INTRODUCTORY LECTURE
Political Science 200
David Tabb
I. Focus of course
A. Exploration of conditions that increase or decrease governmental responsiveness to various interests in the U.S.
B. Central assumption of course is that most explanations and recommendations concerning political change depend on certain underlying perspectives toward politics--conservative, liberal and radical.
II. Preliminary definitions
A. Politics concerns the ways in which individuals gain the power to command the events that effect their lives.
1. More simply, politics concerns the ways in which people individually and collectively decide to get what they want--what they value. In this sense, politics concerns " the authoritative allocation of values.
B. Power involves the capacity of A to get B to do something that B might not otherwise do.
C. Government refers to those institutions that have the authority to allocate what people want while politics refers to the processes by which people get and distribute power.
III. Resources of power - three chief ways in which people gain power to command the events that effect their lives.
A. Means-- To have the "means" to get what one wants refers to the power persons and things. In the modern world this often refers to command over economic resources. The command of mean concerns the ability to use or be used by the major "structural" resources of society—e.g. economic, demographic, cultural, constitutional structures. Structural power refers to "collective" power rather than individual power.
B. Skills--The personal and social strategies one develops either through inheritance or achievement to get what one wants. Political skills are developed through political processes; e.g. elections, parties, interest groups
C. Schemes--refers to the techniques of power. The prime technique concerns institutions and their performance. The use and development of governmental institutions is a prime technique by which power is developed.
III. So, the study of American politics this semester will be concerned with:
Political structures
Political processes
Political institutions
IV. Poverty and theories of poverty.
Poverty may be viewed as the flip side of power. Those who are poor lack the resources of power to command the events that effect their lives.
Social science theories on causes and consequences of poverty organized around three perspectives.
Resource
allocation theories-- command over means
Social and personal theory--
command over skills
Institutional performance--command
over schemes
B. Justifications using radical, conservative and liberal assumptions stress one or another means of riding society of poverty:
1. Radicals stress redistribution resources
2. Conservatives stress the modification of people and/or groups
3. Liberals stress changing
the performance and character
of institutions.