Chapter 1: Introduction to Political Science and State

On 9 July 2011, a crowd gathered in Juba, a town on the White Nile in north-east Africa, to watch a flag go up a pole for the first time.

For more than half a century, the people of southern Sudan had been governed from Khartoum, roughly a thousand kilometres to the north. Two long civil wars had been fought over that arrangement. A peace agreement signed in 2005 promised something unusual: after six years, the south would be allowed to vote on whether to remain part of Sudan at all.

The vote was held in January 2011. Almost ninety-nine per cent of those who voted chose separation.

But a vote is not, by itself, a country. Over the following months the practical questions had to be settled. Where exactly would the boundary run? Who would collect taxes, run the courts, and command the army? Would other governments deal with the new authority as an equal?

On 9 July the Republic of South Sudan declared its independence, and Salva Kiir Mayardit was sworn in as its president. Five days later, on 14 July 2011, a new nameplate was set out in the United Nations General Assembly. South Sudan had become the 193rd member of the UN.

The people had existed all along. Their sense of shared identity had existed all along. What was new that week was something else — a territory with a boundary, a government able to command obedience inside it, and an authority that no outside power could lawfully overrule.

Map

Map 1.1 Caption: Sudan and South Sudan after July 2011, when a single state became two. Brief: Political map of north-east Africa showing Sudan and South Sudan as two separate states after July 2011, with the boundary between them marked and Khartoum and Juba labelled as the two capitals. Show and label the neighbouring states (Egypt, Libya, Chad, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea) and the Red Sea. Include a small inset locating the area within the African continent. Do not shade any area as disputed and do not mark internal provinces. All boundaries to be drawn as officially recognised by the Government of India.

Curiosity Corner

Q1. What exactly turns a group of people living together into a state, and not merely a community? Q2. Why is sovereignty called the element without which the other three cannot hold? Q3. If a nation and a state mean the same thing, why does Political Science need two separate words? Q4. Is Political Science the study of what governments ought to do, or of what they actually do? Q5. Politicians do politics. What, then, do political scientists do? This chapter will answer all five. Keep them beside you as you read, and check each one off when you meet its answer.

1.1 The Meaning Of Political Science

Every group of people living together has to settle a few unavoidable questions. Who decides? Who must obey? What happens when someone refuses? On what grounds may force be used against a person?

Politics is the activity through which people living together settle those questions — how the rules are made, who gets to make them, and how they are enforced. Political Science is the organised study of that activity, and of the institutions, ideas and conflicts that surround it.

The word itself is old. It comes from the Greek polis, meaning a self-governing city-state, such as Athens or Sparta. A polis was small enough for its citizens to gather in one place and argue about its laws.

So the subject is at least twenty-five centuries old. But what political scientists think they are doing has changed a great deal. There are two broad answers, usually called the classical view and the modern view.

1.1.1 The Classical Meaning

The classical meaning of Political Science comes from ancient Greek thought, above all from Plato and Aristotle. On this view, the discipline asks one central question: what is the best political order, and why?

That makes it a normative study. A normative enquiry is concerned with what ought to be — with standards, values and justification — rather than only with what happens to exist.

Classical Political Science therefore treated justice, virtue and civic duty as the core of the subject. The state was not regarded as a mere administrative arrangement. It was seen as the highest form of human association, within which people could live well rather than merely survive.

Plato argued this case in the Republic. He described an ideal state governed by philosopher-kings — rulers selected and trained for wisdom rather than chosen by popularity or birth.

Aristotle took a more observational route in the Politics. He collected the constitutions of Greek city-states, compared them, and classified them by who rules and in whose interest they rule.

Side Note

Who Was Aristotle? Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher, born in Stagira in northern Greece. He studied for two decades under Plato in Athens, later founded his own school there, and for a time tutored the young Alexander of Macedon. He wrote on logic, biology, ethics, poetry and politics. In the Politics he argued that a human being is by nature a political animal — a creature who can only reach a full life inside a political community. Like most thinkers of his time, he accepted his own society’s exclusions: women, resident foreigners and slaves were not counted as citizens of the polis he described.

The Later State-Centred Definitions

This state-centred understanding lasted a very long time. Writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still defined the subject almost entirely by the state and its government.

The American political scientist J. W. Garner put the older position in a much-quoted phrase — that political science ‘begins and ends with the state’. The French writer Paul Janet defined it as the branch of social science dealing with the foundations of the state and the principles of government. The English historian Sir John Seeley made the same point by analogy: as economics deals with wealth and geometry with space, political science deals with government.

Notice what such definitions leave out. Voters, parties, pressure groups, newspapers, protest movements and international organisations are all absent, because none of them is the state.

1.1.2 The Modern Meaning

In the early twentieth century a different way of looking at the subject developed. It is known as the behavioural approach, and its central move was to treat politics as an activity and a process rather than as a set of institutions.

The behavioural approach is empirical. An empirical study asks what actually happens, and answers with evidence that others can check — surveys, election data, statistical analysis, interviews and case studies.

Once you ask what actually happens, the boundary of the subject widens. Power is exercised in many places, and not only through the machinery of the state.

Harold Lasswell made this the heart of his definition. He treated politics as the study of influence and of the influential, and framed the subject in his 1936 book Politics: Who Gets What, When, How.

David Easton offered a formulation that became standard: politics is ‘the authoritative allocation of values’ for a society. In plainer words, politics is how a society decides which claims will be honoured, using decisions that are binding on everyone.

G. E. G. Catlin described Political Science as the study of the act of human and social control. Andrew Heywood, writing much later, defined politics as the activity through which people make, preserve and amend the general rules under which they live.

Two things follow from these definitions. First, the study now includes authority — the recognised right to give a decision that others accept as binding — wherever it is found, and not only in Parliament or the courts.

Second, non-state actors enter the subject properly. Interest groups, trade unions, social movements, the media and international bodies all shape what governments do, and modern Political Science studies them directly.

The field also became openly interdisciplinary. It borrows survey methods from sociology, models of choice from economics, ideas about attitudes from psychology, and context from history.

What The Empirical Turn Could Not Settle

The empirical turn was a genuine gain in rigour, but it did not dispose of the older questions. Data can tell you how many people voted; it cannot tell you whether the result was just.

This objection was pressed hard in the late 1960s, when critics argued that the discipline had become technically sophisticated and publicly irrelevant. David Easton, who had helped lead the behavioural movement, was among those who called for the subject to reconnect with urgent public problems.

Test the Argument

Can The Study Of Politics Be Value-Free? Claim: Political Science should describe what is, not prescribe what ought to be. Reasons: Values differ between people, and description can be tested against evidence while prescription cannot. Strongest objection: Choosing what to count — turnout, but not hunger — is already a judgement about importance. What it turns on: Whether evidence can be selected and reported without any prior judgement of value.

1.1.3 The Classical And Modern Views Compared

The two views are best held apart by asking four questions of each: what does it want to know, how does it find out, what does it look at, and what does it treat as the centre of the subject.

The classical view wants to know what the best political order would be. It finds out by reasoning about justice, virtue and the proper ends of human life. It looks mainly at the state and its organs. Its centre is the ideal.

The modern view wants to know how political life actually works. It finds out by collecting and testing evidence. It looks at behaviour, opinion, parties and movements as well as institutions. Its centre is observable reality.

Figure 1.1-1 sets the shift out in three steps.

Diagram

Fig. 1.1-1 Caption: How the discipline’s self-understanding shifted from the classical to the modern view. Brief: A three-band horizontal figure. Each band is one axis of comparison, with the classical position on the left, a rightward arrow in the middle, and the modern position on the right. Band 1, labelled ‘The question’: ‘What ought the state to be?’ → ‘How does political life actually work?’. Band 2, labelled ‘The method’: ‘Reasoning about justice and virtue’ → ‘Evidence, comparison and measurement’. Band 3, labelled ‘The subject matter’: ‘The state and its organs’ → ‘The state, plus behaviour, parties, movements and global actors’. Keep the arrow in one colour throughout to show it is a single shift, not three separate ones.

It would be a mistake to treat this as a story of error replaced by truth. The classical thinkers were not failing at empirical work; they were doing something else, and doing it deliberately.

It would be an equal mistake to treat the modern view as complete. Every constitution written today rests on judgements about liberty, equality and justice — judgements the classical tradition was built to examine.

The honest summary is that the subject now carries both. Political Science today describes political life as it is, and also asks whether it can be defended.

Curiosity Corner

Q4. Is Political Science the study of what governments ought to do, or of what they actually do?

A. Historically it was the first; since the behavioural turn it is mainly the second. A serious study needs both — evidence about how power is used, and standards by which to judge that use.

1.2 The Scope Of Contemporary Political Science

Once the subject widened beyond the state alone, no single scholar could cover all of it. So the discipline divided its work, as most large subjects do.

These divisions are called subfields. Each one takes a different slice of political life and develops its own questions, methods and vocabulary.

Contemporary Political Science is usually described through five such subfields: Political Theory, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Public Administration and Political Economy. Figure 1.2-1 shows them as branches of one trunk.

Diagram

Fig. 1.2-1 Caption: The five subfields of contemporary Political Science and the question each one asks. Brief: A single trunk labelled ‘Political Science’ with five branches drawn upward, left to right in this fixed order: Political Theory, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Public Administration, Political Economy. Beside each branch print its guiding question in smaller type — Political Theory: ‘What ought political power to be used for?’; Comparative Politics: ‘Why do political systems differ?’; International Relations: ‘How do states and global actors deal with one another?’; Public Administration: ‘How are decisions actually carried out?’; Political Economy: ‘How do political power and economic life shape each other?’. Draw the branches touching one another where they meet the trunk, to show overlap rather than separation.

Debate It

Where Does Politics End? One view: politics is what governments do, so the discipline should study the state and its institutions. Another view: power is exercised in markets, workplaces and homes, so the study must follow power wherever it goes. What would you need to know to decide?

1.2.1 Political Theory

Political Theory is the study of political ideas and of the arguments made for and against them. It asks what political power is for, what makes it rightful, and what limits it should accept.

Its subject matter is concepts rather than events — justice, liberty, equality, rights, obligation and legitimacy. Legitimacy is the quality that makes power feel rightful, so that people obey a decision because they accept the authority behind it, not only because they fear the consequences of refusing.

A typical question of Political Theory is this: why should a citizen obey a law that she voted against? Notice that no amount of survey data answers it. The question asks for a justification, and a justification has to be argued.

1.2.2 Comparative Politics

Comparative Politics studies political systems, institutions and behaviour across different countries, in order to explain why they differ and what follows from those differences.

The method is in the name. A single case tells you what happened; two or more cases, carefully chosen, let you ask why one country turned out differently from another.

A typical question is why India has many parties competing for power while the United States has effectively two. Comparative Politics looks for the answer in things like electoral rules, social divisions and constitutional design.

1.2.3 International Relations

International Relations studies the dealings between independent states, and between states and the other actors that operate across borders — international organisations, alliances, corporations and movements.

An independent state is one that is not under the legal control of any other. That is what makes its relations with other states a distinct problem: there is no world government standing above them to enforce a bargain.

A typical question is why states keep treaties they could break without punishment. War and peace, diplomacy, trade rules, climate agreements and global health all fall inside this subfield.

1.2.4 Public Administration

Public Administration studies how public policy is actually carried out — the departments, agencies and officials through which a government’s decisions reach people.

Its central object is the bureaucracy: the permanent body of appointed officials who staff the offices of the state and remain in place when governments change.

A decision announced in Parliament still has to be executed by someone. A typical question is why two districts, applying the same scheme with the same funds, deliver very different results.

1.2.5 Political Economy

Political Economy studies the relationship between political power and economic life — how political decisions shape the economy, and how economic interests shape politics in return.

It grew out of the work of classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx, each of whom treated wealth and power as parts of a single problem rather than two separate ones.

A typical question is who really bears the cost of a tax on fuel. The tax is a political decision; its effects fall unevenly across incomes; and those effects then change how people vote.

Try Yourself

Take the front page of one day’s newspaper. List the political stories on it, and mark against each which of the five subfields would study it. Note down any story that clearly belongs to more than one.

1.3 The Difference Between Politics And Political Science

In everyday speech the two words are used almost interchangeably. A student says she is ‘studying politics’; a newspaper column on Political Science is filed under the politics page. In the discipline itself, the two are kept apart.

The distinction is easy to state. Politics is something people do. Political Science is something people study.

Two Halves Of One Subject

The English jurist Sir Frederick Pollock drew a formal version of this division in the late nineteenth century. He separated theoretical politics, which reasons about the state, sovereignty, law and government, from applied politics, which deals with the actual conduct of public affairs.

That division reflected the traditional understanding of the subject. On the classical view, politics was an activity — the practice of governing, contesting and deciding. Political Science was a separate intellectual pursuit, grounded in normative philosophy, standing outside the contest and judging it.

The modern view does not hold the two so far apart. Once Political Science defined itself as the empirical study of politics, the activity became its evidence and not merely its occasion.

On this view the relationship is one of dependence rather than distance. Politics supplies the raw material — elections, coalitions, protests, budgets, treaties. Political Science supplies the concepts by which that material is sorted and explained.

Where They Still Differ

They remain different in what they are for. A political worker is trying to win; a political scientist is trying to understand, and may study a campaign that succeeded and one that failed with equal interest.

They differ in method. Politics proceeds by negotiation, persuasion and bargaining. Political Science proceeds by observation, comparison and argument that others are invited to test.

They differ in what they produce. Politics produces decisions with binding force — a law, a budget, a policy. Political Science produces explanations, which bind nobody but can be shown to be wrong.

Table 1.1 collects these differences.

Table

That last point in the table’s closing line is worth pausing on. A study showing that a scheme reached only half its intended beneficiaries is a piece of research; it is also, the moment it is published, an argument the opposition can use.

This is why the distinction is about roles rather than about people. A researcher who begins selecting evidence to help one side has stopped doing Political Science, whatever her job title says.

Perspective

Whose Question Is It? The politician asks: how do I win this seat? The political scientist asks: why did this seat change hands? Both agree: neither question can be answered without knowing what the voters actually did.

Curiosity Corner

Q5. Politicians do politics. What, then, do political scientists do?

A. They study it — describing how power is won and used, explaining why systems differ, and testing whether the justifications offered for political arrangements actually hold.

1.4 The Meaning Of The State

Few words in this subject are used as loosely as ‘state’. Before it can do any work, three everyday uses have to be cleared out of the way.

The first is the federal use. Rajasthan, Kerala and Assam are called states, but not in the sense Political Science means. They are units inside one larger political entity, and none of them can make treaties, keep an army or refuse the authority of the Constitution.

The second is the confusion of the state with the government. The government is the machinery through which the state acts; it is the crew, not the ship.

The third is the confusion of the state with society. Society is the whole web of human association — families, firms, clubs, unions, religious bodies, neighbourhoods. The state is one institution within that web, distinguished by the kind of authority it holds.

What The State Is

The state is a community of people, permanently occupying a definite territory, organised under a government of its own, and free from the legal control of any outside authority.

Aristotle offered an early version of this idea. He described the state as a union of families and villages, existing so that its members could live a complete and self-sufficient life, not merely stay alive.

The twentieth-century writer J. W. Garner gave the definition that most textbooks still follow. A state, on his account, is a fairly numerous body of people, permanently settled on a definite territory, effectively independent of external control, and possessing an organised government which the great body of inhabitants habitually obey.

Both definitions contain the same four things: people, land, a government, and independence. Those four are examined one by one in the next section.

What Makes The State Different From Other Associations

You belong to many associations. What marks the state out from all of them is not its size but three features of its authority.

Its membership is not voluntary in the way a club’s is. A person born within a state’s territory falls under its laws without having agreed to anything.

Its decisions bind everyone inside the territory, including those who opposed them. A school or a company can make rules for its members; only the state can make rules for all residents of an area.

And it alone may lawfully use force to enforce those rules. Private violence is forbidden; the police, the armed forces and the courts act under legal authority, and no rival enforcement system is permitted to operate beside them.

Test the Argument

Is The State Simply The Strongest Power In A Territory? Claim: whoever can enforce obedience over a territory is the state. Reasons: every state backs its orders with force, and permits no rival force beside it. Strongest objection: an armed group can enforce obedience without being accepted as rightful, and is called an occupier, not a state. What it turns on: whether recognised authority adds anything to superior force.

Figure 1.4-1 places the three terms in relation to one another.

Diagram

Fig. 1.4-1 Caption: Society is wider than the state, and the state is wider than the government. Brief: Three concentric circles. The outermost is labelled ‘Society’ with small labels around its rim — families, firms, clubs, trade unions, religious bodies, neighbourhood associations. The middle circle is labelled ‘State’ with the four elements named inside its band — population, territory, government, sovereignty. The innermost circle is labelled ‘Government’ with three segments — legislature, executive, judiciary. Print one line beneath the figure: ‘Governments change; the state continues; society is wider than both.’

The State Is Not Fixed For All Time

It is tempting to treat the state as a permanent natural fact. It is better understood as a social institution that has taken very different forms as societies changed.

The Greek polis was a city; the empires that followed were sprawling and loosely governed; the state we now take for granted — with a mapped boundary, a single legal system and a claim to independence — became the normal form only over the last few centuries. What counts as a state today is the product of that history, not of nature.

1.5 The Elements Of The State

Four things must be present together before a political community counts as a state: population, territory, government and sovereignty.

The word ‘elements’ is exact. These are not desirable features that a good state ought to have. Remove any one of them and what remains is something other than a state.

1.5.1 Population

Population is the body of people who live permanently within the state’s territory. A state is made of persons, not of land or of offices.

No minimum or maximum number is required. India and China each hold more than a billion people; several members of the United Nations, such as Tuvalu and San Marino, have fewer than a hundred thousand. Both ends of that range are equally states.

The population is not uniform in legal standing. It contains citizens and foreign nationals, and the difference between them is political rather than social.

Citizenship is full legal membership of a state, carrying the complete set of political rights that the state confers. In India a citizen may vote, contest an election and hold public office; registration on the electoral roll follows on turning eighteen.

A foreign national living lawfully in India is protected by the law, may own certain property and may go to court. She may not vote or stand for Parliament, because those rights belong to membership and not merely to residence.

Populations also differ in composition. Some states are largely homogeneous in language and religion; others, India among them, contain many languages, religions and communities within one political framework.

Neither arrangement is superior. What follows from diversity is a design problem: a plural society has to build institutions that give different communities a secure share in decisions, and much of the rest of this subject is about how that is attempted.

1.5.2 Territory

Territory is the defined area of the earth’s surface over which the state exercises authority. A wandering community, however well organised, is not a state until it settles.

Territory is three-dimensional. It includes the land, the rivers and lakes within it, the airspace above it, and — for a coastal state — the belt of sea adjoining the coast, extending under international law up to twelve nautical miles from the shore.

What territory supplies is jurisdiction: the authority to apply and enforce law over a defined area and the people in it. Which law governs a contract, a crime or a marriage depends in the first place on where it happened.

Size, again, decides nothing. A large territory brings resources and depth; a small one may be easier to govern; a landlocked state depends on its neighbours for access to the sea. These are advantages and disadvantages, not tests of statehood.

1.5.3 Government

A state cannot speak, sign or arrest. Government is the agency through which it does all three — the set of institutions that formulate the state’s will, express it as law, and carry it into effect.

The state is the permanent, abstract entity; the government is its working machinery. This is why the same state can be a monarchy in one century and a republic in the next without becoming a different state.

Governments are ordinarily organised into three organs. The legislature makes the law. The executive enforces it and administers the country from day to day. The judiciary interprets it and settles disputes about what it means.

Governments also take different forms — democracy, monarchy, oligarchy and autocracy — and may be organised on unitary or federal lines. Those forms are examined closely later in this course; here it is enough that the form of government may change while the state stays the same.

That last point has a hard practical edge. When a government is voted out, the treaties it signed remain binding, the debts it incurred remain payable, and the laws it passed remain in force until repealed. The obligations belong to the state, not to the ministers who took them on.

In a democracy the government is also answerable. It must face elections at fixed intervals, defend its decisions before the legislature, and accept the rulings of courts it does not control.

Flowchart FC 1.1 follows a single decision through the three organs, so that ‘government’ becomes something more concrete than a word.

Flowchart

FC 1.1 — How A Decision Of The State Reaches A Citizen Caption: The three organs act in sequence, and a citizen may meet the state at any stage of the chain. Nodes: Legislature enacts a law → Executive frames the detailed rules under it → A department applies those rules to an individual case → The citizen is either granted what was applied for, or refused → If granted, the matter ends → If refused, the citizen may appeal to a higher authority within the administration → If the refusal stands, the citizen may approach a court → Judiciary interprets the law and the rules → Either the refusal is upheld, or it is set aside and the department must decide the case again

1.5.4 Sovereignty

Sovereignty is the supreme authority of the state — its power to make and enforce law within its territory without being subject to any higher authority.

The word comes from a root meaning ‘above’. Everything in the definition follows from that image of a power with nothing standing over it.

Sovereignty has two faces. Internally, the state is supreme over every person and every association inside its territory: no company, religious body, trade union or private group may set aside its law.

Externally, the state is independent of foreign control. It decides its own foreign policy, signs treaties as an equal, and answers to no other state for what it does at home.

Why This Element Is Decisive

Population, territory and a governing structure are not unique to states. A large corporation has employees, land and a management; so does a university.

What none of them has is the right to make binding law for everyone in an area and to enforce it, if necessary, by force. Sovereignty is what converts the other three elements from a description of any large organisation into a description of a state.

The clearest historical demonstration is colonial rule. A colony had a population, a mapped territory and an administration — and was not a state, because the authority to decide lay elsewhere.

Cause and Effect

When Sovereignty Is Withheld A territory is governed from outside → its laws are made by a body its people do not elect → residents may petition but cannot repeal → grievances accumulate with no final remedy at home → the demand shifts from better administration to independence itself.

Curiosity Corner

Q2. Why is sovereignty called the element without which the other three cannot hold?

A. Because the other three are shared with ordinary organisations. Only sovereignty gives the state supreme law-making authority at home and independence abroad, and it is that authority which holds the other three together.

Sovereignty In Practice

In theory sovereignty is absolute. In practice every modern state accepts limits on how it may be used, and these limits are worth naming precisely because they are so often mistaken for a loss of sovereignty.

The first limit is constitutional. In India the government’s powers are those the Constitution grants, and a law that exceeds them can be struck down by the courts.

The second is democratic. In a democracy sovereignty is said to rest with the people, who lend authority to a government for a fixed term and may withdraw it at the next election.

The third is international. A state that joins the United Nations, signs a trade agreement or ratifies a climate treaty accepts obligations that restrict what it may afterwards do.

Whether the third kind is really a limit is disputed, and the argument is worth having.

Debate It

Does Signing A Treaty Reduce Sovereignty? One view: a treaty binds a state only because it chose to sign, so signing is an exercise of sovereignty rather than a loss of it. Another view: the obligation outlasts the government that accepted it, and later governments are bound by a choice they never made. What would you need to know to decide?

Curiosity Corner

Q1. What exactly turns a group of people living together into a state, and not merely a community?

A. Four things present together: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government to act for them, and sovereignty. A community may have the first three; only a state has the fourth.

1.6 The Difference Between State And Nation

In ordinary speech ‘state’, ‘nation’ and ‘country’ are used as though they meant the same thing. The United Nations is an organisation of states; a national anthem belongs to a nation; and nobody feels the difference.

The difference matters, because the two words answer different questions. ‘State’ answers a question about authority. ‘Nation’ answers a question about identity.

1.6.1 What A Nation Is

A nation is a body of people who believe themselves to be one people, on the strength of things they share — language, culture, religion, ethnicity, traditions, and above all a common history — and who wish, on that basis, to govern themselves.

The important word in that definition is ‘believe’. Shared characteristics by themselves do not make a nation, and the absence of any one of them does not prevent one.

Several countries share the English language without forming a single nation. India contains many languages, religions and communities and is nonetheless one nation. What does the work is not the checklist but the sense of belonging together.

Much of that sense comes from a shared historical narrative — the collective memory of events, struggles, achievements and losses that a people treat as their own. A nation is, among other things, an agreement about which past is ours.

Closely attached to the idea of a nation is nationalism: the belief that the nation should be the unit of political authority, together with the movement that asserts a nation’s identity, autonomy and right to self-government.

Nationalism takes more than one form. Civic nationalism grounds membership in shared political values and institutions, so that anyone who accepts them belongs. Ethnic nationalism grounds it in common ancestry and inherited culture, which a person cannot choose to acquire.

The distinction has consequences. The two versions answer differently when asked who, in a diverse society, counts as fully one of us.

1.6.2 State And Nation Compared

The two ideas differ first in what binds people together. The bond of a state is legal: everyone within its territory falls under its authority, whether or not they feel any attachment to it. The bond of a nation is felt: it exists in the minds of its members.

They differ in their relation to land. A state must have a defined territory, because authority has to apply somewhere. A nation may exist without one, scattered across several states, held together by memory rather than by boundaries.

They differ in sovereignty, and this is the sharpest difference. A state has supreme authority by definition. A nation has none until it forms a state, or persuades one to give it self-government.

They differ, finally, in recognition. A state must be recognised by other states to act in the world — to sign treaties, join organisations and exchange ambassadors. A nation needs no one’s permission to exist.

Table

When The Two Coincide

Where the boundaries of a nation and a state broadly match, the result is called a nation-state. Most modern states aspire to this, because a government that its people regard as their own can rely on willing obedience rather than on enforcement alone.

The match is rarely exact. Switzerland is a single state whose citizens speak German, French, Italian and Romansh, and it has held together for centuries without a common language.

India took the same road deliberately. The Constitution does not define membership by language, religion or descent, and the political community it creates is defined by citizenship rather than by ancestry.

The reverse case also occurs. A nation may exist for generations without a state, seeking one through political movements — which is exactly what happened in India before 1947.

Case Study

Case 1.1 — India: A Nation Before It Was A State Long before 1947 there was an Indian nation in the sense used in this chapter. It rested on a shared civilisational inheritance, on pilgrimage routes and festivals that crossed regions, and on the common political experience of being governed by an outside power.

That sentiment acquired an organisation when the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885, and it became a mass political fact in movements such as Quit India in 1942.

What was missing was the fourth element. Laws for India were made by a legislature Indians did not control, and decisions about war, trade and foreign policy were taken in London.

On 15 August 1947 that changed: authority passed to an Indian government. The Constituent Assembly adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949, and it came into force on 26 January 1950.

The nation was not created in 1947. The state was.

Test the Argument

Must A State Rest On A Single Nation? Claim: a state is stable only if its people form one nation. Reasons: shared identity produces willing obedience, so force is rarely needed. Strongest objection: durable states such as India and Switzerland contain many communities and hold together through constitutional guarantees instead. What it turns on: whether the unity a state needs must be cultural, or can be built politically.

Curiosity Corner

Q3. If a nation and a state mean the same thing, why does Political Science need two separate words?

A. Because they can come apart. A nation may exist without a state, and a state may contain several nations. One word names a feeling of belonging, the other a structure of authority.

1.7 Summary

The Discipline

Politics is the activity through which people living together settle who decides, who obeys and how rules are enforced. Political Science is the organised study of that activity.
The classical meaning of Political Science, drawn from Plato and Aristotle, is normative. It asks what the best political order would be, treats the state as the highest form of human association, and reasons about justice, virtue and civic duty.
Later state-centred writers such as Paul Janet, J. W. Garner and Sir John Seeley kept this focus, defining the subject almost wholly by the state and its government. Voters, parties, movements and international bodies fell outside it.
The modern meaning grew from the behavioural approach of the twentieth century, which treated politics as an activity and a process and studied it empirically. Harold Lasswell, David Easton, G. E. G. Catlin and Andrew Heywood all defined the subject through power, influence and rule-making rather than through the state alone.
The two views differ in what they ask, how they find out, and what they look at. Neither replaces the other: description tells us how power is used, and normative argument tells us how to judge that use.
Contemporary Political Science is divided into five subfields. Political Theory studies political ideas and their justification; Comparative Politics explains why systems differ; International Relations studies dealings between independent states and other global actors; Public Administration studies how policy is actually carried out; Political Economy studies how political power and economic life shape each other.
Politics and Political Science differ in purpose, method and product. Sir Frederick Pollock separated theoretical from applied politics; the classical tradition held the activity and its study apart, while the modern view treats Political Science as the empirical study of politics and therefore inseparable from it.

The State

The state is a community of people, permanently occupying a definite territory, organised under a government of its own, and free from the legal control of any outside authority.
The state must be distinguished from a unit of a federation, from the government and from society. Society is the whole web of association; the state is one institution within it; the government is the machinery through which the state acts.
What marks the state out from every other association is the character of its authority. Membership is not voluntary, its decisions bind everyone in the territory, and it alone may lawfully use force.
Four elements must be present together: population, territory, government and sovereignty. Population may be of any size and contains both citizens and foreign nationals. Territory must be defined, and includes land, airspace and, for a coastal state, the adjoining belt of sea.
Government is the agency that formulates, executes and interprets the state’s will, ordinarily through a legislature, an executive and a judiciary. Governments change; the state continues, and its treaties, debts and laws survive the ministers who made them.
Sovereignty is supreme authority: internally over every person and association within the territory, externally free of foreign control. It is the decisive element, because population, territory and an administration are found in many organisations, and only sovereignty makes them a state. A colony had the first three and was not a state.
In practice sovereignty is exercised under limits — constitutional, democratic and international. Whether accepting a treaty obligation reduces sovereignty or expresses it remains disputed.

State And Nation

A nation is a body of people who believe themselves to be one people, on the strength of a shared language, culture, religion, ethnicity, tradition or history, and who wish on that basis to govern themselves. The belief matters more than the checklist.
Nationality is the bond of belonging to a nation, often expressed in law as citizenship. Nationalism is the belief that the nation should be the unit of political authority; civic nationalism grounds membership in shared institutions, ethnic nationalism in common ancestry.
State and nation differ in the bond that unites them, in their need for territory, in sovereignty and in recognition. Where the two broadly coincide the result is called a nation-state, but the match is rarely exact.
India illustrates the distinction directly. The nation existed long before 1947; the state came into being when authority passed to an Indian government on 15 August 1947, and the Constitution adopted on 26 November 1949 came into force on 26 January 1950.

The Arguments In One Place

The chapter’s central claim is that the state is distinguished from every other human association by sovereignty — supreme law-making authority at home and independence abroad — and that this authority is different in kind from mere superior strength, because it is accepted as rightful.

The strongest position against it is that sovereignty describes a legal form rather than a fact. Constitutional restraints, popular consent and treaty obligations mean that no modern state is actually supreme, and what really separates a state from an armed group may be nothing more than recognition by other states.

A second, older argument runs beneath the first. The classical tradition holds that the subject exists to judge political arrangements; the behavioural tradition holds that it exists to explain them, and that judgement is not a scientific task.

Both disputes remain open, and the chapters that follow assume neither has been settled.

1.8 Key Terms

Applied politics — the practical conduct of public affairs, as distinguished from reasoning about the principles behind them.
Authority — the recognised right to give a decision that others accept as binding, rather than merely obey out of fear.
Behavioural approach — the twentieth-century approach that treats politics as an activity and a process, and studies it through observable evidence.
Bureaucracy — the permanent body of appointed officials who staff the offices of the state and remain in place when governments change.
Citizenship — full legal membership of a state, carrying the complete set of political rights that the state confers.
Comparative Politics — the subfield that studies political systems, institutions and behaviour across countries in order to explain why they differ.
Empirical — concerned with what actually happens, and answerable by evidence that others can check.
Executive — the organ of government that enforces the law and administers the country from day to day.
Government — the agency through which the state formulates its will, expresses it as law, and carries it into effect.
International Relations — the subfield that studies dealings between independent states, and between states and other actors operating across borders.
Judiciary — the organ of government that interprets the law and settles disputes about what it means.
Jurisdiction — the authority to apply and enforce law over a defined area and the people within it.
Legislature — the organ of government that makes the law.
Legitimacy — the quality that makes power rightful, so that people obey because they accept the authority behind a decision.
Nation — a body of people who believe themselves to be one people, on the strength of what they share, and who wish on that basis to govern themselves.
Nationalism — the belief that the nation should be the unit of political authority, together with the movement that asserts its identity and right to self-government.
Nationality — the bond of belonging to a nation, usually expressed in law as citizenship.
Nation-state — a state whose boundaries broadly coincide with those of a single nation.
Normative — concerned with what ought to be, and therefore with standards, values and the reasons offered to justify them.
Political Economy — the subfield that studies how political power and economic life shape each other.
Political Science — the organised study of politics, and of the institutions, ideas and conflicts that surround it.
Political Theory — the subfield that studies political ideas and the arguments made for and against them.
Politics — the activity through which people living together settle how rules are made, who makes them, and how they are enforced.
Public Administration — the subfield that studies how public policy is actually carried out, through departments, agencies and officials.
Sovereignty — the supreme authority of the state: power to make and enforce law within its territory, subject to no higher authority, and independence from foreign control.
State — a community of people, permanently occupying a definite territory, organised under a government of its own, and free from the legal control of any outside authority.
Theoretical politics — reasoning about the state, sovereignty, law and government, as distinguished from the practical conduct of public affairs.

1.9 Points to Ponder

Governments come and go while the state continues, and a person born inside a territory falls under its laws without having agreed to anything. In what sense, then, can a citizen be said to have consented to the state’s authority at all?
A colony had a population, a defined territory and a working administration, and yet was not a state. Does it follow that the people living in it had no political life worth studying?
Political Science claims to explain politics without taking sides. Is it possible to explain why a government fell without implying something about whether it deserved to?
A nation exists because its members believe themselves to be one people. Can such a belief be created deliberately — and if it can, who does the creating?
The state alone may lawfully use force, and its laws bind those who opposed them. On what grounds, if any, could a person be justified in disobeying a law they hold to be unjust?
A unit of a federation, such as Rajasthan, is called a state but has no sovereignty, while the federation divides law-making power between two levels. Where, in such an arrangement, does sovereignty actually sit?

1.10 Objective Questions

Classical Political Science is best described as normative because it is chiefly concerned with:
1. collecting data on how citizens actually vote
2. what the best political order ought to be
3. comparing constitutions across many countries
4. the working of government departments [1 mark]
Which one of the following is NOT an element of the state?
1. Population
2. Territory
3. Nationalism
4. Sovereignty [1 mark]
The description of politics as the authoritative allocation of values for a society is associated with:
1. Harold Lasswell
2. David Easton
3. Sir Frederick Pollock
4. Paul Janet [1 mark]
Under international law, the territorial sea of a coastal state extends up to:
1. six nautical miles from the shore
2. twelve nautical miles from the shore
3. twenty nautical miles from the shore
4. two hundred nautical miles from the shore [1 mark]
Assertion (A): A colony is not a state. Reason (R): A colony does not possess a population of its own.
1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
3. A is true, but R is false.
4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
Assertion (A): A nation may exist without a defined territory. Reason (R): The bond that unites a nation is a shared sense of belonging rather than legal authority over an area.
1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
3. A is true, but R is false.
4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
Match each thinker in Column A with the contribution in Column B. [1 mark]

Column A	Column B
a. Plato	i. divided the subject into theoretical and applied politics
b. Aristotle	ii. classified the constitutions of Greek city-states
c. Harold Lasswell	iii. described an ideal state governed by philosopher-kings
d. Sir Frederick Pollock	iv. treated politics as the study of influence and the influential

Fill in the blank: The subfield of Political Science that studies how public policy is actually carried out through departments and officials is called ____________. [1 mark]
State whether the following is true or false: The state and the government mean the same thing, since the government acts in the name of the state. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: Supreme authority over all persons within a territory, together with independence from foreign control, is called ____________. [1 mark]

1.11 Check Your Concepts

Define the state. [2 marks]
Define a nation and state one element that a nation need not possess. [2 marks]
Name the two dimensions of sovereignty and state what each one means. [2 marks]
Differentiate between politics and Political Science on any three grounds. [3 marks]
Explain briefly why territory is regarded as an essential element of the state. [3 marks]
Give reasons why the state must be distinguished from society and from the government. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example, how a nation may exist without being a state. [4 marks]
Evaluate the claim that the size of a country’s population or territory determines whether it is a state. [4 marks]
Describe the classical and the modern meanings of Political Science, giving the grounds for each and one criticism that has been made of each. [6 marks]
Explain the meaning of each of the five subfields of contemporary Political Science, and give one question that each of them would typically ask. [6 marks]
Discuss the four elements of the state, and explain with reasons which of them is regarded as decisive. [6 marks]

1.12 Source & Passage-Based Questions

A territory has a settled population, a mapped boundary and a legislature elected by its own residents. Under a treaty signed at the time of its creation, however, it may not enter into any agreement with a foreign country without the written approval of a neighbouring power, and that power maintains a garrison on its soil.
1. Which element of the state is incomplete in this case? Give reasons for your answer. [2 marks]
2. Explain what this situation shows about the relationship between sovereignty and the other three elements. [2 marks]
3. State one thing this description does not tell you, which you would need to know before deciding whether it is a state. [2 marks]
Study the description of the cartoon given below. A large ship is shown at anchor, with the word ‘State’ painted along its hull. On the gangway, one set of sailors in identical uniforms is walking off the ship while another set walks on. A signboard on the dock reads ‘Election Results’. The caption below the drawing reads: ‘New crew, same ship.’
1. Identify the distinction the cartoonist is making. [2 marks]
2. Explain, with reference to treaties and debts, why this distinction matters in practice. [3 marks]
3. State one thing about that distinction which a cartoon of this kind cannot show. [1 mark]
Two districts of the same state are given identical funds, identical rules and identical targets under a single national scheme. At the end of the year, one district has reached nine out of ten intended beneficiaries and the other has reached four.
1. Which subfield of Political Science would take this as its central problem, and why? [2 marks]
2. Name one other subfield that could also study this situation, and state the different question it would ask. [2 marks]
3. What further information would you need before you could explain the difference between the two districts? [2 marks]
A community of several million people is spread across three neighbouring countries. Its members share a language, a body of folk literature and a calendar of festivals, and they describe themselves in interviews as one people with one history. They hold no territory of their own, and their representatives have begun to press for the right to govern themselves.
1. Is this community a nation, a state, or neither? Justify your answer using the definitions given in this chapter. [2 marks]
2. Which elements would it have to acquire before it could be called a state? [2 marks]
3. Interviews record what people say about themselves. State one limit of such evidence when studying questions of national identity. [2 marks]