"What is politics?" (Lecture from Introduction to Comparative Politics)

0:00 good morning good morning I want to start talking today about what politics is if you remember last time we defined a state is that political institution that has Monopoly on the use of force within a clearly defined territory and we knew all those words especially by the end of of what we talked about last time except the word political and I promised you we'd talk about that next time and so that time has now come the state remember is that political institution that has Monopoly on the leg legitim use of force within a clearly defined territory and the one word we're really going to concern ourselves here the word that we don't already really understand necessarily is the word political so that's what I want to talk about today what do we mean by political what is politics what we looked last

0:48 time is a little recap of what it is uh that the state actually does and basically we saw that in return for our loyalty in return for our taxes in return for our payments essentially the state will provide us with public goods now in some very broad way uh all of those public goods can be characterized as as one of two things some people even say it's really just one thing uh they provide protection that is to say the state provides protection and the state solves Collective action problems some people who say that the state really just does one thing uh sort of say well solving Collective action problems is itself a public good but more on that next time when we talk about Collective

1:33 action problems okay so if the state is the political institution with a monopoly on the use of force within a clearly defined territory what do we mean by political well to talk about what politics is uh first as all often do you'll see here's your definition right politics is the process by which individual interests are reconciled with Collective action and the provision is of public goods now when we say interests in this context we don't mean interest like my that's interesting we mean interests like things that you want or desires that you have you guys are students you have an

2:20 interest in learning right you have an interest that your professors be good I'm a professor I'm going to be evaluated based on how well you look learn so I have an interest that you learn I also just want that I just desire that I have an interest that my taxes get spent wisely and particularly on things that I like so if if politics is the process by which individual interests are reconciled with Collective action and the pr provision of public goods what we mean by those interests are are things that people want their desires and their their yeah and so on all right again if this definition

3:05 doesn't make complete sense now that's cool right it should make a little sense and I'd like you to think about it but by the end of today it should make a whole lot more sense um here is a possible public good a pizza anyone ever get together with a group of friends and try to order a pizza say you got about five of you you want to order pizza what discussion inevitably in s the five of us get together we say you know let's let's get a pizza what do we then end up talking about what do we want on the pizza exactly what do you like on your pizza basically the typical like suem all right mushrooms onion sausage

3:50 pepperoni basically everything but the kitchen sink cool what do you like on your pizza pepperoni pepperoni do you like mushrooms no huh so if you guys want to order a pizza together you now have some negotiating to do right what do you like on your pizza sausage pepper is there anything you really hate um I'm not a big fan of like Peppers or mushrooms okay not a big fan so if they're there you might eat them or you might pick them off but you're not going to like reject the whole pizza anyone who really hates mushrooms that like if they're on the pizza like no way am I touching it got it um you know there are some people who are like that but for the pepper which is the thing that he really likes think about the diversity of interests there's that word again used

4:37 in this context right interests things that people want just when it comes to pizzas right each and every one of us I dare say that no two of us in this whole room have identical interests when it comes to pizza right each of us wants a slightly different set of things that are going to come on that pizza and each of us has a different set of preferences about those things so you know you love pepperoni you really want the pepperoni there if that pepperoni is there it's not even a pizza you'll eat pepperoni but it's whatever you don't s or you want the mushrooms uh who someone didn't care for mushrooms that was you you didn't or you didn't like mushrooms and then you were like I'm not going to eat it if even has

5:23 mushrooms on it so it's not even just what we want and what we don't want but sort of the intensity of feeling that come along with those desires or those interests right included in our interest in a way is how much we want the thing or don't want the thing well when I talk about Pro uh politics being the process by which we in uh reconcile right sort of make come together individual interests with the provision of a single public good think about it right if we were going to order one pizza what kind of pizza would we get right different one of us would want different things on those pizzas but in the end there's going to be one pizza one public good one Collective action right the pizza that we buy and then

6:10 provide and yet it somehow has to take into account the fact that you like your pizza with olives you won't even touch olives you're a vegetarian you're not a vegetarian but you don't really love meat and you love olives and if there aren't olives on it forget it and you're lactose intolerant and don't want the cheese right we each have individual interests and yet when you buy a pizza typically unless it's an individual Pizza you have to Pro you end up in a situation where one public good is going to be provided and we all have to share that particular public good even though we each have different individual interests and what politics is is the process by which we figure out what single public good we're going to get

6:56 sort of despite the fact that we each have a very different set of individual interests a very different set of toppings that we want on the pizza and that doesn't even get to the fact of how big a pizza we're going to get are we going to get the extra large or the large or where we're going to get it or how many we're going to get or whatever the case may be now of course in real politics in state Politics the public goods that the state provides aren't pizzas typically but things like protection right we talked about this the state wants to provide protection but there's all these individual interests about what kind of protection the state should provide in which context it should use that protection how much money it should

7:42 spend on providing that protection in the first place and where and when we should use those protective forces right do we use them to get the bad guys who are the bad guys do we use them to make sure we have enough oil for our cars here's where the different interest start to come into play almost everybody agrees that the state should provide protection but we all end up having very different interests when it comes to where should this protection be used how much money should we spend on it where should we use it against whom and how much and in what ways one of the things the state provides is Law and Order right State hires police officers to protect us from each other it establishes courts of laws

8:28 to courts of to determine if anybody is breaking the laws that the state establishes and what should be done to them including how should we punish those people who who break those laws but again even though most of us would agree that the state should play some role providing laws and Law and Order for society we might disagree about the laws it should have or about what should happen to people who break those laws the state provides transportation and infrastructure it builds roads and freeways and ports and airports and railroads and so on sometimes Private Industry does these things too but it's certainly a big part of what the state

9:14 does the state builds a lighthouse some of us who are in shipping have an interest that lighthouses get built some of us who buy the things that get shipped in also have an interest in that but of course if I if we own a port over here on the west coast and you own a port over there on the east coast and there's only enough money for one lighthouse we might have very different interests about where and how big that Lighthouse is we want water management right could you imagine what life would be like if we each had like individual in you know uh we were each responsible for uh providing for our own water each of us have to set up like a water collection unit on our house

10:01 um imagine if you had to deal with your own sewage and put it away right it's better for all of us to the state build pipes to bring the water in to hold it until we need it and to carry it away once it's dirty state provides waste management right we don't each want a mini little landfill in our backyard right it's better if we just sort of pay one set of guys to come to all our houses collect the garbage and put it away somewhere far away where it's not going to get us sick it's better for all of us the state provide this public good and yet we might have different interests about how often they should do the trash pickup or how much we should pay for it or if they should also do recycling

10:51 yeah well some of them are managed by Private Industry and so that there that right there is another question right we all have an interest that that that our garbage get picked up and put away somewhere far away from the city do we all want to collectively pay for it or do we want it up be up to individuals to to contract with businesses that might do it for you if we do the latter well you might have more tolerance for garbage piling up in your yard than I do well and and that's okay right then we've made the decision that that you have garbage in your yard and I don't have it in mine but if your garbage in your yard is going to make me sick I might actually want an have an interest in having it be provided uniformly by the state but you might

11:36 still be saying no no no I don't even want that pizza and yet the pizza is going to be provided we all paid our dues to the fraternity the fraternity is going to buy the pizza you're paying for that pizza anyway whether you want it or not at some level and so a political process is going to be involved even in just deciding are we going to buy pizza collectively or not good question public education again most of us agree that at some level the government should provide for some sort of Education it's better for all of us that most of us learn how to read and to do very basic adding and subtracting but we can argue very legitimate arguments on both sides how much education the state should provide up to what level and for

12:23 whom and how many people and so this is sort of the upshot that no matter how basic it may seem any of these public goods or services are there's almost always some diversity of interests here's something that I think I'm just saying we all have individual interest right but here's something I think we we would like all agree on right that among the things that the government tells the police officers to enforce right among the laws that the government's going to have that among those laws the government should say basically Thou shalt not kill I I think anybody even the like most small government libertarian thinks that murder should remain

13:10 illegal agreed okay it's kind of a little extreme to say no even murder shouldn't be illegalized it's up to individuals to regulate that right all right fine so we all agree that murder should be illegal like like that shouldn't be allowed the government should step in and stop it from happening and should step in to punish people who actually do it anyway fine and I think we all agree that that those laws against murder should apply to people like this this is actually just a random group of w bash students murdering Wabash stud should be as illegal as murdering everybody else I think we all agree on that I think we agree it should apply to these people these are high school students notice they don't

13:57 vote but should still apply to them even to like that dude on the right in the stonewashed jeans you know which were very in style then you know it should even apply to little people like that she doesn't even know she's being protected by laws like this right that that he can't murder people but we all agree I think that it should apply to her too right that when the government tells the police Thou shalt not murder they should include in that rule the murder of little people who don't even know they're being protected Ed by that law including my niece but should it apply to these people I don't know kind of depends if you even think those are people and now

14:43 we get into the world where some of us think they are and thus they should be included in what that law protects and some of us think they aren't and thus it doesn't matter and I'm not here to tell you which way is right this isn't a politics class right this is a political science class this is a class where we learn the process by which these decisions are made you go home and on your own decide which way you actually want it to be what I'm here to tell you is that whether you like it or not you are making that decision every time you vote every time you pick the leaders you want you're picking leaders and you're telling them look I want you to have a law that thou shalt not murder we all agree on that law but guess what we all now have to take a position on whether

15:30 that law should be applied to things like this or not and each of us may have a very different set of Interest some of us may think yeah it should even apply to those things but not to those things which is just that thing at an earlier stage of development but of course to some people that thing is really just that thing at a later stage of development right and you know that thing is really just that thing at a later yeah you can go on on and on we all agree I think at some basic level that the government should be involved in in in establishing protection right to protect us from from outside powers to protect us from each other but who's the people we're being protected from who are the people

16:17 against whom we should use our our defense our offense right should we use it to bomb countries that don't attack us first should we even use it to bomb it countries that that do attack us first well that's where you get diversity of interests should we use it against these people or these people they just seem to be minding their own business and yet militaries have been used against people like that too by which I mean just sort of innocent people who belong to the racial or religious or ethnic group that most of the people in the state decide they don't like most of us agree that the state should establish schools right in some amount of of Education right but the schools have to decide whether they're

17:02 going to teach that our great great great great great great grandmother was her or her and now even if we all agree that the schools should provide education we're still going to have different interests in terms of what particular type of education the state provides for the last time right I'm not here to tell you which one of those was our great great great great that's up to you I'm here to tell you that if we all get what we want which is public schools I imagine most of us want some level of public schools we're going to then have that diversity over what those schools teach different interests some guys want pepperoni some guys don't want pepperoni some guys really hate pepperoni and some guys you know they don't want it but

17:49 they'll eat it sometimes it's not a matter of whether you oppose or support something it's not that simple right uh uh everybody likes the environment I hate to break it to you even Republicans like the environment the question is how much money you want to spend protecting it that's where people agree or disagree right I mean everybody if they had their way like bald eagles wouldn't be extinct I think I think there's very few people who want animals to go extinct but there's a lot of people who think we shouldn't use Public Funding to prot protect them and then there's a lot of people who think we should there's a lot of people who think the endangered

18:34 species that you're killing is really well you want to kill it you kill it it's it's just an animal then there's other people who say wait but if you kill all of them they're none left for me to enjoy and so I actually want that that common decision to include even your individual actions taxes right nobody likes paying taxes right nobody want wants taxes we just disagree on how much our taxes should be and on where that tax money should get spent okay so if politics is the process by which individual interests are reconciled with Collective action and the provision of public

19:21 goods then government is the set of individuals and institutions that make those political decisions institutions are the organizations and the rules and sometimes even the Traditions that government establishes or that we as a society live by and I want you to note something a little different about our use of this word typically we we understand that the word institution means something like an organization but in comparative politics we will also use the word institution to refer to the laws that those organiz ations pass and the rules that those organizations themselves live by so the US Senate is an institution so

20:08 too are the laws that the US Senate helps pass in this context in fact there are two kinds of laws broadly speaking you have statutory laws the laws of everyday life the laws that we see and think about most often right don't walk on the grass Thou shalt not kill your taxes are going to be this much and so on and so forth but sometimes it'll be important that we contrast those with a different kind of law constitutional laws which are the rules that determine how the rules are going to be made the president has to stand for

20:53 election every four years each state gets two senators no one matter how big or how small it is right those are rules too those are institutions too but those institutions really govern how the people who make the other rules get their jobs and how they end up serving notice that all political decisions really end up involving winners and losers right we decide on that pizza we decide that it's going to have pepperoni on it somewhere there's somebody who didn't want pepperoni they lost that time well we could decide that it shouldn't have pepperoni but somewhere there's somebody who really wanted pepperoni and that guy

21:41 loses you know sort of like everybody wants public transportation kind of we all like like none of us would really be that much worse off if there was a subway system in our city maybe not this city but you know and and in the end it doesn't even cost very much right like a couple extra tax dollars I'm talking into realate this is actually the San Diego public transport system so it's like you know a a bigger city that would really benefit from that it only cost a couple dollars per person even if you're not going to use it it might be worth a couple dollars to not have the traffic or to have other people you know be able to get around a little bit more easily but yet even here you're going to have groups of people who oppose those things

22:27 right I don't know tax taxi cab companies auto companies people who sell gasoline and so on we might all agree that lighthouses are good again if you own a shipping company you certainly agree that lighthouses are a good thing but guess what all of us buy stuff that ends up getting shipped in and that stuff that we buy is cheaper and comes in more reliably because we have ports and because we have lighthouses and because the whole process of shipping shipping stuff in is easier and cheaper it benefits all of us and yet we're going to have diversity of opinion as to where those lighthouses should go and even if we put them there we're

23:13 going to have people in places like that who want them but didn't get them so even on these things that we all agree on right there's going to be winners and losers people who don't get exactly what they want we're going to order pizzas and some of us aren't going to get in fact very few of us will get exactly the pizza we want note that interests can be concentrated or they can be diffuse now in this context these words are a little it's a little unusual to use them in this context but in politics we do but we know what concentrated and diffuses right if a chemical is concentrated there's a lot of it in a little small space

23:59 if it's diffus there's the same amount of it but it's all spread out with only a little bit per same unit of space or area so diffuse interests are interests that many many people have but they only care about it a little bit concentrated interests are interests that maybe a smaller number of people have but they really care a lot and here's an example right there I sort of gave it to you right we all kind of would benefit from there being a subway system or public transportation it's only a couple dollars and in the end it does us all a little bit of good it relieves traffic and so on but these people lose out a lot right

24:45 they lose a big chunk of your bus of their business so whereas it may be that a lot of us kind of want the convenience of public transportation there are going to be a few of us that really really don't want it a diffuse interest in having public in uh uh uh uh Transportation a concentrated interest in not having it doesn't always work that way but there's an example here's another example this is just the way it is I'm not uh uh uh publicizing a a personal political preference here it's just the way it is if you poll Americans if you ask Americans how they feel about abortion about 66% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in the first uh 3 months of

25:31 pregnancy and about 29% say it shouldn't be yeah this isn't necessarily my view on things this is just what happens if you if you pull the American public but here's my question why do we even then talk about it shouldn't abortion just be legal by this measure I'm not saying should like I think it should be but just shouldn't it like like if we have a democracy and there's voting and 66% of the people want something and the other 29% don't like isn't that just what you would expect to happen that okay abortion is legal end of discussion we'll talk about taxes now why do we have a public discussion on an issue where the public is so disproportionately on one side of the

26:17 issue there are a lot of other competing interests when elected officials are making decisions so like the reading pointed out that there are interest groups and lobbyists and other people who impact happens in government H you want to elaborate on that not on that but I think it goes back to concent diffused interest because abortion is just so I feel like it feel passionate between like opposing it or supporting it not supporting it but like having option open right go on you want to add to that silent majority and the minority that's what really just drives the discussion there you go right different words for the same thing right the silent majority and the vocal minority right it turns out that people who oppose abortion a lot of them anyway

27:03 really really oppose it it's like me with anchovies on my pizza I re I'm not even picking them off and eating the thing I am not touching if there are anchovies on that thing the way you are with mushrooms right everybody else they may not like anchovies maybe even they want them but they just want them a little bit well it turns out that that typically uh in the sort of pro-choice Camp people kind of want to portion to be legal but they don't really care about it that much or at least not as much as the people who oppose it who really care about it and think it should definitely be illegal and so think about how that then happens when it comes to voting this is where your answer comes in right if I'm pro-choice but I just kind of care about it a little and I've got this guy who's

27:49 pro life but I like him on all the other issues and I got this guy who's pro-choice like he's in line with me but actually I don't like him on the other issues you know if if if the choice life thing is is if something I want but I don't really care about that much I'll still vote for him based on the other issues well those the pro-life crowd right they feel passionately this is a concentrated interest and for them it's going to be like wait you're pro life I can disagree with you on everything else but if you're pro life I'm going to vote for you this is I mean I'm simplifying this a little bit but that's the the general gist of it right you see how a a conent how how a concentrated interest though

28:34 held by fewer people might result in more public officials getting elected based on that view free trade kind of works this way too most everybody benefits from from free trade after all it's just an option right but a few people are disadvantaged by it and they're disadvantaged a lot notice that institutions really really they actually really do affect the public goods that we get and here I'm talking about institutions as the rules for how we make the rules the rules for how we decide all right we want to order a pizza what's a concentrated interest

29:21 that you've no doubt seen people who have this very concentrated interest when it comes to Pizza and what kinds of toppings you get a minority group who nonetheless feel very strongly about their particular preferences with toppings and so on vegetari vegetarians right they're a dietary minority they're not the majority especially I used to teach in California the world was different there but I'm in Indiana now and vegetarians are definitely a minority but they feel really passionately I'm not a vegetarian I like pepperoni on my pizza but I'll give it or take it or leave it you know if I could if I could just not get anchovies I'll take that that pepperoni

30:07 off right if you could not get mushrooms you'd take all the other vegetables right the vegetarians they're not going to eat it if it's got meat on it typically so you have a world where you have carnivores and you have vegetarians and this world has 13 carnivores and seven vegetarians vegetarians are a minority about 35% of the small population of this Society all right well if we're going to order five pizzas for this Society one way to resolve this problem of many many individual interest in the provision of a single public good is to vote on it now if you vote on it in this Society five

30:52 pizzas how many pizzas do you think would end up being meat pizzas and how many would be vegetarian pizzas any guesses two vegetarian three carnivors well let's try it out all right we're going to order five pizzas people um order your the way you want right first pizza how many people want a meet Pizza raise your hand all right hands down how many people want a vegetarian pizza oh okay well better luck next time second pizza how many people want a meet Pizza raise your hand okay hands down how many people

31:38 want a vegetarian pizza yeah okay two three all right third Pizza how many people want a meat pizza all right third Pizza how many people want a vegetarian pizza H okay but you know you told us that really it's going to be three too so now it's time for a vegetarian pizza right but but vote the way you want how many people want to meat pizza oh wait wait how many people want that vegetarian pizza it's the fourth pizza oh huh we have a word for your situation it's called so wait fifth Pizza though right how many people want like now it's the last chance for the vegetarians how many people want to meat pizza right how many people want okay

32:25 you get the point right like vote voting isn't always going to guarantee that a small minority in society or even a relatively sizable minority is going to get anything right and if you just vote on it you might end up with a situation where the majority gets everything not just what proportionally it would be due now you can try to solve for this situation in fact this is a situation that we call tyranny of the majority we know know what a majority is mostly and tyranny is really something that's not good right it involves some kind of Oppression but here you go what kind of

33:12 Oppression is it when the majority of us want it when the majority of us want meat on our pizza and we order five meat pizzas because after all the majorities win and we do have a democracy what's the situation that the vegetarians are in that so situation right well they might argue that it's tyranny of the majority that yeah sure it was all Democratic but I have some rights to at least one pizza here well how can you guarantee that when you also have democracy the answer is it's very hard and in some ways we're going to spend the next month grappling with that very question one way that governments attempt to grow grapple with that

33:59 question is by dividing the power that the government itself has some countries like our country are divided federally right we have the United States but we're broken down into 50 little States and even some sort of semi-autonomous districts like the District of Colombia if we basically say look the rules will be made on a local level well then assuming and sometimes this is safe to assume that people with similar interests end up living concentrated and closer together to one another then they might get the kinds of pizzas they want in their regions and will get the kinds of pizzas we want in

34:45 our regions so if instead you say in this Society look we'll divide ourselves up federally into five districts and now have each district decide on what pizza it's going to have well now we get three carnivorous pizzas or meat pizzas and two vegetarian pizzas now we get something that's closer to the proportions that people are in society note still not exact in fact this is a situation where the carnivores might complain because how many of the pizzas now are vegetarian what by percentage what percentage of the pizzas are vegetarian 40% what percentage of the population is

35:32 vegetarian to of the minority oh my now it's less proportionally but you're still going to have people arguing even this way that there's something unfair right Collective decisions inevitably are going to leave some people without the kind of pie that they want and now of course in real government in real Society the kinds of toppings people want are not pepperoni and sausage and no Anchovies and yes green peppers and certainly not olives or something like that right the interests we have are about the common political issues that we think about all the time should taxes be raised or

36:18 lowered should drugs be illegal or legalized if they are illegal what should the penalties be should the federal government make rules about drugs at all or should that be left to the states should we invade this country or not should we invade a country but not that one it should be this one instead should we only invade this kind of country countries with oil in it country with minority group in it that we like countries with a minority in it that we don't like whatever the case may be so what I'd like you to think about next time right is that we've seen governments do these things right governments provide protection from others and from each other they write

37:05 and they enforce laws they establish public goods like transportation and infrastructure and so on and so forth but there's this other thing that governments do they solve Collective action problems and that's what we're going to talk about next time all right questions we got some questions as we were going and I'm I'm glad for that but you know even in a big class like this I like to take a few minutes at the end of class uh for questions