Perceptions of Politics and Governance

PERCEPTIONS OF
POLITICS AND
GOVERNANCE
PRECY MAE C. CABRERA
MSS-110
INTRODUCTION
 What is Politics? The question is very simple but it has

various definitions and contradictory responses. But after
debating what is politics, one thing prevails. POLITICS IS
IMPORTANT.
 Politics influences our everyday lives in countless ways.
Some ordinary events may somehow has an extraordinary
political relevance. Much of our routine is greatly
influenced by politics
 What, then, is politics? To this deceptively simple question
there is actually no simple answer. Throughout the history
of the discipline, political theorists and practitioners have
offered multiple, at times contradictory, at times
overlapping definitions of what politics involves. It is
therefore difficult (if not impossible) to provide a single
definition of politics that everyone can agree on.
SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS
ON THE ISSUES
POLITICS THAT CONCERNS THE STATE
 As distinct from the government, the state comprises the permanent
institutions that provide public services, enforce laws, ensure security and
thereby provide for the governance of persons and the administration of things.
 The government, on the other hand, is composed of politicians who temporarily
run the state because they have been elected (at least in democracies) to do
so. The politicians determine the public services the state should provide, the
laws it ought to enforce, the form of security it should ensure and the purposes
for which the state should govern people and administer things.
 Politics defined as that which concerns the state can include: activities that
either involve, or in some ways directly affect, the institutions of the state;
individuals who are directly involved in the institutions of the state or the
business of governance; and places in which these activities and people are
present

POLITICS AS CONFLICT RESOLUTION
 A second definition of politics goes some way towards ameliorating this

problem. It removes the state as the focus of politics and defines politics as a
particular kind of process.
 Politics, in this definition, is a particular method for resolving conflict.
Among the best-known proponents of such an understanding of politics was
the political scientist Bernard Crick (1929–2008).
 Crick defines politics as ‘the activity by which differing interests within a
given unit of rule are conciliated by giving them a share in power in
proportion to their importance to the welfare and the survival of the whole
community’ (Crick, 1964, p. 21). Later on he defines politics even more
broadly, suggesting that politics is a ‘solution to the problem of order which
chooses conciliation rather than violence or coercion’ (p. 30).
POLITICS AS AN EXERCISE OF POWER
 In Lasswell’s book “Politics, Who Gets What, When and

How” he clearly outlines the “influential are those who
get the most of what there is to get”, in his opinion
politics was primarily to do with power and influence.
 Laswell defined politics as”who gets what, when and
how”. Politics is a way of determining without recourse to
violence, who gets power and resources in society , and
how they get them. Power is the ability to get other
people do what you want them to do.
POLITICS AS SOCIAL AND PUBLIC
ACTIVITY
 Defining politics is to understand it as a ‘social activity’ – an activity
we engage in together with others, or one through which we engage
others. Politics, in this sense, is ‘always a dialogue, and never a
monologue’ . A similarly broad definition is offered by Arendt (2005),
who argues that politics does not have an ‘essence’ – it does not have
an intrinsic nature, or an indispensable element according to which
we can definitively, and in all circumstances, identify something as
political. Thus, there are no political acts, subjects or places.
Politics, rather, is the world that emerges between us – the world
that emerges through our interactions with each other, or through the
ways that our individual actions and perspectives are aggregated into
collectivities.
So what is POLITICS?
 What is politics? The simple answer to this question is that there is no single
answer. Like many political concepts, politics is itself a contested concept.
This section has introduced you to the idea that concepts, including the
concept of politics, can be ‘essentially contested’, and has explored some of
the implications this might have for the study (and practice) of politics.
C0NCLUSION
 ‘What is politics and why is it important?’

 What does politics mean to me? It’s the interaction of lots of different issues
that affect how we live. Those are local issues, national issues, international
issues. Most issues interact with each other in some way, and when you’re
making a decision you have to think through the consequences of each
decision. It’s like playing a multi-dimensional game of chess. You have to
think what would happen three, four, five moves down the road. Whatever
decision you make has implications elsewhere at lots of different levels. And
the job of a politician is to try and understand the complexity of the situation
and think through the consequences of making a decision. And that might
actually lead you to make a different decision from the one that you might
have initially thought. And that’s why I find politics fascinating, because it’s
the interaction of so many people and arguments.
 Politics is the safe way of resolving disputes. At every level of society, and
globally, people compete for resources, for wealth, for lots of different
things, and if you didn’t have politics to resolve these issues, you would have
an armed conflict in some way.
 Politics is about stories, very much about human stories. About battles, about
struggles between political parties, about ambition, about the rise of
personalities and the fall of personalities. But the older I get, the clearer it
becomes to me that politics, in the end, should be about administration: the
administration of a country. People love to talk about change. Politics exist to
bring change. Change is all very well, and sometimes things need to be
changed, but a country also simply needs to be governed. Government is
mostly about administration: sound administration, efficient administration.
 Politics is what governs us, what governs a country. All human society, in the
end, comes down to organization. Every society must be organized: there
must be leadership, there must be roles for people, people must be paid for
what they do. Politics is about the organization of society.
 We need politics because we can’t all sit round the village square, the town
square, the city square, discussing how to allocate resources, how much to
spend on roads, how much to spend on hospitals, how much to spend on
education. So we have to develop a political system to make those
decisions.We elect people to make those decisions on our behalf and if we
don’t like the decisions that they’ve made, the next time they come up for
election we don’t vote for them.
 Politics is everything. I don’t think there is an aspect of our lives that isn’t
political. So it’s decisions that we make in our everyday living and what we’re
allowed to do.

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PERCEPTIONS OF

 What is Politics? The question is very simple but it has

 A second definition of politics goes some way towards ameliorating this

 In Lasswell’s book “Politics, Who Gets What, When and

 ‘What is politics and why is it important?’

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