What exactly is Political Science?

In these cases, empirically we always find that special institutions or processes have emerged as mechanisms for helping to impose a settlement.

Without such special means at the disposal of a society, its integration might be threatened. In addition, collective purposive action would be impaired, if not eliminated.

If the society sought to adopt any objectives requiring the combined effort or resources of part or all of its members, some means would have to be found to organize and direct their energies.

Differences would have to be reconciled or regulated so that purposive action in the name of the society could become possible.

This involves more than just the establishment and maintenance of order, although that may be and typically has been a primary objective.

But regardless of the goals, each society has in fact devised some means for regulating differences, so as to be able to coordinate the efforts of its members.

One way of achieving this result is by invoking force in the name of the society.

Others are through the use of persuasion, manipulation, ad hoc mediation, and the like.

The weakness of these methods is that they do not offer stable and regularized procedures through which conflicts over valued things may be negotiated when the members are not able to arrive at an autonomous settlement.

Regular and stable means for meeting this situation require two things at the very least: first, structures and procedures for undertaking decisions and related actions—what we may call allocations—that will help reduce or regulate differences, and second, some guarantee that there will be a greater rather than a lesser likelihood that these decisions and actions (allocations) will be accepted as authoritative.

That is, the outcomes of efforts to regulate the differences must have a relatively high probability of being accepted as binding.

In structurally differentiated societies, the making and implementing of decisions with which the members normally comply are assigned to special institutions that have come to be known as “governmental.”

But in small, nonliterate societies, where structures are combined and unspecialized, such tasks will usually be undertaken by persons in social roles that cannot be described as either purely or largely governmental.

A lineage head in a tribal society may be chief religious leader, regulator of hunting (economic director), and familial chief, as well as the paramount negotiator of disputes not regulated by the members themselves.

In every society, therefore, we can expect to find those kinds of interactions which have to do primarily with influencing and shaping the way in which authoritative allocations of values (decisions and actions) are made for the society.

It is these interactions taken collectively which constitute the behavior to which the term “political system” refers; it is the study of these interactions that provides the basic subject matter of political science.

We must examine each of the component terms of the phrase “authoritative allocations of values for a society” if we are to appreciate its full implications.

Politics revolves around allocations. An allocation distributes valued things among the members of a society.

In providing safety, a policeman helps to allocate this value differently from the way it would have been allocated without his presence; in building roads, a government offers a benefit to its users and a deprivation to other taxpayers, for whom it may have no importance at all.

An allocation may occur in three significantly different ways: when a decision or action prevents a member from retaining a value that he already possesses; when it prevents him from obtaining one he would like to possess; when it gives him access to a value that he might not otherwise have obtained.

Generally an allocation apportions benefits or deprivations in such a way that they are different from what they would have been but for the allocative activities.

An allocation of values may be formal. In modernized political systems, allocations take such forms as legislation, laws, judicial decisions, and administrative decrees.

They may be informal in these systems, as when administrative action substantially modifies or subverts a law in the process of applying it.

They may also be informal, as in nonliterate societies, where a council of elders may meet and achieve an unarticulated consensus on what ought to be done, and the responsible members of the lineage or clan may then feel impelled through custom to undertake the necessary actions.

Control over allocations may be diffused throughout a society, as in a direct democracy, or it may be confined to the hands of a few, as in an autocracy