a higher presence of women on party national executive committees is related to higher numbers of women in legislatures and to the adoption of gender quotas.

Redefining Party Membership - Spain example

The Spanish left-wing party Podemos, founded in 2014, introduced a new, open model of party membership with no fees, citizenship requirements, or exclusivity, and allowed broad online participation in decision-making. While this approach made Podemos one of Spain’s largest parties by membership, it did not meet expectations. Research by Luis Ramiro and Raul Gomez found that the party still faced a gap between members and voters—its members were mostly men, more ideologically radical, and better educated and employed than the general electorate.

Emily Farris and Mirya Holman

Demonstrates that involvement in community groups and community-based activism plays a much bigger role in stimulating Black women’s political participation than it does for Black men, white women, or white men in the United States.

Duverger on party supporters, members and party militants

In his view, ordinary members, for example are more involved in party activities than party than party supporters, but are not as active as party militants. 

Lipset and Rokkan

Four main lines of cleavage in the development of modern industrial societies reflected in today’s party system: center-periphery, state-church, rural-urban and workers-employers. This model reflects a particular “version” of history that is rooted in Western Europe. 

Women’s Parties

Women’s parties are created to boost women’s political representation and highlight women’s issues, often emerging when mainstream parties fail to do so. Since 1987, over 30 such parties in Europe have contested national elections, with some successes—like the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition and Sweden’s Feminist Initiative (F!). Though usually small and short-lived, these parties play an important role in pressuring mainstream parties to address gender equality and raising feminist awareness among voters.

Giovanni Sartori

Argued that parties should only be counted as relevant if they have coalition or blackmail potential.

Duverger’s Laws

First Law: The majority [plurality] single-ballot system tends to party dualism.

Second Law: The second ballot [majority] system or proportional representation tend to multipartyism.

Paul Webb

“Parties continue to perform vital tasks with a relatively high degree of effectiveness and are central mechanisms of popular choice and control. If they did not exist … somebody would undoubtedly have to invent them.”