Questions tagged [political-theory]
Political theory is the study of the concepts in politics. Use this tag for questions regarding political philosophy or scientific theories.
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Why do protests happen in the light of their apparent futility?
Just today,
Riot police called in to disperse angry locals after [a bishop] was attacked at Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd church
There seem to be an ingrained belief that when something bad ...
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To what extent can citizens of democracies be held responsible for the acts of their governments?
The United States has often the case used the justification of removing a dictator as a reason to go to war. This has inflicted untold suffering onto the peoples of many nations. This brings into ...
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Does it make sense to label Lenin as a 'social democrat'?
I am confused by tim's great answer to this question on Bernie Sanders's political orientations. To summarize the answer, though Sanders labels himself as a socialist, it seems that social democrat ...
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Why allow convicted criminals to vote?
According to a 1998 HRW report,
The United States may have the world’s most restrictive criminal disenfranchisement laws. We know of no other democracy besides the United States in which convicted ...
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Is the social contract invalid if I change jurisdiction? [closed]
Can I move to a different place and nullify the social contract (just somewhere else)?
Does this destroy the moral justification for taxes?
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What does it mean for Singapore to be pragmatic?
As a Singaporean, one of the things I've learned is that our governance is pragmatic. I assume that this means we do not care about particular ideologies, but rather whatever gets "things" ...
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Using technology to take democracy to next level [closed]
Though US is a democracy, I'm hesitant to call it completely democratic. No nation is. At this stage of capitalism, lobbying groups and establishment regularly forces the congress to pass bills that ...
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Who has first or most famously distinguished different stages of social movements?
Who has first or most famously distinguished 4 stages of social movements?
It is common to take social movements to have four stages: emergence, coalescence, institutionalization or bureaucratization, ...
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The ethics related to social Darwinism and Darwinism [closed]
Has someone written a monograph on ethics and politics in the social Darwinist tradition?
Edit: The text below was added on 2/21/24:
Social Darwinism in Britannica.com has important information, and ...
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What is the minimum age before your political views are considered well thought out and educated? [closed]
I see a lot of the time people shut younger people down when arguing politics because they say that they aren't wise and educated enough to have these opinions. What age or education level do you ...
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How to identify the keys to power in a government? [closed]
I am interested in predicting the political dynamics of a country. I really like CGP Grey's explanation of the rules for rulers, and I wanted to use that as my framework for prediction.
The basic idea ...
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What is the term for the idea that everyone should vote according to their own best interests? [closed]
What is the name for the theory that democracy should work like the more optimistic theories of free market competition, where (ideally) things work best when everyone votes narrowly according to ...
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If authoritarian regimes are so bad, why do we see so many of them?
If authoritarian regimes are so bad, why do we see so many of them? I don't understand why they are so prevalent in the world. It can't be because people are gullible and don't recognize the situation....
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How do Western countries get people who vote against the authorities?
I was born in the USSR, Russia, so this is the question that always puzzled me: how it happens that in some countries there are people who vote against the authorities, for instance, the president?
If ...
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What is the purpose of democracy?
In many modern political debates democracy is often considered an unalloyed virtue: things are good because they are democratic. Things the people have voted for are good because they represent the &...
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Why would a state retaliate to a nuclear strike if the consequences could be human extinction?
The entire mutually-assured destruction (MAD) concept is based on game theory and mutual belief.
Suppose we have two states (A and B) with massive nuclear arsenals which together suffice to plunge the ...
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How does Karl Marx’s political vision, views, or advocacy differ from communism as realized in places like Soviet Russia? [duplicate]
Since learning a bit more about Marxism, the question has been opened in my mind, to what extent a common perception of what a communist society is supposed to be like - for example, the USSR - is ...
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What range of rules are used in major democracies to limit candidate eligibility for high office?
These two recent questions partially cover the "who is eligible to stand for office" question: Is there a precedent in Western countries where a state court has prohibited a candidate from ...
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Definition of diversity if Old World countries deemed not diverse enough
One of the recent answers I have seen the claim that
the Western countries... see benefit in diversity.
What caught my eye is that it's really hard to argue that 1960s France (or Germany, or Spain) ...
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Are there any good articles on the topic of how political influence differs from individual to individual?
I'm an industry professional writing a journal article about a certain kind of misinformation that is circulating on the internet.
My current reasoning is that public opinion shapes policy decisions ...
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Why are superstates rare? [closed]
I am interested in the efficacy of superstates and the apparent rarity of them. The closest things that are related, are the European Union and the East African Federation (which is still theoretical)....
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What are some progressive critiques of the concept of democracy and human rights?
I have traced a philosophical line of thought in my mind that “human rights” as commonly defined (and also “democracy”) may suffer a kind of disjunction between their “statutory” and “purposive” ...
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Can the Tyranny of the Majority rule be applied to the UN's General Assembly?
Looking at this question, and previous year's UNGA resolutions, it seems there's a certain bias in UNGA resolutions. They seem disproportional:
2022 UNGA Resolutions on Israel: 15
2022 UNGA ...
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Why does partisanship trump concerns about hypocrisy with voters?
Politicians are routinely hypocritical in support of partisan ends.
I'll provide a few examples to demonstrate what I mean:
When their party's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court is facing ...
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What are the politics of Steven Pinker? [closed]
What are the politics of Steven Pinker?
I have not heard or read a statement from him in which he describes the political theory to which he adheres.
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Given the presence of internet, encryption, and digital cash, why hasn't "assasination politics" taken off?
Jim Bell writes in his Assasination Politics:
Now, there is one more thing that I would hope we could get straight: As I originally "invented" this system, it occurred to me that there ...
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Where would Geoism be placed on a political compass?
Geoism/Georgism is an economic philosophy holding that, while people should own the value they produce themselves, economic value derived from land and other natural resources should belong equally to ...
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Why is populism seen as being negative or bad?
The definition that I found for populism is "support for the concerns of ordinary people". Democracy is form of government where the people rule by majority. If Democracy is considered to be "good", ...
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Why do Anarcho-Primitivists believe a primitive society will persist?
Whenever anyone advocates a transition to a stateless society, an obvious objection is that such a society would be unable to resist a dissident group trying to impose a government on it. Some ...
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If the goal of communism is a stateless society, then why do we refer to authoritarian governments such as China as communist?
The actions taken by these governments seem to be more fascist than communist. The term communism is used to describe so many contradicting policies and it is very confusing.
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left vs Right politics and liberal vs conservative [closed]
Can we say left means liberal and right means conservative ?
In history we see lot of counterexamples.
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Is there any modern political theory or strong evidence that direct democracy would not work?
If one considers a society with a more direct relationship between what people want and the policies of the country, is there any reason to believe it would not work?
In the U.S., people vote for ...
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Democracy as a means for growth progress [duplicate]
Is there any correlation beten democracy and development/progress.
If yes is it by data(interpolating democratic countries vs Human development index etc.) Or using deductive reasoning (conclusion ...
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What actually stops someone from running for public office in the US after agreeing not to do so?
Rachel Maddow asks whether Trump should be offered a plea deal trading the threat of jail time for his agreeing to never hold public office again. Ron Liebman Barney Skolnik, and Russell “Baker, the ...
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Do more legislative seats make Gerrymandering harder?
In a system of single member districts, elected for an entire legislative body all at once, is it easier to gerrymander the map to favor one party over another in a two party system, with more ...
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To what extent is Marxism a liberal ideology?
It's been asserted in another answer here that:
Marxism is, of course, part of the spectrum of Liberal ideologies, though it is often maligned as being something 'other.'
Looking at the SEP page ...
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Why are radicals so intolerant of slight deviations in doctrine?
As a follow-on to this question, I ask the question in the Subject line.
It seems more visible in tiny 1950s-1970s Socialist and Marxist factions (satirized in the conflict between the People's Front ...
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Writings or public statements advising elected politicians on how to make hard choices
While not always seen in this light, members of congressional or parliamentary bodies are regularly faced with moral choices when deciding how to vote in situations where the answers to questions like ...
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Political system fairer than democracy? [closed]
Let's say a country has 1,400,000 citizens. Elections are held about, for example, joining the EU. 1,000,000 people decide to do A, while 300,000 people decide to B, and 100,000 decide to do C. In a ...
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What does social/public-choice theory have to say about plural v. unitary executive?
There are many state-level offices in the US that are elected by the people other than the legislature and the Governor, in the executive (Treasurer, Controller, Attorney General, Secretary, oil & ...
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How can one distinguish between "Ethnic Russians" and "mostly Russian-speaking Ethnic Ukrainians"?
According to a multi-million-views talk of John Mearsheimer (2015), the "ethno-linguistic map of Ukraine" looked like this.
There's no source given in the talk for the map and I've not seen ...
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What does the term "Equity" mean, in "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion"?
The use of the term Equity has been on the rise for years, especially with the emergence of the new political term of "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion", or DEI, being bandied about in the US....
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How do unpopular policies arise in democracies?
Very recent example: Macron bypassed parliament to enact French retirement bill amid protests against the bill.
There are several pedestrian explanations I can think of:
The decision makers believe ...
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Alternatives to money and power as social incentive mechanisms
Capitalism does a pretty good job of incentivizing people to work on what's economically profitable, e.g., finance, law, tech, and what gives them power over others, e.g., becoming CEOs. Now let's ...
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Would it be justified for a libertarian state to ban certain religious schools?
From a libertarian perspective, public education system is not desirable in a free society, roughly because public education is a monopoly (in this case, of the State), which is based on the ...
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What are the options for a government facing massive protests over seemingly unsustainable economical measures?
Context
France is currently facing nationwide strikes due to pension system reformation discussions. According to France24, there seems to be a debate over the opportunity of such a reform:
French ...
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Why should the state not provide for basic necessities?
What are the major arguments for why the state should not provide for the basic necessities of its people? I am thinking of things like water, food, and housing as "basic necessities".
I think some ...
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Do oil-rich, wealthy Gulf countries have any local nationalist movements?
Do oil-rich, wealthy Gulf countries have any nationalist movements that are specific to their own countries, such as Qatari or Emirati (UAE) nationalism? How strong are these nationalisms compared to ...
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The meaning of "right" in Italian Fascism
In laying out the foundation for fascism, Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini wrote two essays in the 1920s and 30s known as, "La Dottrina del Fascismo".
Gentile authored the first essay titled "...
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Why do working class people vote for the political right?
Some analysis of the 2017 General Election in the UK has been published in the Financial Times, which seems to indicate that people without a university degree, who were working class, and had poor ...
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