Friday, September 28, 2018

Politics / Week 5 / Cindy Paskalina Kweesar


Summary
According to Joice Mitchel, politics is collective decision-making or public policy-making in its entirety. When talking about politics, people usually associate it with state affairs, but over time, politics can also be linked to various aspects of human life that relate to the power of decision making, general policy, and distribution of prosperity.
In politics, there are 3 important elements, namely, Power, Authority, and Violence. Power often interpreted as the ability to influence the other, to achieve what is desired by the power holder. Meanwhile, authority is the right to do something or order someone else to do or not do something to achieve certain goals. Power does not need legitimacy while authority requires legitimacy and requires power. Authority is the right to manipulate or change others. Authority is divided into 3 types, rational-legal authority, traditional authority, charismatic authority. In today's countries, governments also have various types of government, for example, monarchy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, Oligarchy, and others. These different types of government have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Government is usually contested by political parties. The way they work depends on the type of government they use. For example in a USA country that has 2 main parties, Democratic Party and Republican Party, they have a system called Electoral College votes for presidential elections.

What was interesting/what did you learn
Politics that can be a tool for the prosperity of many people, apparently still has the values of injustice in the reality of its practice. Gender, age, race and class still seems to be an obstacle for some people to be able to voice their political opinions. For example, even though women were found to be more likely to vote, women were still in underrepresented positions. At the 109th Congress (2005-2007) there were only 14 female Senate members out of a total of 100 members and 70 members of Congress from a total of 435 members.

Discussion Point
One of the oldest type of government is Monarchy. It is stated that there are still 44 countries that have a monarch as their head of state. What are the real tasks of monarchs in a country when they actually have a head of government to deal with government problems?

1 comment:

  1. I really like your post, I think it's really interesting how you talk about the relationship of politics with another aspect not only governmental things.

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