Political sociology is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with exploring how governance and society interact and influence one another across the micro- to macro-levels of analysis. Interested in the social causes and consequences of how power is distributed and changes throughout and amongst societies, political sociology's focus ranges across individual families to the state as sites of social and political conflict and power contestation.
Introduction Political sociology was conceived as an interdisciplinary sub-field of sociology and politics in the early 1930s throughout the social and political disruptions that took place through the rise of communism, fascism, and World War II. This new area drawing upon works by Alexis de Tocqueville, James Bryce, Robert Michels, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Karl Marx to understand an integral theme of political sociology: power.
Power's definition among political sociologists varies across the approaches and conceptual frameworks utilised in this interdisciplinary study. At its basic understanding, power can be seen as the ability to influence or control other people or processes around you. This helps create a variety of research focuses and methodologies, as scholars' understandings of power differ. Alongside this, their academic discipline or institution can also shape their research as they develop from their baseline of inquiry (e.g., political or sociological studies) into this interdisciplinary field (see ). Although there is variation in how it is carried out, political sociology has an overall focus on understanding why power structures are the way they are in any given societal context.
Political sociologists, across their broad manifestations, propose that, to understand power, society and politics must be studied together and neither treated as assumed variables. In the words of political scientist Michael Rush, "For any society to be understood, so must its politics; and if the politics of any society is to be understood, so must that society."
Origins The development of political sociology from the 1930s onwards occurred as the disciplines of sociology and politics explored their overlapping areas of interest. Sociology can be viewed as the broad analysis of human society and the interrelationship of these societies. Predominantly focused on the relationship between human behaviour and society. Political science or politics, as a field of study, largely situates itself within this definition of sociology and is sometimes regarded as a well-developed sub-field of sociology, but is seen as a standalone disciplinary area of research due to the scale of scholarly work undertaken within it. Politics offers a complex definition, and what 'politics' means is subjective to the author and context. From the study of governmental institutions, public policy, and power relations, politics has a rich disciplinary outlook.
The importance of studying sociology within politics, and vice versa, has been recognised by figures from Mosca to Pareto, who noted that politicians and politics do not operate in a societal vacuum, and that society does not operate outside of politics. Here, political sociology sets about to study the relationships of society and politics.
Numerous works highlight political sociology, from the work of Comte and Spencer to other figures such as Durkheim. Although it feeds into this interdisciplinary area, the body of work by Karl Marx and Max Weber is considered foundational to the field's emergence as a subfield of research.
Scope
Overview The scope of political sociology is broad, reflecting widespread interest in how power and oppression operate across and within social and political spheres. Although diverse, some major themes of interest for political sociology include:
Understanding the dynamics of how the state and society exercise and contest power (e.g., power structures, authority, social inequality). How political values and behaviours shape society and how society's values and behaviours shape politics (e.g., public opinion, ideologies, social movements). How these operate across formal and informal areas of politics and society (e.g., ministerial cabinet vs. family home). How socio-political cultures and identities change over time.
In other words, political sociology is concerned with how social trends, dynamics, and structures of domination affect formal political processes, as well as the social forces that work together to create change. From this perspective, we can identify three major theoretical frameworks: pluralism, elite or managerial theory, and class analysis, which overlaps with Marxist analysis.
Pluralism sees politics primarily as a contest among competing interest groups. Elite or managerial theory is sometimes called a state-centered approach. It explains what the state does by examining constraints arising from organizational structure, semi-autonomous state managers, and interests that emerge from the state as a unique, power-concentrating organization. A leading representative is Theda Skocpol. Social class theory analysis emphasizes the political power of capitalist elites. It can be split into two parts: one is the "power structure" or "instrumentalist" approach, whereas another is the structuralist approach. The power structure approach focuses on the question of who rules, and its most well-known representative is G. William Domhoff. The structuralist approach emphasizes how a capitalist economy operates, allowing and encouraging the state to do some things but not others (Nicos Poulantzas, Bob Jessop).
Where a typical research question in political sociology might have been, "Why do so few American or European citizens choose to vote?" or even, "What difference does it make if women get elected?", political sociologists also now ask, "How is the body a site of power?", "How are emotions relevant to global poverty?", and "What difference does knowledge make to democracy?"
Political sociology vs. sociology of politics While both are valid lines of inquiry, sociology of politics is a sociological reductionist account of politics (e.g., exploring political areas through a sociological lens). In contrast, political sociology is a collaborative socio-political exploration of society and the contestation of power. When addressing political sociology, there is an overlap in the use of sociology of politics as a synonym. Sartori outlines that sociology of politics refers specifically to a sociological analysis of politics, not to the interdisciplinary area of research that political sociology seeks to pursue. This difference is due to the variables of interest that both perspectives focus on. Sociology of politics centres on the non-political causes of oppression and power contestation in political life, whereas political sociology includes the political causes of these actions throughout commentary with non-political ones.
People Karl Marx
Marx's ideas about the state can be divided into three subject areas: pre-capitalist states, states in the capitalist (i.e., present) era, and the state (or absence of one) in post-capitalist society. Overlaying this is the fact that his own ideas about the state changed as he grew older, differing in his early pre-communist phase, the young Marx phase, which predates the unsuccessful 1848 uprisings in Europe and in his mature, more nuanced work.
In Marx's 1843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, his basic conception is that the state and civil society are separate. However, he already saw some limitations to that model, arguing: "The political state everywhere needs the guarantee of spheres lying outside it." He added: "He as yet was saying nothing about the abolition of private property, does not express a developed theory of class, and "the solution [he offers] to the problem of the state/civil society separation is a purely political solution, namely universal suffrage".
By the time he wrote The German Ideology (1846), Marx viewed the state as a creature of the bourgeois economic interest. Two years later, that idea was expounded in The Communist Manifesto: "The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."
This represents the high point of the state theory's conformance to an economic interpretation of history, in which the forces of production determine people's relations of production, and those relations determine all other relations, including the political. Although "determines" is the strong form of the claim, Marx also uses "conditions". Even "determination" is not causality, and some reciprocity of action is admitted. The bourgeoisie control the economy; they control the state. In this theory, the state is an instrument of class rule.
Antonio Gramsci Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony is tied to his conception of the capitalist state. Gramsci does not understand the state in the narrow sense of the government. Instead, he divides it between political society (the police, the army, legal system, etc.) – the arena of political institutions and legal constitutional control – and civil society (the family, the education system, trade unions, etc.) – commonly seen as the private or non-state sphere, which mediates between the state and the economy. However, he stresses that the division is purely conceptual and that the two often overlap in reality. Gramsci claims the capitalist state rules through force plus consent: political society is the realm of force and civil society is the realm of consent. Gramsci proffers that under modern capitalism, the bourgeoisie can maintain its economic control by allowing certain demands made by trade unions and mass political parties within civil society to be met by the political sphere. Thus, the bourgeoisie engages in passive revolution by going beyond its immediate economic interests and allowing the forms of its hegemony to change. Gramsci posits that movements such as reformism and fascism, as well as the scientific management and assembly line methods of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford, respectively, exemplify this.
Ralph Miliband English Marxist sociologist Ralph Miliband was influenced by American sociologist C. Wright Mills, of whom he had been a friend. He published The State in Capitalist Society in 1969, a study in Marxist political sociology, rejecting the idea that pluralism spreads political power, and maintaining that power in Western democracies was concentrated in the hands of a dominant class.
Nicos Poulantzas Nicos Poulantzas's theory of the state reacted to what he saw as simplistic understandings within Marxism. For him Instrumentalist, Marxist accounts such as that of Miliband held that the state was simply an instrument in the hands of a particular class. Poulantzas disagreed with this because he saw the capitalist class as too focused on its individual short-term profits rather than on maintaining the class's power as a whole and thus on exercising state power in its own interest. Poulantzas argued that the state, though relatively autonomous from the capitalist class, nonetheless functions to ensure the smooth operation of capitalist society, and therefore benefits the capitalist class. In particular, he focused on how an inherently divisive system such as capitalism could coexist with the social stability necessary for it to reproduce itself—looking in particular to nationalism as a means to overcome the class divisions within capitalism. Borrowing from Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony, Poulantzas argued that repressing movements of the oppressed is not the sole function of the state. Rather, state power must also obtain the consent of the oppressed. It does this through class alliances, in which the dominant group forms an "alliance" with subordinate groups to obtain their consent.
Bob Jessop