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Political sociology is politics studied sociologically. More specifically, it is politics as the practice of power, as this has typically been defined sociologically, that is, in terms of social relations. Most famously, Max Weber (1968) defined power as a probabilistic social relation between hypothetical actors A and B, as the chance of A realizing A’s will over the resistance of B, despite B’s resistance. In so defining power, Weber defines it as a social relation and, thus, in terms of a defining concept of sociology.

More generally, the social relational study of politics encompasses both aggregate dyadic relations, such as the impact of society on state, and more complex relational patterns involving relations among multiple political actors, such as the differential impacts of actors on each other via the consequences of their differential impacts on the state. It further involves not only interrelations of discrete actors but also consideration of such interrelations in the context of institutions and social structures themselves, conceptualized as patterns of social relations.

Sociological Definitions And Theories Of Politics

Prominent alternative sociological definitions of politics that have not been explicitly social relational tend to emphasize power as a capability and then highlight organizational or group capacities, or they tend to study actors as incumbents of political institutions. Psychological approaches and other centrally individualistic approaches to the empirical study of politics, such as some economic ones, tend to be social psychological; that is, they typically examine people in terms of their roles within particular social contexts (e.g., as voters in polyarchal electoral systems). Economic theories of politics likewise do not escape specification of action to particular institutional settings. However, these enter as rather broad conditions for choice.

Commonly, sociological theories of politics tend to reflect specific forms of social relations in particular societies, institutions, and organizations. They are often “societal” in the sense that they trace causes of states and the actions of state incumbents to forces in the societal contexts of states, for example, to Marxian classes or Weberian parties, groups or voters, and economic or cultural forces in the state’s environment. Sociological theories of politics also are often sociological in the sense that they have state or polity theories centered on states as substantially autonomous social institutions. This is true both for an older, classical perspective on institutions like that of Philip Selznik in 1949 that tended to view institutions as formal organizations (social relationally conceived) at the service of values. More recently, the new institutionalism perspective pioneered by Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell in 1991 conceptualizes institutions in terms of rules and cognitive schema. Often they are sociological in their concentration on the interplay between sociologically conceived attributes of states and societies, for example, state policy and societal inequality.

Sociological theories of politics are often institutional in the sense that they focus on the sociocultural and organizational characteristics of state social structures. State-centered institutional approaches have much in common with institutional approaches in political science, but they differ from institutionalists in political science in some respects. In regards to the so-called neoinstitutionalists in political science, sociological institutionalists differ dramatically in that they use little or no neoinstitutional theory from economics and public choice theory. Sociological new institutionalists tend to focus on state and political institutions with both less historical precision and more theoretical self-consciousness than historical institutionalists in political science.

Despite certain distinguishing characteristics, differences should still not be drawn too sharply. First, although increasing use of rational choice theoretical models in political science distances political science work on institutions from sociological work on institutions, persistent political science reference to sociological theories of institutions narrows the gap. Second, overlapping academic subfields about welfare states and political economy sustain much cross-fertilization and communality across the sociological and political science disciplines. For all the centrality of societal and state theoretical touchstones in political sociological theory, emphasis on these reference points obscures a distinctive sociological emphasis on cultural—and, to a lesser extent, historical—approaches. To their disadvantage, students of politics in other disciplines (e.g., political science, philosophy) would miss this emphasis.

Origins And Trends

Modern U.S. political sociology traces to three lines of work, and reactions to them, that arose before the Vietnam War (1959–1975). The tradition of voting behavior studies that stressed voter social networks and contexts constitutes one of these lines. This line of work waned during the 1960s due to a marginalization of political sociological interest in voting issues during the Vietnam War era. However, it has been continuously sustained, most recently by the collaborative efforts of Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza.

The class-centered pluralism of the pre-Vietnam works of Seymour Martin Lipset constitutes a second line. This line of work waned because reactions in the 1970s and 1980s against the reformist stress in its treatment of class moderation, as well as because of the manifest conservatism of Lipset’s Parsons-inspired work on value traditions. However, a focus on reformist activities of pluralistic class actors has returned in the form of power resource theory.

A pre-Vietnam dialogue between elitist and pluralist interpreters of urban (“community”) and national political power, and the neo-Marxist reaction to it, composes a third line of work. The elite side of this debate is virtually Marxian in its skepticism about the representativeness of American democracy and in its considerable stress on economic elites. Floyd Hunter and C. Wright Mills’s studies of urban and national Atlanta city politics and national elites are seminal works in this line, and responses to these by Robert Dahl and such notable collaborators as Nelson Polsby also proved influential. The debate first evolved as a refutation of claims for the oligarchical power of the few with arguments for the relevance, in democratic contexts, of more dispersed and plural rule. Neopluralists next articulated pluralist-elitist syntheses of elite and pluralist elements, followed by neo-Marxist inspired incorporations of structuralist arguments. Several more distinctive sociological thrusts emerged in the late 1960s, and these innovations are often associated with the intellectual unsettling of sociology following the full onset of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

First, with the radicalization of sociologists accompanying the social movements of the Vietnam War era, sociological elite and neopluralist work was repudiated and replaced by new systematically Marxian structuralist, or class-analytical, approaches to the analysis of politics. Structuralist variants of the Marxian turn emphasized the power of structural constraints to shape action, while other, class-analytical approaches unequivocally accommodated the causal powers of agency as well as structure. The innovative work of G. William Domhoff in 1967 revitalized elite-theoretical cases for economic oligarchy in new class-analytical terms, while James Petras and Maurice Zeitlin’s Latin America: Reform or Revolution (1968) and Barrington Moore Jr.’s The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) advanced theories of class conflict as well as hegemony, and revolution as well as domination. These works also helped usher in the eventually ascendant historical-comparative method in political sociology. A two-pronged Marxian development of political sociology emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, one prong stressing structure and the other action (and conflict).This remains influential today.

A turn to Marxist structuralism helped bring students of politics important conceptions of systemic and structural power. From French structuralists, it imported a conception of power as an effect of structure that may pressure for outcomes favorable to a particular class or group beneficiary, unaided by conscious striving after the outcome by the beneficiary. As Axel Van den Berg and Thomas Janoski detail, the conception is rooted in the Marxist structuralism of Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas, which tends to treat human agency as epiphenomenal.

Fred Block offered extensions of Marxist structuralism, reconciling policy-maker agency, if not ruling-class agency, with structural effect. Block treats policy-maker decision making as a social mechanism linking structural constraint cause to policy effect. For example, no political action (e.g., lobbying) by “capital” is needed for policy-making politicians to lower an interest or tax rate to stimulate economic activity because the public approval of politicians, as well as the prosperity of capitalists, depends on economic performance. Block’s reading appeared at the same time as Charles Edward Lindblom’s parallel formulation of the “privileged position of business.”

With its assimilation into rational choice formulations, the structural conception of power becomes more strategic and less manifestly sociological. Still, underlying conceptions of class institutions that link economic distributions and processes to political cost and benefits are substantially sociological. While this is true, many social-structural and institutional factors may be treated by nonsociologists as ad hoc additions to, rather than core elements of, their theories. Not only did the structural conceptions of power at issue come to influence political science, but underlying class and institutional conceptions also entered into political science via such avenues as sociologist Wolfgang Streeck’s early investigations with Phillip C. Schmitter into neocorporatist institutions and Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s 1991 delineation of his three worlds approach to study the welfare state. A turn to class analysis, stressing agency as well as structure, and familiar collective political agencies (e.g., unions, parties) as well as abstract theoretical formulations, shifted emphasis from structures that constrain the action of nondominant classes (e.g. private control of investment) to organizational agencies that empower such classes (e.g., labor parties). Walter Korpi’s groundbreaking work on power resource theory became widely employed and variously elaborated. Interestingly, on the terrain of twentieth-century European reformist politics, power resource transformation of neo-Marxist thinking on class converges with pluralist thinking on interest politics.

During the Vietnam War era, a second distinctive sociological thrust emerged. Social movement theory gradually emerged from the recent, repudiated precedent of collective behavior theory, with its emphasis on irrational behavior. This new move was oriented not toward the analysis of institutional politics like voting legislation, but instead toward the analysis of relatively uninstitutionalized modes of politics, such as protest and self-help. However, this shift did not preclude attention to such institutional contexts as religious institutions or such institutional consequences as organizational reform and new public policies.

Powerful new tradition of social movement studies emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the work of Charles Tilly, John McCarthy, Meyer Zald, Doug McAdam, and others. This work centered on resources and tactics of politically oriented social movement. In particular, resource mobilization theory began to differentiate a distinct social movement theory from collective behavior theory. This distinction emphasized specific goals opposed to diffuse grievances; rational action rather than irrational behaviors (e.g., panics, outbursts, crazes); organizations instead of unstructured masses; specialized instead of amateur organizational personnel; and reasoned tactics instead of spontaneous disruption. Increasingly, social movement theory attends to the study of outcomes, especially political ones.

Social movement theory remains large despite revitalizations of interest group theory by theorists of interest intermediation, policy networks, and interest groups as crystallized social movements. Theoretical cohesion around the organizational and mobilizational core of resource mobilization theory was followed, first, by theoretical elaborations concerning tactics, strategies, and political opportunities, and subsequently by ones concerning culture (e.g., frames, identities).The sociological commitment to social movements as an area of study has deepened into the substantively focused field of analytical history on topics like the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and the women’s movement, and it now ventures into new substantive domains such as terrorism. With works by political scientists and historians, as well as sociologists, the new social movement theory evolved by the 1980s into an interdisciplinary specialty. Indeed, social movement theories’ chronicles of its own development and branches, such as that by McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly in 2001, are now often multidisciplinary.

A turn to historical political sociology—historical-comparative sociology for the most part—provided a third new direction. The historical turn in sociology emerged at the same time as the Marxian one. The “historical” thrives in sociology not merely as an arena for studies of the past, but also as a central laboratory for small-n qualitative studies. It is also an approach that stresses the importance of antecedent events and their sequences of occurrence to the explanation of many outcomes, and it is an orientation that claims a historical, timedependent nature for the social world. Historical comparativists argue for the historical constitution of the social world, the centrality of historical conditions, and the valid identification of theoretical domains. In fact, one of the great historically oriented works of post–World War II (1939–1945) sociology, Michael Mann’s multivolume The Sources of Social Power series, offers a political sociology of world history that, among much else, sequentially arranges key theoretical domains for sociological theory. Historical comparativists thus stress the importance of national historical processes within nations to the comparison of nations.

In some cases, historical sociology is simply conventional historical interpretation of other times completed with a particular attentiveness to the sociological theory, as when Michael Mann stresses intensive and extensive models of imperial power in his treatment of the fall of the Roman Empire. In other cases, it stresses a combination of historical subject matter with the methodologies of systematic comparison, for example in Torben Iversen and David Soskice’s 2009 analysis of distribution and redistribution in modern capitalism. In still others, it has morphed philosophically as well as methodologically into a self-consciously realist, or even interpretive, social science at odds with positivist social science.

In the interpretive—or interpretivist—case, covering law explanations must be rejected by the social scientists because meanings are both integral to human action and too psychologically, culturally, and historically heterogeneous and volatile for explanatory patterns that are stable over time. This complicates the theoretical task for already highly contingent open systems, leaving scholars with more prospect to come up with potent causal mechanisms that might assemble into compelling post hoc explanations of particular events. These prospects are higher than for those that capture determinist explanatory formulas for general classes of social events. Although this antipathy to generalization may seem antithetical to philosophical and methodological canons of political science, it may resemble the skepticism of many survey researchers—perhaps in the area of voting behavior—to claims for external validity much beyond the spatial and historical perimeters of the data at hand.

The interpretivist variant of the historical turn overlaps with a fourth major political sociological innovation—the cultural turn. This development has numerous sociological precedents: microinteractionist theories ranging from symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology in the United States (e.g., Herbert Blumer, Howard Garfinkel, Anselm Strauss, Erving Goffman) to hermeneutics, phenomenology, and historicism in Europe (e.g., Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Paul Ricouer, Hans-Georg Gadamer).The epistemological basis for this new interpretivism lies in the meaning created in small contexts, with their strands dissipating as it moves beyond the original context to other situations.

Although employing cultural variables in a positivist mode, George Steinmetz documents a preponderance of interpretivist approaches to the cultural analysis of politics in the new political sociology of culture. Where history and culture are concerned, sociological precedents of great potential interest to political scientists abound. On the historical side, Michael Mann’s work on world history comes most to mind, but the works of Theda Skocpol and Edwin Amenta and collaborators on American political development help illustrate the variety offered by historical-comparative sociologists. As Julia Adams, Lis Clemens, and Ann Orloff extensively catalogue, the cultural facet of comparative and historical sociology ranges across organizational, national, and transnational institutions in a generally constructionist and sometimes interpretivist mode.

New Cross-Fertilization

Questions now arise regarding whether political sociology’s turn toward social movements, class-analytical, cultural, and historical-comparative approaches to the study of politics will continue to influence political science. In the area of class analysis, power resource theory is at least one strong continued response from within the class-analytical tradition. For example, Korpi’s 2006 take on class politics impacts Iversen and Soskice’s 2009 analysis of distribution and redistribution in late twentieth-century advanced capitalism. In the area of social movements, political science is beginning to figure prominently, as the centrality of political scientist Sid Tarrow documents.

Some influences from historical-comparative approaches, especially in the subfields of Amer ican political development and comparative politics, are also apparent. In addition, cultural approaches prevail as strong interdisciplinary work along traditional methodological lines. Despite some culturally framed theory and research, such as the studies of international relations associated with the initiative of Peter Katzenstein in 1996, more interpretive, cultural approaches imported from sociology into political science proceed slowly.

Bibliography:

Adams, Julia, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff. Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005
McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. Dynamics of Contention. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
DiMaggio, Paul J., and Walter W. Powell. The New Institutionalism in Institutional Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Domhoff, G.William. Who Rules America? Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. London: Polity Press, 1991.
Hicks, Alexander, and Frank Lechner.“Neo-pluralism and Neo-functionalism in Political Sociology,” in Handbook of Political Sociology, edited by Thomas Janoski, Robert Alford, Alexander Hicks, and Mildred Schwartz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Inglehart, Ronald R. Culture and Social Change: Findings from the Values Surveys. Leiden,The Netherlands: Brill Academic, 2003.
Iversen,Torben, and David Soskice. “Distribution and Redistribution: The Shadow of the Nineteenth Century.” World Politics 61 (2009): 438–486.
Katzenstein, Peter J. The Culture of National Security. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Korpi,Walter. “Power Resources and Employer-centered Approaches in Explanations of Welfare States and Varieties of Capitalism: Protagonists, Consenters, and Antagonists.” World Politics 58 (2006): 167–206.
Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power.Vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Manza, Jeffrey, Clem Brooks, and Michael Sauder. “Money, Participation and Votes: Social Cleavages and Electoral Politics.” In Handbook of Political Sociology, edited by Thomas Janoski, Robert Alford, Alexander Hicks, and Mildred Schwartz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Moore, Barrington, Jr. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.
Petras, James F., and Maurice Zeitlin. Latin America: Reform or Revolution? Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1968.
Selznick, Philip. TVA and the Grass Roots. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949.
Steinmetz, George. State/Culture: State-formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Streeck,Wolfgang, and Lane Kenworthy, “Theories and Practices of New-corporatism.” In Handbook of Political Sociology, edited by Thomas Janoski, Robert Alford, Alexander Hicks, and Mildred Schwartz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Van den Berg, Axel, and Thomas Janoski. “Conflict Theories in Political Sociology.” In Handbook of Political Sociology, edited by Thomas Janoski, Robert Alford, Alexander Hicks, and Mildred Schwartz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968.
Weir, Margaret, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds. The Politics of Social Policy in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

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