3458 political sociology the specific mechanisms within each that can be found across multiple movements. Examples of such mechanisms that they identify include brokerage, the linking of previously unconnected units; category formation, the creation of identities; and certification, a target recognition of a movement, its tactics or its claims. However, despite this distancing by its founders, PPT remains the dominant paradigm for social movement research. SEE ALSO: Civil Rights Movement; Framing and Social Movements; Political Opportunities; Social Movement Organizations; Social Movements REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Goodwin, J. & Jasper, J. M. (2004) Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning and Emotions. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD. McAdam, D. (1982) Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. McAdam, D., McCarthy, J. D., & Zald, M. N. (1996) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2001) Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. McCarthy, J. D. & Zald, M. N. (1973) The Trend of Social Movements in America: Professionalization and Resource Mobilization. General Learning, Morristown, NJ. McCarthy, J. D. & Zald, M. N. (1977) Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory. American Journal of Sociology 82: 1212–41. Olson, M. (1965) The Logic of Collective Action. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Piven, F. F. & Cloward, R. (1977) Poor People’s Movements: Why they Succeed, How they Fail. Vintage Books, New York. Tarrow, S. (1994) Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Mass Politics in the Modern State. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tilly, C. (1978) From Mobilization to Revolution. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. Tilly, C. (1995) Contentious Repertories in Great Britain, 1758–1834. In: Traugott, M. (Ed.), Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 15–42. political sociology Ryan Calder and John Lie Political sociology analyzes the operation of power in social life, examining the distribution and machination of power at all levels: individual, organizational, communal, national, and international. Defined thus, political science becomes a subfield of sociology. Parsons (1951), for example, treated the political as one of the four principal domains of sociological analysis. In practice, however, political sociology has developed as a sociological subfield, with its distinct concerns and fashions. Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, or Montesquieu may rightfully claim to be the founder of political sociology insofar as they highlighted the social bases of power relations and political institutions. However, most contemporary scholars trace their intellectual lineage to Marx or Weber. Political sociology emerged as a distinct subfield in the 1950s, especially in the debate between pluralists and elite theorists. In the 1980s and 1990s political sociologists focused on social movements, the state, and institutions. MARX AND WEBER According to Marx (and Engels), economic structure and class relations are the basis for all political activity (Miliband 1977). The dominant mode of production determines who wields power in society. Under the capitalist mode of production, the capitalist class controls the state, which serves to perpetuate its domination of subordinate classes and manage ‘‘its common affairs.’’ There are two principal strands in Marxist political sociology. The instrumentalists portray the state as the tool of a unified capitalist class that controls both the economic and political spheres. In this model, the state is virtually epiphenomenal to the dominance of the ruling class. The structuralists view the state (as well as politics more generally) as a relatively autonomous product of conflict between classes and sometimes within classes. Whereas Marx viewed social classes as the basic units of competition, Weber (1978) recognized that competition occurs among many different types of entities, including not only political sociology social classes but also status groups (defined in terms of consumption, codes of honor, education and credentials, ethnicity, and other criteria), as well as political agencies and agents. Contestation for power occurs both across and within various institutions and organizations: heads of state clash with parliaments and civilservice bureaucracies over legislation; trade unions and professional groups vie to influence legislators; politicians and bosses fight for control of a political party. The political sphere, while linked to events in other spheres, has its own logic of contestation. Against the Marxian stress on the economy and class struggle, the defining feature of modern western societies for Weber is the ineluctable advance of rationality. Thus, the bases of political authority shift from traditional or charismatic claims toward legal-rational forms of legitimation and administration. For example, the whim of a king or lord who asserts the right to rule based on dynastic precedent (traditional authority) or heroic acts and personal qualities (charismatic authority) is replaced by state control of the populace according to normalized standards and codified laws (legal-rational authority). For Weber, the modern state also extends and entrenches its domination of society by expanding its coercive apparatus, chiefly in the form of bureaucratization. The central function of modern mass citizenship is to legitimize this iron cage; even in a democracy, real power would reside in the hands of a few. ELITE THEORY, PLURALISM, AND THE THIRD WORLD That power in society is always concentrated in the hands of a few is the basic assumption of the elite theory of society (Bottomore 1993). The elite theorists drew heavily on Weber, but placed greater emphasis than Weber on power rather than authority as the key to political dominance. Whereas Weber agreed that the power to make major political decisions always concentrates in a small group, he viewed the authority that stems from popular support as the foundation for all institutions that provide this power. For the elite theorists, it was the reverse: power made authority, law, and political culture possible. 3459 Michels (1966) proposed ‘‘the iron law of oligarchy’’: the thesis that all organizations – whether political parties, trade unions, or any other kind – come to be run by a small group of leaders. He saw the oligarchical tendency as ‘‘a matter of technical and practical necessity,’’ citing several causes for this tendency: the impracticality of mass leadership, the organizational need for a small corps of full-time expert leaders, the divergence of leaders’ interests from those of the people they claim to represent, and the masses’ apathy and thirst for guidance. Schumpeter agreed with elite theorists, including Pareto and Mosca, that mass participation in politics is very limited. Emphasizing the lability and pliability of popular opinion, he stated that ‘‘the will of the people is the product and not the motive power of the political process’’ (Schumpeter 1976). With The Power Elite (1956), C. Wright Mills produced a radical version of elite theory. Mills described a ‘‘power elite’’ of families that dominated three sectors of American society: politics, the military, and business. The power elite was cohesive and durable because of the ‘‘coincidence of interests’’ among organizations in the three sectors, as well as elites’ ‘‘similarity of origin and outlook’’ and ‘‘social and personal intermingling.’’ Radical elite theory presumed the passivity of mass politics, which was articulated most influentially by Marcuse (1964). Radical elite theory was largely a response to pluralism, which was particularly influential in US social science in the two decades following World War II. Pluralism has its roots in Montesquieu (1989), an advocate of the separation of powers and of popular participation in lawmaking, and Tocqueville (2004), who famously observed decentralization of power, active political participation by citizens, and a proliferation of associations in the early nineteenth-century US. In addition to these earlier theorists, pluralists also drew inspiration from Weber, particularly in his view of the political sphere as a realm of constant contention. The basic assumption of pluralism is that in modern democracies power is dispersed among many groups and no single group dominates. Power is dispersed in part because it has many sources, including wealth, political office, social status and connections, and popular legitimacy. Pluralists also note that individuals 3460 political sociology often subscribe to multiple groups and interests, making pluralist systems more stable in their opinion. In this model, the state is largely an arbiter facilitating compromise between competing interests. The 1950s and early 1960s were the heyday of pluralist theory, coinciding with the apparent stability of liberal democracy in the US, which most pluralists viewed as an exemplar. David Truman’s 1953 book The Governmental Process was a defining work of the period, focusing on interest groups as its basic unit of analysis and examining how their interaction gave rise to policy (Truman 1971). In Who Governs? (1961), Robert Dahl argued that city policies in education and development were a function of input from many individuals and groups, and that neither individual office-holders nor business leaders wielded overriding influence. Lipset and colleagues (1956) challenged empirically Michel’s iron law of oligarchy in their analysis of a trade union. The Cold War directed attention to democratization in the face of rapid industrialization, transition from colonial rule, and other conditions that prevailed in the third world: the world outside of Europe and North America. Modernization theory posits that societies follow a stage-by-stage process of political, economic, and social development. It typically portrays western democracies as consummately ‘‘modernized’’ societies. Different modernization theorists have highlighted different social conditions as critical to democratization. For example, Lipset (1994) has argued for the importance of ‘‘political culture,’’ defined as popular and elite acceptance of civil and political liberties. Allied with pluralism, modernization theory delineated an optimistic, evolutionary account of democratization and development. Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) provided a profound critique – not only stressing the role of power and class struggle, but also the fact of distinct trajectories of political development – and laid the foundations for historically oriented political sociology. Dependency theory emerged in response to the apparent failure of modernization theorists’ prescriptions in the developing world. Drawing heavily on Marx, dependency theory argued that the economic and political problems of the developing world were not a function of ‘‘backwardness,’’ but rather of developing societies’ structural positions in the capitalist world-economy (Cardoso & Faletto 1979). Dependency theory inspired much of world-systems theory and would come to engage in dialogue with it (Wallerstein 1984). SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, THE STATE, AND THE NEW INSTITUTIONALISMS Crises of authority and production shook the industrialized world in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Civil Rights Movement and protests against the Vietnam War in the US, the social upheaval of May 1968 and radicalization of the Left in France, and the global oil shocks and stalling of growth regimes. These events suggested flaws in pluralist models of democratic society that assumed stable competition among groups and consensus about the rules of the political game. Meanwhile, anti-colonial nationalist movements in Africa and Southeast Asia drew further sociological attention to questions about collective behavior and the conditions for successful mobilization against state structures. In this environment the study of social movements evolved and gained prominence within sociology. The three major theoretical models of social movements have corresponded with the pluralist, elite, and Marxist models of institutionalized power in society (McAdam 1982). The classical model of social movements portrays them as the result of structural pathologies that led to psychological strain and the desire to pursue nonconventional channels for political participation in an otherwise open system. The ‘‘resourcemobilization’’ model of social movements posits that they arise and grow because rational individuals decide that the benefits of joining outweigh the costs and because the necessary resources are available and worth investing. As such, they do not reflect social pathologies or psychological abnormalities, but are a natural feature of political life (McCarthy & Zald 1977). Finally, the political-process model of social movements blends elite theorists’ position that power is highly concentrated in society with the Marxist conviction that the ‘‘subjective transformation of consciousness’’ through popular movements nevertheless has the immanent political sociology power to force social change (McAdam 1982). It stresses the interplay between activist strategy, skill, and intensity on the one hand, and the favorability of resources and political opportunity structures to movement tactics and goals, on the other. One objection raised in the late 1970s to the dominance of post-World War II theoretical models in the pluralist, elite, and Marxist camps was that social scientists had been focusing on social and economic activity and had largely ignored the operations of the state as an autonomous entity. Advocates of ‘‘statecentered’’ approaches sought to remedy what they saw as a ‘‘society-centered’’ bias in scholarship. In the introduction to Bringing the State Back In, Theda Skocpol (1985) remarks on the trend toward viewing states as ‘‘weighty actors’’ that shape political and social processes. She notes that ‘‘states . . . may formulate and pursue goals that are not simply reflective of the demands or interests of social groups, classes, or society’’ – that is, states are autonomous. Research on how the modern form of the state arose has been an important part of the movement to refocus attention on the state: how states became centralized, developed functionally differentiated structures, increased their coercive power over their populations, and developed national identities that superseded class and religious differences. The bellicist model of state formation points to the pressure to organize for, prosecute, and pay for war in an environment of interstate competition on the European continent as the driving force behind the evolution of the modern state. As Tilly (1979) put it, ‘‘states make war, and war makes states.’’ Other scholars have emphasized different factors. Anderson (1979) stressed the power of class relations and struggles. Gorski (2003) has called attention to the significance of religion and culture. Mann (1986) has traced European state formation and the growth of western civilization in general as a function of interrelations between four types of power networks – ideological, economic, military, and political – with each taking on different levels of importance at different stages and locales in European history. The initial call to ‘‘bring the state back in’’ was followed by a recognition that as broad a concept as ‘‘the state’’ is best analyzed in terms 3461 of the various institutions that compose it. This led to a renewed focus on institutions, both within the state and outside it. The socalled new institutionalisms build on the ‘‘old’’ organizational institutionalism of mid-century. Selznick (1949) had called attention to the importance of informal institutions and extraorganizational interests in shaping policy outcomes. Each of the new institutionalisms defines and operationalizes institutions differently, largely a function of its origins in a social science discipline. Rational-choice institutionalism, which grew out of the economics literature, defines institutions as the formal rules or ‘‘structures of voluntary cooperation that resolve collective action problems’’ (Moe 2005). Historical institutionalism defines institutions as formal and informal rules and procedures (Thelen & Steinmo 1992). Finally, organizational institutionalism is rooted in the sociology of organizations and embraces a wider definition of institutions than the other two institutionalisms. In addition to formal rules, it considers habits, rituals, and other cognitive frameworks to be institutions, thus situating a large part of the force of institutions within the minds of actors (DiMaggio & Powell 1983). REDIRECTING POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY Recent changes in national and international political environments have taken political sociology in new directions. Political sociologists have participated in the proliferation of literature on globalization, including work on postnational citizenship (Soysal 1994) and transnational advocacy networks (Keck & Sikkink 1998). The postmodern turn in the human sciences has found adherents among students of post-industrial politics (Bauman 1999). There is growing interest in the realm of ‘‘subpolitics’’ that analyzes power outside the traditional realm of politics as a contestation for state power (Beck 1992). In this regard, gender remains understudied in the realm of politics (Gal & Kligman 2000). Theorization of the politics of ethnicity and identity has taken on new urgency in the wake of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia (Lie 2004). 3462 political sociology Theoretically, there are serious challenges to the very foundations of political sociology. Rational-choice models are based on game theory, treating individual entities in political contexts as rational actors seeking to maximize their utility (Friedman 1996). In so doing, they deemphasize and at times ignore the social origins or dimensions of politics. From very different perspectives, Unger (1997), who argues for the autonomy of politics, and Foucault (1977), who probes the microphysics of power, bypass traditional sociological concerns with groups and institutions. For Unger and Foucault, political sociology misrecognizes the very nature and operation of power. The evolution of political sociology has mirrored the great political movements of modern history. Just as class-based models of state and society have drifted upward and downward with the political cachet of socialism and communism, and conservative elite theory linked itself to Italian Fascism in the 1920s, so pluralist models have been fellow-travelers of liberal democracy’s credibility and theorists of social movements interrogated the global upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, as the meaning of national boundaries and identities changes in a global age, political sociology continues to expand its intellectual horizons and investigate new configurations of power. SEE ALSO: Democracy; Institutional Theory, New; Marx, Karl; Pluralism, American; Pluralism, British; Political Leadership; Political Machine; Political Parties; Politics; Politics and Media; Power Elite; Power, Theories of; Revolutions; Social Movements; State; Weber, Max REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anderson, P. (1979) Lineages of the Absolutist State. Verso, London. Bauman, Z. (1999) In Search of Politics. Blackwell, Oxford. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society. Trans. M. Ritter. Sage, Newbury Park, CA. Bottomore, T. (1993) Elites and Society. Routledge, London. Cardoso, F. H. & Faletto, E. (1979) Dependency and Development in Latin America. Trans. M. M. Urquidi. University of California Press, Berkeley. Dahl, R. (1961) Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. Yale University Press, New Haven. DiMaggio, P. J. & Powell, W. W. (1983) The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American Sociological Review 48: 147–60. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. Vintage, New York. Friedman, J. (Ed.) (1996) The Rational Choice Controversy. Yale University Press, New Haven. Gal, S. & Kligman, G. (2000) The Politics of Gender after Socialism. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Gorski, P. S. (2003) The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Keck, M. E. & Sikkink, K. (1998) Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Lie, J. (2004) Modern Peoplehood. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Lipset, S. M. (1994) The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited. American Sociological Review 59: 1–22. Lipset, S. M., Trow, M., & Coleman, J. (1956) Union Democracy. Free Press, Glencoe, IL. McAdam, D. (1982) Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. McCarthy, J. D. & Zald, M. N. (1977) Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory. American Journal of Sociology 82: 1212–41. Mann, M. (1986) The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Marcuse, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man. Beacon Press, Boston. Michels, R. (1966) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Free Press, New York. Miliband, R. (1977) Marxism and Politics. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Mills, C. W. (1956) The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, New York. Moe, T. M. (2005) Power and Political Institutions. Perspectives on Politics 3 (June): 215–33. Montesquieu, C. (1989) The Spirit of the Laws. Trans. A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller, & H. S. Stone. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Moore, B. (1966) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Beacon Press, Boston. Parsons, T. (1951) The Social System. Free Press, New York. Schumpeter, J. (1976) Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Allen & Unwin, London. Selznick, P. (1949) TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization. Harper & Row, New York. politics Skocpol, T. (1985) Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research. In: Evans, P., Rueschemeyer, D., & Skocpol, T. (Eds.), Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Soysal, Y. N. (1994) The Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Thelen, K. & Steinmo, S. (1992) Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics. In: Steinmo, S., Thelen, K., & Longstreth, F. (Eds.), Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tilly, C. (1979) Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Blackwell, Oxford. Tocqueville, A. de. (2004) Democracy in America. Trans. A. Goldhammer. Library of America, New York. Truman, D. (1971) The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. Knopf, New York. Unger, R. M. (1997) Politics, 3 vols. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wallerstein, I. (1984) The Politics of the World-Economy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society. University of California Press, Berkeley. politics Peter Murphy The discipline of sociology has generated few outright political classics. The most splendid of all of the sociological classics, Weber’s Economy and Society, contributed a great deal to the understanding of political behavior. Yet it is not a political work in the same sense as Aristotle’s Politics or Hobbes’s Leviathan. Economy and Society sometimes hints at but never enumerates the ‘‘best practical’’ regime. Aristotle and Hobbes had no doubt that such a regime existed, even if they disagreed about what it was. Weber’s comparison of traditional, charismatic, and procedural authority bears a passing resemblance to the comparison of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy perennially made by the great political thinkers. But the resemblance is limited. The discipline of politics persistently asks ‘‘what is the best type of state?’’ Answers vary, but the question is constant. The prime object of sociological inquiry is not the state but society. Even Weber, who was politically astute, 3463 preferred terms like ‘‘authority’’ and ‘‘domination’’ to ‘‘the state.’’ Sociological categories have a much broader application than expressly political categories like ‘‘democracy’’ or ‘‘monarchy.’’ Weber’s discussion of legitimate authority was a major and enduring contribution to understanding the consensual foundations of power. But it did not replace the older and equally enduring topic of political regime. The limits of political sociology are exemplified by the following. A democracy can be traditional, charismatic, or procedural, depending on time and circumstance. Even if we can resolve which one of these types of legitimate authority we favor, and which we think would be most feasible for a country in a given period or situation, larger questions still remain. Is democracy preferable to monarchy or military rule? Which regime – stratocracy or democracy, oligarchy or monarchy – is most compatible with tradition, charisma, and procedure? Lewis (2003) illustrates neatly the difference between political sociology and classic political inquiry. Lewis uses Weber’s categories to analyze the pervasiveness of traditional authority – such as clientalism and patrimonalism – in contemporary Arab societies. But the alternative postulated to this – democracy – is originally a Greek term with a very old lineage extending back to antiquity. Its provenance belongs to political thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Rawls and Strauss. In short, sociology is not political science reborn. Yet sociology does have a political resonance. It is a kind of deferred politics. This stems from one overwhelming fact. Sociology emerges out of the disintegration of hierarchical societies or, in Weber’s terms, out of the fraying of traditional authority. At its core, sociology is an answer to a neo-Kantian question: How is society possible without the binding agent of hierarchy? This is a political question insofar as, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all states – whether they were city-states, monarchies, or empires – were built around social hierarchies. Political forms turned on the social orders of master and servant, noble and commoner, tribute receiver and giver, citizen and free person, slave owner and slave. Something staggering began to happen in the late eighteenth century. The traditional social authority of hierarchy started to be replaced.