Define Politics and democracy in your own words

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Kelly Mawhinney                        Assignment                        25/09/2005

Define Politics and democracy in your own words

The word "Politics" is derived from the Greek word for city-state, "Polis". Corporate, religious, academic and every other polity, especially those constrained by limited resources, contain dominance hierarchy and therefore politics. Politics is most often studied in relation to the administration of governments.

        Politics is the process and method of gaining or maintaining support for public or common action. Although it is generally applied to governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions including corporate, academic, and religious. Political science is the study of political behavior and examines the acquisition and application of power, i.e. the ability to impose one's will on another. One theorist, Harold Lasswell, has defined politics as "who gets what, when, and how."

        Politics, in it's broadest sense, is activity through which people make, preserve and amend the general rules under which we live. Through this is affects almosts every area of your lives, from the sports we watch to what we eat, to how safe you feel on the streets and to how we interact with each other. Politics, and therefore politicians, invariably have to respond to what society in general and individuals specifically want out of their community. These are the values and beliefs that society in general has.

        The traditional view is that politics boils down to 'what concerns the state' has been reflected in the tendency for academic study to focus upon the personal adn machiney of government. Different views embody different conceptions of social order. Definitions of politics that relate it to the art of government, public affairsor peaceful compromise are based upon an essentially consensus model of society, which portrays government as basically benign and emphaises the common interest of the commuinty.

        Karl Marx sees politics as 'merely the orgainised power of one class for oppressing another' while Kate Millett sees politics as 'power-structured relationships,arrangements whereby one grop of persons is contolled by another. This shows how different people feel about politics and it shows that everyone has a differnt view on what politics means. My view is that politics is how different parties believe the county should be run, how different political views change how different people feel on politics, e.g. The old labour party had the views for the working man and the unions, and the conservatives was for the business man, but now the 'new' labour party has the same views as the conservatives, making it almost impossible to tell the difference between the parties. This is called Convergence.

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        There are many political parties in Britain but throughout the whole of England, there are three dominant political parties : Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. These are expanded on in the regions by the addition of the Scottish National Party  in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales and the various Unionist parties and Sein Fein of Northern Ireland. In terms of electoral success, Britain has frequently been referred as a two-party state; similar to America. In terms of pure definition, Britain is a classic multi-party state in which just a handful of parties have any political/electoral significance due to the electoral ...

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