POLS 1400 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: First-Past-The-Post Voting, Liberal Democracy, Direct Democracy
1 Dec 2014
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Politics: all of the activity related to influencing, making, and implementing collective decisions. Political activity involves controversy with many contrasting interests, values, and priorities when collective decisions are at stake: controversy and conflict are in politics because of competition for positions of political power. In democratic countries, politics involves activity aimed at resolving conflicts or downplaying them. Power: the ability to affect the behaviour of others particularly by getting them to act in ways they would not otherwise do: ex. A student group that succeeds in pressuring its provincial gov"n to lower tuition fees. If the gov"n would not have taken action without this pressure then we would say the students exercised their power effectively. The collective decisions of a political community mirror the distribution of political power: those with little political power will likely find that decisions do not reflect their interests or values, ex.
