Politics and society

Politics is the activity of taking and implementing collective decisions that are related to the functioning of society, especially reconciling the conflicts over the distribution of resources and rewards. Thus, political events and structures can be conceptualized as particular social phenomena. However, the intersection of politics and society is complex and, subsequently, is interpreted in diverging ways. It is a long-standing tradition of social history to attribute a significant or even decisive role to social factors in shaping political relations. For instance, religious divides or changes in the employment structure substantially affect the support for political parties. In fact, this view prevalent in social history largely coincides with a classic approach of political sociology, proposed by Stein Rokkan and Seymour M. Lipset, who interpreted political phenomena by virtue of their social correlates, and, in particular, analysed and understood political systems in terms of how they are related to the structures of social cleavages. ¹ However, representatives of modern political science promoted the scholarly perspective that politics as a distinctive phenomenon is worth studying in its own right. Moreover, classics of sociology (including Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann) stood for the idea that politics forms a distinct subsystem of modern societies, which is separate from other subsystems, and, similarly to those, enjoys a high level of autonomy. ² This is manifest in political institutions with distinct operational logics, as also elaborated by the representatives of political institutionalism. This latter approach shows how political organizations perpetuate their existence in the long run, and endeavour to increase their influence. Instead of stressing historical and social factors, others called for the analysis of the political behaviour of individuals and groups or their informal relationships, or claimed that in order to understand the sphere of the state and politics, one should examine political attitudes and culture. ³ From the 1960s, the idea that political behaviour should be primarily attributed to social (and economic) factors had been challenged, and numerous social historians also acknowledged that social development is significantly influenced by state activity and politics. Hence, the intersection of politics and society has become a major subject of social and historical research. Thus, in the following, we also survey some major interrelated fields of twentieth-century European political and social life, among which social policy has already been discussed. In accordance with the main goals of this book, we focus on the direct social aspects of the functioning of political systems, and thereby the chapter does not touch upon the constitutional systems. Therefore, in-depth discussion of parliaments, governments and political decision-making processes are also dismissed. Arranging the study in this way necessarily posits a selective approach from the viewpoint of political science. Nonetheless, we readily acknowledge that the institutionalist and other approaches referred to above are essential for understanding the world of politics. Thus, we make use of several of these perspectives as well when studying the relations of politics and society.