politics definition essay

Politics Definition & Meaning Essay

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Introduction

Meaning of politics, contrast between weber and lane’s conceptions of politics, works cited.

Politics is arguably the most renowned and constantly debated issue across the world due to an exceptionally diverse history coupled with endless controversies. The concept of politics and its theory has existed in almost throughout all the documented political science literature. As simple as it looks, the concept of politics can prove significantly challenging especially when individuals are struggling to understand its actual meaning, as different pieces of literature and theories posit different intuitions about the meaning of politics, thus resulting in a mixture of understandings.

In proletarian terms, politics principally refers the art or science involved in governing especially that consist political entity such as administration techniques over a nation and its citizens. Different perceptions over the concept of politics have existed and are augmenting in the political science literature. Based on such conceptions, this essay seeks to examine the concept of politics as articulated in Weber’s ‘politics as a vocation’ and in Lane’s ‘Pitkin’s dilemma: the wider shores of political theory and political science’.

The concept of politics, just as postulated by Weber (77), is actually a diverse discipline that comprises any form of sovereign leadership engaged in actions. An elaborative meaning from my personal understanding, politics can principally refer to actions or activities of governing or form of leadership that artily or technically entail managing citizens, a nation, and its resources. A considerably key issue in the concept of politics as assumed by Lane is that the “idea of strategic interactive behavior is the central phenomenon of politics” (460).

To concur with this conception created by Lane from a wider pool of reasoning, politics generally involves activities of a government designed by and for people living within certain social structures including small regions to global spectrum (Weber 79). However, politics is just akin to an organization where laws and regulations imposed by top officials play a critical role in the management of capital and human resources.

Politics thus involves certain aspects of power and structures developed in hierarchical order, which are currently eminent in the prevailing world political order. As Weber discerns, in politics “there is the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism or other qualities of individual’s leadership” (79). In its broadest sense, politics is a form of governance that requires an inclusion of the aspects of power or supremacy.

Human relationships, as nature, spur development of the aspect of political growth as political experiences in the modern days are becoming more eminent in human relationships. From perceptions and conceptions revealed from Lane and Weber, a collective meaning of politics emerges. Politics can thus mean activities of strategically managing human beings and resources in a given nation through certain systems of governance that may also involve using power or authority in such administration.

A combination of conceptions protracting from Lane and Weber may draw an accurate meaning of the concept of politics if well understood. However, the two authors portray significant contrast in their general intuition about politics. Weber’s main perception about politics is the sense that politics are individuals’ power struggle to have control over the state or nation. Weber believes that nations or a state itself is a major source of violence and hence, “politics for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state”( 85).

Supremacy and charismatic leadership must dominate a nation for human beings to have proper governance in any social structure and that centrality of violence for the state is important. Similar to such perceptions developed, a similar intuition is inherent in the literature documented by Lane (461), where he suggests that whether in human relations, verbal communication, or economic relationship, power is present.

However, Lane’s work does not stipulate that governance must entail power utilization, but rather, as noted from literature, he contends that states of dominations are simply subset of relations to power, and does not use the term power to signify any political structure, or any form of governance (Lane 461). Violence is use of power or aggression to govern a nation and Weber argues, “Every state is founded on force and if no social institutions existed, which knew the use of violence” (80), the concept of state would never prevail. Therefore, violence in governance can be useful to certain extents.

To Lane’s perception, power is useful when used in strategic governance, and to expound the essence of coercion in leadership, Weber believes that nations are social structures with individuals possessing unique characteristics and presence of military organizations, judicial systems, and jails are important components of powerful governance that ensure rules and regulations have essence in nations (83). Contrary to Lane’s (467) conceptions, people form rules that they can follow without intimidation.

Another idea is how and why individuals join politics and systems of governance. The intent why politicians or simple individuals join national politics remains a quandary for many scholars across the world. This dilemma underscores the contrast point between Weber and Lane over the meaning of politics within the state paradigm. From their arguments, Weber sees politics as the matter of the state and Lane considers politics as merely individuals playing games.

According to Lane, “these power plays do not occur in abstract conceptual terms, but in empirical and sometimes unseemly political practice, where sharp strategy may prevail even in the most private game” (460). However, from Weber’s conception, “the leadership of a state or of a party by men who (in the economic sense of the word) live exclusively for politics and not off politics” (117), hence politics remains a state issue. Political parties arise with the primary aim of dominating governance of the nation.

Politics is a global concept that attracts substantial debates within the political science paradigm and its real meaning remains a quandary in many academic and societal quarters. Different conceptions have arisen from different researchers over the authentic meaning of the word ‘politics’. From my personal understanding using a combination of Lane and Weber’s literature, politics may principally refer to activities or practices of governance or administration artily or scientifically designed to control human beings (citizens), nations, and all the resources within a state.

Power in politics is and has been an evident characteristic in traditional and contemporary politics where leaders believe on coercion to manage human beings. From a different conception, power is present in governance though politics must entail strategic governance of human beings through human relations.

Lane, Ruth. “Pitkin’s Dilemma: The Wider Shores of Political Theory and Political Science.” Perspectives on Politics 2.3 (2004): 459-473. Print.

Weber, Max. Politics as a vocation, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Print.

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Bibliography

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1.1 Defining Politics: Who Gets What, When, Where, How, and Why?

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Define and describe politics from various perspectives.
• Identify what makes a behavior political.
• Identify and discuss the three core elements of any political event: rules, reality, and choices.
• Define and discuss varieties of constitutions.

Politics has existed as long as humans have faced scarcity, have had different beliefs and preferences, and have had to resolve these differences while allocating scarce resources. It will continue to exist so long as these human conditions persist—that is, forever. Politics are fundamental to the human condition.

Politics means different things to different people. Politics , and related terms like political and politician , can have both positive and negative connotations. The Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that humans were “political animals” in that only by engaging in politics could humans reach their highest potential. 5 Yet often, the terms political and politician can be used in disparaging ways to refer to individuals using trickery or manipulation to obtain or preserve their status or authority. More formally, a politician is someone running for elective office or serving in it or as a person who is using the skills of a politician in other social interaction. A political actor is anyone who is engaged in political activity. Politics involves all the actions of government and all the people who work for, serve, or challenge it.

This book takes the broadest view, adopting the guidance of political scientist Harold Lasswell , who defined politics as “who gets what, when, how.” 6 Politics exists wherever people interact with one another to make decisions that affect them collectively. Politics exists within families. When parents decide where the family will live: politics. The family (who) gets a place to live (what) at the point of decision (when) based on the parents’ choice (how). When your school decides what tuition to charge: politics. When the government imposes taxes or funds education: politics. Most generally, politics is any interaction among individuals, groups, or institutions that seek to arrive at a decision about how to make a collective choice, or to solve some collective problem. Political science focuses primarily on these interactions as they involve governments. 7

Every political event is different. The mass protests in Hong Kong in 2020, inspired by those seeking to protect their political rights, were not exactly the same as the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States or the climate change actions animated by Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg . Yet as varied as political situations can be, there are commonalities across these events and over all political activities. Whenever you seek to understand a political event—whether an election in Tanzania, a protest in Estonia, or a public health program in Indonesia—it is useful to focus on the following:

What are the most important rules ? What is the reality of the existing event or environment? What choices do the participants make? Political outcomes—for example, which candidate wins an election—are based on the interaction of these rules, realities, and choices.

The importance of rules in politics or in life cannot be overstated. In virtually every human endeavor, the most successful individuals are likely to have a keen knowledge of the rules and how to use (or break) the rules to the advantage of their cause. Ignorance of the rules makes accomplishing your goals more difficult.

Rules can be highly precise or open to interpretation. In chess, for example, the rules are completely known to all players: each piece can move in certain directions but in no other ones. Each player takes a turn; that’s the rule. Although chess is highly complex, each player’s options at any given time are known. Chess champions—in fact, all champions—know how to use the rules to their advantage.

College campuses have their own sets of formal and informal rules, and not all of them are as precise as those in chess. The de jure rules are the rules as they are written, the formal rules. The de facto rules are the ones actually practiced or enforced, the informal rules. For example: a sign might state that the ( de jure ) speed limit is 55 miles per hour, but if police do not give tickets to drivers unless they are driving 65 miles per hour, then that is the de facto rule. To thrive at college, it is useful to understand not only the formal rules but also the informal rules, which have been called “the hidden curriculum.” 8

The rules in any political environment affect who has power and how they can use it. Consider the rules that determine who can vote and how. These rules can be permissive or strict, making voting either easier or harder to do. The harder it is to vote, the fewer people will actually cast their ballots and vice versa. Voting rules influence who shows up to vote. Politicians who believe they have a better chance of success under permissive voting rules are likely to advocate for such rules, while politicians who believe they are more likely to prevail under restrictive voting rules will advocate for them instead.

Rules might appear to be neutral—that is, they may seem fair and not designed to favor one group over another—but this is not entirely true. Until recently, to become a pilot in the US Air Force, a person had to be no shorter than 5 feet 4 inches and no taller than 6 feet 5 inches: the short and the tall were excluded from this opportunity. The rule might be in place for a good reason—in this case, to ensure that pilots can fit properly into their seats—but rules like these allocate opportunities and resources to some while withholding them from others. Because this rule excluded over 40 percent of American women from becoming pilots, it has been modified. 9

Rules are everywhere in politics. Your family has rules—even if the main rule is “no rules”—as does your school. Rules, such as Robert’s Rules of Order , 10 govern legislatures, and the criminal justice system, the tax system, and the national immigration systems are all based, at least in principle, on rules.

Rules and institutions are closely related. The institution of marriage or the institution of the family, for example, are the sets of rules (rights, roles, and responsibilities) by which those within the marriage or family live. Alternatively, institutions can be organizations, which are groups of people working together for a common purpose whose actions are governed by rules.

Perhaps the most important set of rules for any institution or organization is its constitution . The constitution affirms the most basic legal principles of a country or a state. These principles typically include the structure of the government, its duties, and the rights of the people. Constitutions can be quite general or extremely detailed. The Constitution of Monaco has fewer than 4,000 words, while the Constitution of India has nearly 150,000 words. 11 Unlike the United States, some countries, including Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, do not have a single document they call the constitution but instead rely on other written and even unwritten sources. In most countries the constitution is called just that—the constitution—although Germany, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and a few other countries call their constitutions the basic law. 12

What Is a Constitution?

Constitutions define the relationship between people and their government. They give powers to and place limits upon the government and serve as the basis for any other laws or government activities.

Constitutions are perhaps the most important set of rules in a country because, after all, they are just pieces of paper. The true importance of a country’s constitution depends on the politics of that country. In the United States, the Constitution is venerated almost as if it were a religious document. Most of the biggest conflicts throughout US history have involved disputes over what the Constitution requires, allows, or prohibits. When the US Supreme Court rules that a political action is unconstitutional, the violator—whether it be the president, the Congress, or any other group or individual in society—is expected to comply with the ruling and stop the action. 13 But this is not always the case everywhere. Politicians in any country may be tempted to ignore their constitutions, especially when it comes to the rights they ostensibly guarantee, and whether those politicians prevail depends on whether other political actors are willing and able to uphold the constitution.

Because rules affect the allocation of power and other scarce resources, political actors spend substantial time and effort fighting over them. In general, political actors seek to establish rules that benefit them and their allies.

Rules guide and constrain behavior, but the reality on the ground at any specific time also impacts political outcomes. Reality —facts—is not a matter of opinion, although people can dispute the nature of reality. Something is a fact , for example, when there is compelling evidence that an event has happened or a condition exists. The sun rises in the East: reality. The United Nations is an international organization: fact (reality). 14 Has the United Nations made the world a better place? That is a matter of opinion, although those who say “yes” or “no” can provide facts that support their views about reality. 15

How candidates can raise and spend money on their electoral campaigns may be limited by campaign finance laws, but if one candidate raises twice as much money as the other candidate, that is an important fact. If one candidate is the incumbent —a politician already serving in office and running for reelection—and the other is not, that is an important fact. These are important facts because whether or not a candidate is an incumbent and how much campaign money they raise may affect their chances of winning the election. In US elections, for example, incumbents generally have a better chance of being elected (although the strength of this relationship has varied over time), while the impact of fundraising on electoral success is open to question. 16

In chess, the rules are constant, never changing during the game. The reality changes as play proceeds—at any moment each player has a specific number of pieces in particular places on the board. What happens then depends on the choices the players make. This is as true for politics as for any other game. A key difference between chess and politics is that, in politics, the players themselves can change the rules of the game while they are playing.

Politics can be thought of as having the characteristics of a game. The players—anyone involved in political action—make strategic choices, given the rules and the current conditions, in an attempt to “win” the game by obtaining their goals.

Rules provide constraints and opportunities. Reality presents resources and challenges. The choices participants make in the face of rules and reality determine political outcomes. Choice exists whenever political actors face options, which they always do. If there are two candidates in an election for a single position, the voter has to choose between them, not being able to vote for both. Even if there is only one candidate, the voter still has an option: to vote for the candidate or to abstain.

In a democracy , the winning candidate wins because more voters chose to vote, and vote for that candidate, than for other options. The very definition of democracy is that it is a form of government in which the people have the ability to choose their leaders or, in some cases, the policies that they will adopt. 17

Political outcomes are always contingent; they cannot be predicted with certainty in advance. That does not mean, however, that outcomes are completely unpredictable. By accounting for the rules, how human behavior works, and existing realities, it is possible to reasonably predict what is likely to happen and explain what does happen.

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• Essay on Politics

Essay on Politics for Students in English

Politics is a hugely important domain in the world and it has a profound impact on the functioning as well as the policies of the governments. Politics has an effect on all types of government including democratic, autocratic, monarchical, theocratic and others. The government is responsible for making decisions on different matters of public interest, issuing orders for the public health, directing the citizens towards development and growth, and performing a wide range of other related functions.

There are numerous definitions of what politics means. Politics can be described as the disagreement between the various groups on what they like. One of the broad definitions of politics, which is widely agreed, is the art of governance. The government is the entity having the legal authority of regulating people’s actions. The word politics is usually used for defining how the countries are governed and how the governments make the rules and the laws. 

Defining laws and regulations that tell people what they can or cannot do is one of the ways in which the government leads the people. These regulations and laws are enacted by the government for ensuring order and protection in the society. Beyond the laws, the government might also regulate the citizens and the functioning of the country in other ways. Most of the countries have specific groups or political parties for expressing their views and policies. 

The political parties form a consensus on the common policies or path that they should take in communicating their ideas or policies to the people. These parties support legislative bills or reforms and the candidates based on the agenda agreed upon by the members. The election is usually contested or fought between the opposite political parties of different spectrum. 

One of the conventional explanations of politics refers to politics being conducted within the system of checks and balances for avoiding misuse of political power. The several institutions that exist within the governing system include the legislative body that is responsible for making laws, executive body that imposes them, and judiciary that interprets them thus providing a powerful and well-rounded political spectrum.

If you want to study in detail about politics and its various concepts of applications for your essay in English then you can refer to it on the Vedantu website or app. Vedantu is a leading learning platform with a wide range of learning resources, tutorials, solutions, reference notes, and sample questions papers with solutions for students of different branches.

Short Politics Essay in English

Politics, in general, is the platform by which people create, maintain, and change the laws that govern their lives. As a result, conflict and collaboration are inextricably connected in politics. On the one hand, the presence of conflicting views, competing expectations, competing needs, and competing interests is expected to result in conflict over the rules under which people live.

Politics is fascinating because everyone has a different perspective on life and its rules. They have differing opinions about how they should live. What money should go to whom? What is the best way to disperse power to help the powerless? Is it better for society to be built on collaboration or conflict? And so forth. They also talk about how such disputes can be resolved. What is the best way to make decisions as a group? In what conditions does who have a say? How much say should each person have in decisions? The list goes on.

This, according to Aristotle, made politics the "master science," which he described as "the action by which human beings strive to better their lives and build and contribute to a Good Society." Politics is, first and foremost, a social practice. It's still a conversation, but the parties have reduced it to a monologue.

Any effort to grasp the sense of the word "politics" must always grapple with two major issues. The first is the different connotations that this word has in everyday speech. Unlike economics, geography, history, and biology, which most people think of as academic subjects, few people approach politics without preconceptions. The second, more complicated issue is that even well-respected authorities cannot agree about what politics is all about. It has infiltrated nearly every aspect of society.

Hence, we can say that the exercise of authority, the sacred science of governance, the making of unified decisions, the distribution of limited resources, the art of deceit and exploitation, and so on are all terms used to describe politics.

FAQs on Essay on Politics

1. How do we define politics?

Politics is the collection of activities connected with community decision-making or other types of power relations between individuals, such as resource allocation or status.

2. Name the Various national-level political parties in india.

There are several national-level political parties in India. The major ones include:

All India Trinamool Congress(AITC)

Bahujan Samaj Party(BSP)

Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP)

Communist Party of India(CPI)

Communist Party of India(Marxist)

Indian National Congress(INC)

National People’s Party(NPP)

Nationalist Congress Party(NCP)

3. What is the definition of politics?

Politics has numerous definitions and explanations. In the basic broad term politics can be defined as the art of governance through a collection of activities that are associated with society, decision-making, and power relations between the individuals, like status or resource allocation. The concept of politics is very important in the governance of a country and it is an important topic related to public life that the students must learn about.

4.  Which are the different major political parties in India?

There are several major political parties in India. Some of these political parties include All India Trinamool Congress (AITMC), Indian National Congress (INC), Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India (CPI), and National People’s Party (NPP) amongst a host of others. Each of these political parties have their own political manifesto based on which they conduct their operations.

5. Why is politics an important subject for students to learn?

Politics is related to day-to-day functioning of a country or a society and thus it is important for students to learn and be well informed about it. Politics includes vital policies and decisions that have a direct impact on people and as a responsible citizen it is crucial for students to have a basic grasp of developments in the country that charts out the future path of the nation.

6. How can I prepare for an essay on politics?

If you want to write an essay on politics then you would need to prepare well by understanding the definitions and various other aspects related to politics. One of the ways you can do this is by learning and reading about politics on the internet. You can also find a detailed essay on politics for students in English at Vedantu. This essay incorporates all the important points and provides an excellent guide on how the essay should be done.

7. How can I download the English essay on politics from Vedantu?

If you want to download the English essay on Politics provided by Vedantu then you can do it from either the website or the app. All you need to do is go to the English section and browse to the essay on politics. Here you will have the “Download PDF” option and you just need to click on that button to download the English essay by Vedantu on your device for free. Once you downloaded the PDF file you can access it offline any time you want.

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Definition of politics

Did you know.

Playing Politics

Politics is a multifaceted word. It has a set of fairly specific meanings that are descriptive and nonjudgmental (such as “the art or science of government” and "political principles"), but it can and often does carry a negative meaning closely related to these (“political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices”). English is a flexible language, and it is not uncommon for a word to have multiple related meanings that run the connotative gamut from good to bad. Some of these have been around for a surprisingly long time. The negative sense of politics , as seen in the phrase play politics , for example, has been in use since at least 1853, when abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared: “We do not play politics ; anti-slavery is no half-jest with us.”

Examples of politics in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'politics.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Middle English Polletiques, Polytykys, as title of Aristotle's Politics, from polit ik "of spiritual or secular governance, political" + -iques, -ykys -ics , after Middle French politiques, polliticques and Medieval Latin polītica, after Greek tà politiká "public matters, civic affairs," from neuter plural of politikós "of citizens, civic, of a state, political, public" — more at politic

circa 1529, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

Phrases Containing politics

• anti - politics
• enter politics
• go into politics
• identity politics
• office politics
• party politics
• play politics
• power politics

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Dictionary Entries Near politics

Cite this entry.

“Politics.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/politics. Accessed 10 Jun. 2024.

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1: What Is Politics and What Is Political Science?

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• 1.1: Introduction
• 1.2: Defining Politics- Who Gets What, When, Where, How, and Why?
• 1.3: Public Policy, Public Interest, and Power
• 1.4: Political Science- The Systematic Study of Politics
• 1.5: Normative Political Science
• 1.6: Empirical Political Science
• 1.7: Individuals, Groups, Institutions, and International Relations
• 1.8: Summary
• 1.9: Key Terms
• 1.10: Review Questions
• 1.11: Suggested Readings

Essay on Politics: Topics, Tips, and Examples for Students

Defining What is Politics Essay

The process of decision-making that applies to members of a group or society is called politics. Arguably, political activities are the backbone of human society, and everything in our daily life is a form of it.

Understanding the essence of politics, reflecting on its internal elements, and critically analyzing them make society more politically aware and let them make more educated decisions. Constantly thinking and analyzing politics is critical for societal evolution.

Political thinkers often write academic papers that explore different political concepts, policies, and events. The essay about politics may examine a wide range of topics such as government systems, political ideologies, social justice, public policies, international relations, etc.

After selecting a specific research topic, a writer should conduct extensive research, gather relevant information, and prepare a logical and well-supported argument. The paper should be clear and organized, complying with academic language and standards. A writer should demonstrate a deep understanding of the subject, an ability to evaluate and remain non-biased to different viewpoints, and a capacity to draw conclusions.

Now that we are on the same page about the question 'what is politics essay' and understand its importance, let's take a deeper dive into how to build a compelling political essay, explore the most relevant political argumentative essay topics, and finally, examine the political essay examples written by the best essay writing service team.

Politics Essay Example for Students

If you are still unsure how to structure your essay or how to present your statement, don't worry. Our team of experts has prepared an excellent essay example for you. Feel free to explore and examine it. Use it to guide you through the writing process and help you understand what a successful essay looks like.

How to Write a Political Essay: Tips + Guide

A well-written essay is easy to read and digest. You probably remember reading papers full of big words and complex ideas that no one bothered to explain. We all agree that such essays are easily forgotten and not influential, even though they might contain a very important message.

If you are writing an essay on politics, acknowledge that you are on a critical mission to easily convey complicated concepts. Hence, what you are trying to say should be your main goal. Our guide on how to write a political essay will help you succeed.

Conduct Research for Your Politics Essay

After choosing a topic for the essay, take enough time for preparation. Even if you are familiar with the matter, conducting thorough research is wiser. Political issues are complex and multifaceted; comprehensive research will help you understand the topic better and offer a more nuanced analysis.

Research can help you identify different viewpoints and arguments around the topic, which can be beneficial for building more impartial and persuasive essays on politics. Sometimes in the hit of the moment, opposing sides are not able to see the common ground; your goal is to remain rational, speak to diverse audiences, and help them see the core of the problem and the ways to solve it.

In political papers, accuracy and credibility are vital. Researching the topic deeply will help you avoid factual errors or misrepresentations from any standpoint. It will allow you to gather reliable sources of information and create a trustworthy foundation for the entire paper.

If you want to stand out from the other students, get inspired by the list of hottest essay ideas and check out our political essay examples.

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Brainstorm Political Essay Topics

The next step to writing a compelling politics essay is to polish your thoughts and find the right angle to the chosen topic.

Before you start writing, generate fresh ideas and organize your thoughts. There are different techniques to systematize the mess going on in your head, such as freewriting, mind mapping, or even as simple as listing ideas. This will open the doors to new angles and approaches to the topic.

When writing an essay about politics, ensure the topic is not too general. It's always better to narrow it down. It will simplify your job and help the audience better understand the core of the problem. Brainstorming can help you identify key points and arguments, which you can use to find a specific angle on the topic.

Brainstorming can also help you detect informational gaps that must be covered before the writing process. Ultimately, the brainstorming phase can bring a lot more clarity and structure to your essay.

We know how exhausting it is to come up with comparative politics essay topics. Let our research paper writing service team do all the hard work for you.

Create Your Politics Essay Thesis Statement

Thesis statements, in general, serve as a starting point of the roadmap for the reader. A political essay thesis statement outlines the main ideas and arguments presented in the body paragraphs and creates a general sense of the content of the paper.

Creating a thesis statement for essays about politics in the initial stages of writing can help you stay focused and on track throughout the working process. You can use it as an aim and constantly check your arguments and evidence against it. The question is whether they are relevant and supportive of the statement.

Get creative when creating a statement. This is the first sentence readers will see, and it should be compelling and clear.

The following is a great example of a clear and persuasive thesis statement:

 'The lack of transparency and accountability has made the World Trade Organization one of the most controversial economic entities. Despite the influence, its effectiveness in promoting free trade and economic growth in developing countries has decreased.'

Provide Facts in Your Essay about Politic

It's a no-brainer that everything you will write in your essay should be supported by strong evidence. The credibility of your argument will be questioned every step of the way, especially when you are writing about sensitive subjects such as essays on government influence on economic troubles. 

Provide facts and use them as supporting evidence in your politics essay. They will help you establish credibility and accuracy and take your paper out of the realm of speculation and mere opinions.

Facts will make your essay on political parties more persuasive, unbiased, and targeted to larger audiences. Remember, the goal is to bring the light to the core of the issue and find a solution, not to bring people even farther apart.

Speaking of facts, many students claim that when they say ' write my essay for me ' out loud, our writing team is the fastest to respond and deliver high-quality essays meeting their trickiest requirements.

Structure Your Political Essay

Your main goal is to communicate your ideas to many people. To succeed, you need to write an essay that is easy to read and understand. Creating a structure will help you present your ideas logically and lead the readers in the right direction.

Sometimes when writing about political essay topics, we get carried away. These issues can be very emotional and sensitive, and writers are not protected from becoming victims of their own writings. Having a structure will keep you on track, only focusing on providing supported arguments and relevant information.

Start with introducing the thesis statement and provide background information. Followed by the body paragraphs and discuss all the relevant facts and standpoints. Finish it up with a comprehensive conclusion, and state the main points of your essay once again.

The structure will also save you time. In the beginning, creating an outline for essays on politics will give you a general idea of what should be written, and you can track your progress against it.

Revise and Proofread Your Final Politics Essay

Once every opinion is on the paper and every argument is well-constructed, one final step should be taken. Revision!

We know nothing is better than finishing the homework and quickly submitting it, but we aim for an A+. Our political essay must be reviewed. You need to check if there is any error such as grammatical, spelling, or contextual.

Take some time off, relax, and start proofreading after a few minutes or hours. Having a fresh mind will help you review not only grammar but also the arguments. Check if something is missing from your essays about politics, and if you find gaps, provide additional information.

You had to spend a lot of time on them, don't give up now. Make sure they are in perfect condition.

Effective Political Essay Topics

We would be happy if our guide on how to write political essays helped you, but we are not stopping there. Below you will find a list of advanced and relevant political essay topics. Whether you are interested in global political topics or political science essay topics, we got you covered.

Once you select a topic, don't forget to check out our politics essay example! It will bring even more clarity, and you will be all ready to start writing your own paper.

Political Argumentative Essay Topics

Now that we know how to write a political analysis essay let's explore political argumentative essay topics:

• Should a political party take a stance on food politics and support policies promoting sustainable food systems?
• Should we label Winston Churchill as the most influential political figure of World War II?
• Does the focus on GDP growth in the political economy hinder the human development index?
• Is foreign influence a threat to national security?
• Is foreign aid the best practice for political campaigning?
• Does the electoral college work for an ideal political system?
• Are social movements making a real difference, or are they politically active for temporary change?
• Can global politics effectively address political conflicts in the modern world?
• Are opposing political parties playing positive roles in US international relations?
• To what extent should political influence be allowed in addressing economic concerns?
• Can representative democracy prevent civil wars in ethnically diverse countries?
• Should nuclear weapons be abolished for the sake of global relations?
• Is economic development more important than ethical issues for Caribbean politics?
• What role should neighboring nations play in preventing human rights abuse in totalitarian regimes?
• Should political decisions guide the resolution of conflicts in the South China Sea?

Political Socialization Essay Topics

Knowing how to write a political issue essay is one thing, but have you explored our list of political socialization essay topics?

• To what extent does a political party or an influential political figure shape the beliefs of young people?
• Does political influence shape attitudes toward environmental politics?
• How can individuals use their own learning process to navigate political conflicts in a polarized society?
• How do political strategies shape cultural globalization?
• Is gender bias used as a political instrument in political socialization?
• How can paying attention to rural communities improve political engagement?
• What is the role of Amnesty International in preventing the death penalty?
• What is the role of politically involved citizens in shaping minimum wage policies?
• How does a political party shape attitudes toward global warming?
• How does the federal system influence urban planning and attitudes toward urban development?
• What is the role of public opinion in shaping foreign policy, and how does it affect political decision making
• Did other countries' experiences affect policies on restricting immigration in the US?
• How can note-taking skills and practice tests improve political engagement? 
• How do the cultural values of an independent country shape the attitudes toward national security?
• Does public opinion influence international intervention in helping countries reconcile after conflicts?

Political Science Essay Topics

If you are searching for political science essay topics, check our list below and write the most compelling essay about politic:

• Is environmental education a powerful political instrument? 
• Can anarchist societies provide a viable alternative to traditional forms of governance?
• Pros and cons of deterrence theory in contemporary international relations
• Comparing the impact of the French Revolution and World War II on the political landscape of Europe
• The role of the ruling political party in shaping national policies on nuclear weapons
• Exploring the roots of where politics originate
• The impact of civil wars on the processes of democratization of the third-world countries
• The role of international organizations in promoting global health
• Does using the death penalty in the justice system affect international relations?
• Assessing the role of the World Trade Organization in shaping global trade policies
• The political and environmental implications of conventional agriculture
• The impact of the international court on political decision making
• Is philosophical anarchism relevant to contemporary political discourse?
• The emergence of global citizenship and its relationship with social movements
• The impact of other countries on international relations between the US and China

Final Words

See? Writing an essay about politic seems like a super challenging job, but in reality, all it takes is excellent guidance, a well-structured outline, and an eye for credible information.

If you are stressed out from juggling a hundred different course assignments and have no time to focus on your thesis, our dissertation writing services could relieve you! Our team of experts is ready to take over even the trickiest tasks on the tightest schedule. You just have to wish - ' write my essay ' out loud, and we will be on it!

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Annie Lambert

specializes in creating authoritative content on marketing, business, and finance, with a versatile ability to handle any essay type and dissertations. With a Master’s degree in Business Administration and a passion for social issues, her writing not only educates but also inspires action. On EssayPro blog, Annie delivers detailed guides and thought-provoking discussions on pressing economic and social topics. When not writing, she’s a guest speaker at various business seminars.

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Politics (1st edn)

• Acknowledgements
• List of Boxes
• List of Tables
• About the authors
• How to Use This Book
• How to Use the Online Resources
• 1. Introduction: The Nature of Politics and Political Analysis
• 2. Politics and the State
• 3. Political Power, Authority, and the State
• 4. Democracy
• 5. Democracies, Democratization, and Authoritarian Regimes
• 6. Nations and Nationalism
• 7. The Ideal State
• 8. Ideologies
• 9. Political Economy: National and Global Perspectives
• 10. Institutions and States
• 11. Laws, Constitutions, and Federalism
• 12. Votes, Elections, Legislatures, and Legislators
• 13. Political Parties
• 14. Executives, Bureaucracies, Policy Studies, and Governance
• 15. Media and Politics
• 16. Civil Society, Interest Groups, and Populism
• 17. Security Insecurity, and the State
• 18. Governance and Organizations in Global Politics
• 19. Conclusion: Politics in the Age of Globalization

p. 1 1. Introduction: The Nature of Politics and Political Analysis

• Peter Ferdinand , Peter Ferdinand Emeritus Reader in Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
• Robert Garner Robert Garner Professor of Politics, University of Leicester
•  and  Stephanie Lawson Stephanie Lawson Professor of Politics and International Studies, Macquarie University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/hepl/9780198787983.003.0001
• Published in print: 12 April 2018
• Published online: August 2018

This chapter discusses the nature of politics and political analysis. It first defines the nature of politics and explains what constitutes ‘the political’ before asking whether politics is an inevitable feature of all human societies. It then considers the boundary problems inherent in analysing the political and whether politics should be defined in narrow terms, in the context of the state, or whether it is better defined more broadly by encompassing other social institutions. It also addresses the question of whether politics involves consensus among communities, rather than violent conflict and war. The chapter goes on to describe empirical, normative, and semantic forms of political analysis as well as the deductive and inductive methods of the study of politics. Finally, it examines whether politics can be a science.

• political analysis
• empirical analysis
• normative analysis
• semantic analysis
• deductive method
• inductive method

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2.1 The many meanings of politics

What, then, is politics? To this deceptively simple question there is actually no simple answer. Throughout the history of the discipline, political theorists and practitioners have offered multiple, at times contradictory, at times overlapping definitions of what politics involves. It is therefore difficult (if not impossible) to provide a single definition of politics that everyone can agree on. The best we can do is to explore some of the more salient definitions of politics, and see how they compare and contrast. This requires that we develop some sort of framework, some way of organising these definitions. In this section, we locate them on a spectrum that stretches between narrow and broad interpretations of politics. We begin on the narrow side of the spectrum, and consider the implications of defining politics as an activity restricted to specific people and places. We then explore broader definitions of politics and consider the implications of expanding the remit of politics to include less obvious activities, people and places.

Essay on Politics for Students and Children

500+ words essay on politics.

When we hear the term politics, we usually think of the government, politicians and political parties. For a country to have an organized government and work as per specific guidelines, we require a certain organization. This is where politics comes in, as it essentially forms the government. Every country, group and organization use politics to instrument various ways to organize their events, prospects and more.

Politics does not limit to those in power in the government. It is also about the ones who are in the run to achieve the same power. The candidates of the opposition party question the party on power during political debates . They intend to inform people and make them aware of their agenda and what the present government is doing. All this is done with the help of politics only.

Dirty Politics

Dirty politics refers to the kind of politics in which moves are made for the personal interest of a person or party. It ignores the overall development of a nation and hurts the essence of the country. If we look at it closely, there are various constituents of dirty politics.

The ministers of various political parties, in order to defame the opposition, spread fake news and give provocative speeches against them. This hampers with the harmony of the country and also degrades the essence of politics . They pass sexist remarks and instill hate in the hearts of people to watch their party win with a majority of seats.

Read 500 Words Essay on Corruption Here

Furthermore, the majority of politicians are corrupt. They abuse their power to advance their personal interests rather than that of the country. We see the news flooded with articles like ministers and their families involving in scams and illegal practices. The power they have makes them feel invincible which is why they get away with any crime.

Before coming into power, the government makes numerous promises to the public. They influence and manipulate them into thinking all their promises will be fulfilled. However, as soon as they gain power, they turn their back on the public. They work for their selfish motives and keep fooling people in every election. Out of all this, only the common suffers at the hands of lying and corrupt politicians.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Lack of Educated Ministers

If we look at the scenario of Indian elections, any random person with enough power and money can contest the elections. They just need to be a citizen of the country and be at least 25 years old. There are a few clauses too which are very easy.

The strangest thing is that contesting for elections does not require any minimum education qualification. Thus, we see how so many uneducated and non-deserving candidates get into power and then misuse it endlessly. A country with uneducated ministers cannot develop or even be on the right path.

We need educated ministers badly in the government. They are the ones who can make the country progress as they will handle things better than the illiterate ones. The candidates must be well-qualified in order to take on a big responsibility as running an entire nation. In short, we need to save our country from corrupt and uneducated politicians who are no less than parasites eating away the development growth of the country and its resources. All of us must unite to break the wheel and work for the prosperous future of our country.

FAQs on Politics

Q.1 Why is the political system corrupt?

A.1 Political system is corrupt because the ministers in power exercise their authority to get away with all their crimes. They bribe everyone into working for their selfish motives making the whole system corrupt.

Q.2 Why does India need educated ministers?

A.2 India does not have a minimum educational qualification requirement for ministers. This is why the uneducated lot is corrupting the system and pushing the country to doom. We need educated ministers so they can help the country develop with their progressive thinking.

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What is politics?

by Professor Christina Boswell FBA

14 Jan 2020

We often refer to something as being ‘political’, or ‘all about politics’, to mean it boils down to a power struggle between people or groups. The idea is that politics is a process of manoeuvring to assert rival interests.

Of course, this notion of competition over interests or power is very relevant to politics with a capital ‘P’, or party politics. Indeed, we might start by defining politics as a process of competitive claims-making by rival parties, with the aim of mobilising support to put these programmes into action. But beyond this broad definition, it’s useful to unpack what this competition is about and the way in which it plays out. Both of these questions will help us develop a rather more nuanced (and hopefully less cynical!) view of politics.

First, what is politics about? One of the classic answers to this question is that politics is about who gets what, when and how. On this view, politics is essentially about settling contestation over the distribution of material goods. This may have been a fair characterisation of politics in the post-World War II era – an era that saw the rolling out of progressive taxation and welfare provision by a relatively centralised state and a party political system based on a traditional left-right ideological cleavage.

Yet the notion that politics is solely, or mainly, about distribution has been challenged over the past three or more decades. The increasing salience of ‘post-ideological’ contestation around values and lifestyles suggests that politics is as much, or arguably more, about identity and culture as it is about material resources. Much of our contemporary political debate revolves around issues that are not neatly categorised as left or right, such as the environment, gender and sexual rights, immigration and security.

Political contestation is as much about cultural identity and recognition, as it is about allocating material resources

Another challenge to this classic view comes from the ‘ideational turn’ in studies of politics. Scholars have shown how politics is as much about contestation over ways of framing or narrating policy problems, as it is about struggles over distribution. Of course, the two may not be easily distinguishable: different ways of framing problems may have profound consequences for distribution. But the point is that politics is a battle of ideas, in which participants attempt to control the narrative through tapping deep-rooted values and beliefs, rather than invoking objective self-interest. This recognition of the importance of narratives chimes with debates on ‘fake news’ and the potential for significant divergence in the way rival political groups frame policy issues.

The second question is about the process of politics: how are these rival claims translated into policy? In multi-party democracies, the obvious answer to this is through winning elections, which allows parties to implement their programmes.

But this rather transactional account is misleading. Electoral competition tends to create a ‘bidding war’, in which rival parties promise ever more appealing programmes. Voters often assume that these programmes can be straightforwardly implemented – as if they are consumers choosing a product. But in reality, manifesto claims are often discarded or watered down in the face of limited resources, viability, or political veto. What results is disappointment and disillusionment in democratic politics.

One of the challenges for political science, then, is to chart and understand these changes in the nature of politics. We need to understand that political contestation is as much about cultural identity and recognition, as it is about allocating material resources and to make sense of the disappointment in politics generated by the gap between the transactional view and the messier reality. Only by elucidating these trends can we develop institutions that can renew democratic debate and trust in politics. No mean feat in the current political climate, but definitely worth our best effort.

Christina Boswell is Professor of Politics and Dean of Research of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.

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A Brief History of the Political Essay

From swift to woolf, david bromwich considers an evolving genre.

The political essay has never been a clearly defined genre. David Hume may have legitimated it in 1758 when he classified under a collective rubric his own Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. “Political,” however, should have come last in order, since Hume took a speculative and detached view of politics, and seems to have been incapable of feeling passion for a political cause. We commonly associate political thought with full-scale treatises by philosophers of a different sort, whose understanding of politics was central to their account of human nature. Hobbes’s Leviathan , Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , Rousseau’s Social Contract , Mill’s Representative Government , and, closer to our time, Rawls’s Theory of Justice , all satisfy that expectation. What, then, is a political essay? By the late 18th century, the periodical writings of Steele, Swift, Goldsmith, and Johnson had broadened the scope of the English essay for serious purposes. The field of politics, as much as culture, appeared to their successors well suited to arguments on society and government.

A public act of praise, dissent, or original description may take on permanent value when it implicates concerns beyond the present moment. Where the issue is momentous, the commitment stirred by passion, and the writing strong enough, an essay may sink deep roots in the language of politics. An essay is an attempt , as the word implies—a trial of sense and persuasion, which any citizen may hazard in a society where people are free to speak their minds. A more restrictive idea of political argument—one that would confer special legitimacy on an elite caste of managers, consultants, and symbolic analysts—presumes an environment in which state papers justify decisions arrived at from a region above politics. By contrast, the absence of formal constraints or a settled audience for the essay means that the daily experience of the writer counts as evidence. A season of crisis tempts people to think politically; in the process, they sometimes discover reasons to back their convictions.

The experience of civic freedom and its discontents may lead the essayist to think beyond politics. In 1940, Virginia Woolf recalled the sound of German bombers circling overhead the night before; the insect-like irritant, with its promise of aggression, frightened her into thought: “It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death.” The ugly noise, for Woolf, signaled the prerogative of the fighting half of the species: Englishwomen “must lie weaponless tonight.” Yet Englishmen would be called upon to destroy the menace; and she was not sorry for their help. The mood of the writer is poised between gratitude and a bewildered frustration. Woolf ’s essay, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” declines to exhibit the patriotic sentiment by which most reporters in her position would have felt drawn. At the same time, its personal emphasis keeps the author honest through the awareness of her own dependency.

Begin with an incident— I could have been killed last night —and you may end with speculations on human nature. Start with a national policy that you deplore, and it may take you back to the question, “Who are my neighbors?” In 1846, Henry David Thoreau was arrested for having refused to pay a poll tax; he made a lesson of his resistance two years later, when he saw the greed and dishonesty of the Mexican War: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” But to Thoreau’s surprise, the window of the prison had opened onto the life of the town he lived in, with its everyday errands and duties, its compromises and arrangements, and for him that glimpse was a revelation:

They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn,—a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I had never seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

Slavery, at that time, was nicknamed “the peculiar institution,” and by calling the prison itself a peculiar institution, and maybe having in mind the adjacent inn as well, Thoreau prods his reader to think about the constraints that are a tacit condition of social life.

The risk of political writing may lure the citizen to write—a fact Hazlitt seems to acknowledge in his essay “On the Regal Character,” where his second sentence wonders if the essay will expose him to prosecution: “In writing a criticism, we hope we shall not be accused of intending a libel.” (His friend Leigh Hunt had recently served two years in prison for “seditious libel” of the Prince Regent—having characterized him as a dandy notorious for his ostentation and obesity.) The writer’s consciousness of provocative intent may indeed be inseparable from the wish to persuade; though the tone of commitment will vary with the zeal and composition of the audience, whether that means a political party, a movement, a vanguard of the enlightened, or “the people” at large.

Edmund Burke, for example, writes to the sheriffs of Bristol (and through them to the city’s electors) in order to warn against the suspension of habeas corpus by the British war ministry in 1777. The sudden introduction of the repressive act, he tells the electors, has imperiled their liberty even if they are for the moment individually exempt. In response to the charge that the Americans fighting for independence are an unrepresentative minority, he warns: “ General rebellions and revolts of an whole people never were encouraged , now or at any time. They are always provoked. ” So too, Mahatma Gandhi addresses his movement of resistance against British rule, as well as others who can be attracted to the cause, when he explains why nonviolent protest requires courage of a higher degree than the warrior’s: “Non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.” In both cases, the writer treats the immediate injustice as an occasion for broader strictures on the nature of justice. There are certain duties that governors owe to the governed, and duties hardly less compulsory that the people owe to themselves.

Apparently diverse topics connect the essays in Writing Politics ; but, taken loosely to illustrate a historical continuity, they show the changing face of oppression and violence, and the invention of new paths for improving justice. Arbitrary power is the enemy throughout—power that, by the nature of its asserted scope and authority, makes itself the judge of its own cause. King George III, whose reign spanned sixty years beginning in 1760, from the first was thought to have overextended monarchical power and prerogative, and by doing so to have reversed an understanding of parliamentary sovereignty that was tacitly recognized by his predecessors. Writing against the king, “Junius” (the pen name of Philip Francis) traced the monarch’s errors to a poor education; and he gave an edge of deliberate effrontery to the attack on arbitrary power by addressing the king as you. “It is the misfortune of your life, and originally the cause of every reproach and distress, which has attended your government, that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth, until you heard it in the complaints of your people.”

A similar frankness, without the ad hominem spur, can be felt in Burke’s attack on the monarchical distrust of liberty at home as well as abroad: “If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so; and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.” Writing in the same key from America, Thomas Paine, in his seventh number of The Crisis , gave a new description to the British attempt to preserve the unity of the empire by force of arms. He called it a war of conquest; and by addressing his warning directly “to the people of England,” he reminded the king’s subjects that war is always a social evil, for it sponsors a violence that does not terminate in itself. War enlarges every opportunity of vainglory—a malady familiar to monarchies.

The coming of democracy marks a turning point in modern discussions of sovereignty and the necessary protections of liberty. Confronted by the American annexation of parts of Mexico, in 1846–48, Thoreau saw to his disgust that a war of conquest could also be a popular war, the will of the people directed to the oppression of persons. It follows that the state apparatus built by democracy is at best an equivocal ally of individual rights. Yet as Emerson would recognize in his lecture “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and Frederick Douglass would confirm in “The Mission of the War,” the massed power of the state is likewise the only vehicle powerful enough to destroy a system of oppression as inveterate as American slavery had become by the 1850s.

Acceptance of political evil—a moral inertia that can corrupt the ablest of lawmakers—goes easily with the comforts of a society at peace where many are satisfied. “Here was the question,” writes Emerson: “Are you for man and for the good of man; or are you for the hurt and harm of man? It was question whether man shall be treated as leather? whether the Negroes shall be as the Indians were in Spanish America, a piece of money?” Emerson wondered at the apostasy of Daniel Webster, How came he there? The answer was that Webster had deluded himself by projecting a possible right from serial compromise with wrong.

Two ways lie open to correct the popular will without a relapse into docile assent and the rule of oligarchy. You may widen the terms of discourse and action by enlarging the community of participants. Alternatively, you may strengthen the opportunities of dissent through acts of exemplary protest—protest in speech, in action, or both. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain the commanding instances in this regard. Both led movements that demanded of every adherent that the protest serve as an express image of the society it means to bring about. Nonviolent resistance accordingly involves a public disclosure of the work of conscience—a demonstrated willingness to make oneself an exemplary warrior without war. Because they were practical reformers, Gandhi and King, within the societies they sought to reform, were engaged in what Michael Oakeshott calls “the pursuit of intimations.” They did not start from a model of the good society generated from outside. They built on existing practices of toleration, friendship, neighborly care, and respect for the dignity of strangers.

Nonviolent resistance, as a tactic of persuasion, aims to arouse an audience of the uncommitted by its show of discipline and civic responsibility. Well, but why not simply resist? Why show respect for the laws of a government you mean to change radically? Nonviolence, for Gandhi and King, was never merely a tactic, and there were moral as well as rhetorical reasons for their ethic of communal self-respect and self-command. Gandhi looked on the British empire as a commonwealth that had proved its ability to reform. King spoke with the authority of a native American, claiming the rights due to all Americans, and he evoked the ideals his countrymen often said they wished to live by. The stories the nation loved to tell of itself took pride in emancipation much more than pride in conquest and domination. “So,” wrote King from the Birmingham City Jail, “I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.”

A subtler enemy of liberty than outright prejudice and violent oppression is the psychological push toward conformity. This internalized docility inhabits and may be said to dictate the costume of manners in a democracy. Because the rule of mass opinion serves as a practical substitute for the absolute authority that is no longer available, it exerts an enormous and hidden pressure. This dangerous “omnipotence of the majority,” as Tocqueville called it, knows no power greater than itself; it resembles an absolute monarch in possessing neither the equipment nor the motive to render a judgment against itself. Toleration thus becomes a political value that requires as vigilant a defense as liberty. Minorities are marked not only by race, religion, and habits of association, but also by opinion.

“It is easy to see,” writes Walter Bagehot in “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration,” “that very many believers would persecute sceptics” if they were given the means, “and that very many sceptics would persecute believers.” Bagehot has in mind religious belief, in particular, but the same intolerance operates when it is a question of penalizing a word, a gesture, a wrongly sympathetic or unsympathetic show of feeling by which a fellow citizen might claim to be offended. The more divided the society, the more it will crave implicit assurances of unity; the more unified it is, the more it wants an even greater show of unity—an unmistakable signal of membership and belonging that can be read as proof of collective solidarity. The “guilty fear of criticism,” Mary McCarthy remarked of the domestic fear of Communism in the 1950s, “the sense of being surrounded by an unappreciative world,” brought to American life a regimen of tests, codes, and loyalty oaths that were calculated to confirm rather than subdue the anxiety.

Proscribed and persecuted groups naturally seek a fortified community of their own, which should be proof against insult; and by 1870 or so, the sure method of creating such a community was to found a new nation. George Eliot took this remedy to be prudent and inevitable, in her sympathetic early account of the Zionist quest for a Jewish state, yet her unsparing portrait of English anti-Semitism seems to recognize the nation-remedy as a carrier of the same exclusion it hopes to abolish. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a widened sense of community is the apparently intuitive—but in fact regularly inculcated—intellectual habit by which we divide people into racial, religious, and ethnic identities. The idea of an international confederation for peace was tried twice, without success, in the 20th century, with the League of Nations and the United Nations; but some such goal, first formulated in the political writings of Kant, has found memorable popular expression again and again.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “Of the Ruling of Men” affords a prospect of international liberty that seems to the author simply the next necessary advance of common sense in the cause of humanity. Du Bois noticed in 1920 how late the expansion of rights had arrived at the rights of women. Always, the last hiding places of arbitrary power are the trusted arenas of privilege a society has come to accept as customary, and to which it has accorded the spurious honor of supposing it part of the natural order: men over women; the strong nations over the weak; corporate heads over employees. The pattern had come under scrutiny already in Harriet Taylor Mill’s “Enfranchisement of Women,” and its application to the hierarchies of ownership and labor would be affirmed in William Morris’s lecture “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil.” The commercial and manufacturing class, wrote Morris, “ force the genuine workers to provide for them”; no better (only more recondite in their procedures) are “the parasites” whose function is to defend the cause of property, “sometimes, as in the case of lawyers, undisguisedly so.” The socialists Morris and Du Bois regard the ultimate aim of a democratic world as the replacement of useless by useful work. With that change must also come the invention of a shared experience of leisure that is neither wasteful nor thoughtless.

A necessary bulwark of personal freedom is property, and in the commercial democracies for the past three centuries a usual means of agreement for the defense of property has been the contract. In challenging the sacredness of contract, in certain cases of conflict with a common good, T. H. Green moved the idea of “freedom of contract” from the domain of nature to that of social arrangements that are settled by convention and therefore subject to revision. The freedom of contract must be susceptible of modification when it fails to meet a standard of public well-being. The right of a factory owner, for example, to employ child labor if the child agrees, should not be protected. “No contract,” Green argues, “is valid in which human persons, willingly or unwillingly, are dealt with as commodities”; for when we speak of freedom, “we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying.” And again:

When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves.

Legislation in the public interest may still be consistent with the principles of free society when it parts from a leading maxim of contractual individualism.

The very idea of a social contract has usually been taken to imply an obligation to die for the state. Though Hobbes and Locke offered reservations on this point, the classical theorists agree that the state yields the prospect of “commodious living” without which human life would be unsocial and greatly impoverished; and there are times when the state can survive only through the sacrifice of citizens. May there also be a duty of self-sacrifice against a state whose whole direction and momentum has bent it toward injustice? Hannah Arendt, in “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” asked that question regarding the conduct of state officials as well as ordinary people under the encroaching tyranny of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Citizens then, Arendt observes, had live options of political conduct besides passive obedience and open revolt. Conscientious opposition could show itself in public indications of nonsupport . This is a fact that the pervasiveness of conformism and careerism in mass societies makes harder to see than it should be.

Jonathan Swift, a writer as temperamentally diverse from Arendt as possible, shows in “A Modest Proposal” how the human creature goes about rationalizing any act or any policy, however atrocious. Our propensity to make-normal, to approve whatever renders life more orderly, can lead by the lightest of expedient steps to a plan for marketing the babies of the Irish poor as flesh suitable for eating. It is, after all—so Swift’s fictional narrator argues—a plausible design to alleviate poverty and distress among a large sector of the population, and to eliminate the filth and crowding that disgusts persons of a more elevated sort. The justification is purely utilitarian, and the proposer cites the most disinterested of motives: he has no financial or personal stake in the design. Civility has often been praised as a necessity of political argument, but Swift’s proposal is at once civil and, in itself, atrocious.

An absorbing concern of Arendt’s, as of several of the other essay writers gathered here, was the difficulty of thinking. We measure, we compute, we calculate, we weigh advantages and disadvantages—that much is only sensible, only logical—but we give reasons that are often blind to our motives, we rationalize and we normalize in order to justify ourselves. It is supremely difficult to use the equipment we learn from parents and teachers, which instructs us how to deal fairly with persons, and apply it to the relationship between persons and society, and between the manners of society and the laws of a nation. The 21st century has saddled persons of all nations with a catastrophic possibility, the destruction of a planetary environment for organized human life; and in facing the predicament directly, and formulating answers to the question it poses, the political thinkers of the past may help us chiefly by intimations. The idea of a good or tolerable society now encompasses relations between people at the widest imaginable distance apart. It must also cover a new relation of stewardship between humankind and nature.

Having made the present selection with the abovementioned topics in view—the republican defense against arbitrary power; the progress of liberty; the coming of mass-suffrage democracy and its peculiar dangers; justifications for political dissent and disobedience; war, as chosen for the purpose of domination or as necessary to destroy a greater evil; the responsibilities of the citizen; the political meaning of work and the conditions of work—an anthology of writings all in English seemed warranted by the subject matter. For in the past three centuries, these issues have been discussed most searchingly by political critics and theorists in Britain and the United States.

The span covers the Glorious Revolution and its achievement of parliamentary sovereignty; the American Revolution, and the civil war that has rightly been called the second American revolution; the expansion of the franchise under the two great reform bills in England and the 15th amendment to the US constitution; the two world wars and the Holocaust; and the mass movements of nonviolent resistance that brought national independence to India and broadened the terms of citizenship of black Americans. The sequence gives adequate evidence of thinkers engaged in a single conversation. Many of these authors were reading the essayists who came before them; and in many cases (Burke and Paine, Lincoln and Douglass, Churchill and Orwell), they were reading each other.

Writing Politics contains no example of the half-political, half-commercial genre of “leadership” writing. Certain other principles that guided the editor will be obvious at a glance, but may as well be stated. Only complete essays are included, no extracts. This has meant excluding great writers—Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill, among others—whose definitive political writing came in the shape of full-length books. There are likewise no chapters of books; no party manifestos or statements of creed; nothing that was first published posthumously. All of these essays were written at the time noted, were meant for an audience of the time, and were published with an eye to their immediate effect. This is so even in cases (as with Morris and Du Bois) where the author had in view the reformation of a whole way of thinking. Some lectures have been included—the printed lecture was an indispensable medium for political ideas in the 19th century—but there are no party speeches delivered by an official to advance a cause of the moment.

Two exceptions to the principles may prove the rule. Abraham Lincoln’s letter to James C. Conkling was a public letter, written to defend the Emancipation Proclamation, in which, a few months earlier, President Lincoln had declared the freedom of all slaves in the rebelling states; he now extended the order to cover black soldiers who fought for the Union: “If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Lincoln was risking his presidency when he published this extraordinary appeal and admonition, and his view was shared by Frederick Douglass in “The Mission of the War”: “No war but an Abolition war, no peace but an Abolition peace.” The other exception is “The Roots of Honour,” John Ruskin’s attack on the mercenary morality of 19th-century capitalism . He called the chapter “Essay I” in Unto This Last , and his nomenclature seemed a fair excuse for reprinting an ineradicable prophecy.

__________________________________

From Writing Politics , edited by David Bromwich. Copyright © 2020 by David Bromwich; courtesy of NYRB Classics.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Politics of Education

Introduction, emergent critics, the first politics of education scholars, entering the mainstream political discourse, democratic governance studies, the search for community power, teacher unionism and collective bargaining, rethinking accountability, the politics of policymaking, micropolitics, curriculum politics, desegregation reevaluated, political cultures and public values, globalization, international and comparative politics, judicial and legal politics, urban mayoral influence, family choice reconsidered, research and knowledge utilization, federalism and the centralization of control, linking schools to other social services, the politics of philanthropy, related articles expand or collapse the "related articles" section about, about related articles close popup.

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Politics of Education by Douglas E. Mitchell , Lisa Romero LAST REVIEWED: 25 September 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 25 September 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0129

At its origins and until the end of the 20th century, the politics of education was primarily a product of American scholarship. The field is a relatively new arena of research and analysis. Its origins can be traced to a seminal essay in the American Political Science Review in 1959. That essay, “Toward an Understanding of Public School Politics” by Thomas Eliot ( Eliot 1959 cited under Prehistory of Education Politics ), does not so much describe the study of educational politics as issue a call to Eliot’s political science colleagues to recognize that they had seriously neglected school politics—a significant domain of policymaking and political power exertion. Of course, in the decades prior to 1960, energized political advocacies substantially influenced public and private schools. Calls by leaders of the Urban Reform and Progressive Education movements to “get politics out of the schools and get the schools out of politics” were so successful that the nation’s political scientists and public officials were thoroughly persuaded, as were ordinary citizens, that there was no such thing as a politics of education. The persuasive presentation of this ideology of a schooling system free of politics is properly seen as one of the most successful political strategies in this nation’s history. These movements, seeking reform in the governance of both cities and schools, sought to professionalize, bureaucratize, and insulate “reform” governance structures through teacher tenure and civil service for employees and by creating at-large, off-year, nonpartisan elections for school boards and city councils. The development and evolution of what we all now recognize as a richly textured, highly contested, and often partisan politics of education began to emerge in the 1950s. This new understanding of the importance of educational politics has stimulated serious scholarly interest that has become the life work of a substantial band of education and political science research scholars and analysts. To frame the study of the politics of education, it is important to review at least a few of the landmark books that describe the emergence of the modern form of free, compulsory mass public education found in all economically developed nations. In this article, the initial framework is brought into focus through an examination of the field’s prehistory, early scholars, and initial themes, and then summaries are provided of fourteen domains in which political scholars have pursued explanations of educational system development, stabilization, and change.

The Prehistory of Education Politics

One of the best places to start when trying to grasp the schooling enterprise that, after 1959, began to be seen as one of the nation’s core political institutions is Tyack 1974 , a classic description of how local, village, and community schools throughout the nation sought to become the “one best system.” This book tells the story of how schools became professionalized and bureaucratized, emerging as partners to the Industrial Revolution. Four important books elaborate the industrialization theme identified in Tyack 1974 . The first is Taylor 2010 , a classic work. Elwood Cubberley and George Strayer, two prominent professors of education, led in bringing concepts of closely managed and supervised work into the arena of the public school. Their major works are Cubberley 1916 and Strayer, et al. 1916 . Even as the bureaucratic and managerial revolutions were transforming public education, however, some critics were setting in motion a counterforce. Intellectually led by the philosopher John Dewey, educational progressives were pressing for a more humane and democratic approach to school organization and instruction. The story of this counterpressure is well told in Cremin 1961 . Among the best known and most influential of the progressives was George S. Counts. His most influential work is Counts 1932 . See also the seminal essay Eliot 1959 .

Counts, G. S. 1932. Dare the school build a new social order? New York: John Day.

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In this volume, education is seen as the most important social institution for maintaining democratic ideals and securing democratic government.

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Cremin, L. A. 1961. The transformation of the school: Progressivism in American education, 1876–1957 . New York: Knopf.

While discipline for the scientific managers meant teacher and administrator authority to control students’ behavior, education progressives saw discipline as a matter of student engagement in disciplined inquiry in which students were not compelled to learn lessons dictated by teachers. Ultimately, progressivism collapsed, however, leaving a legacy of social commitment and intellectual challenge, but without overcoming the managerial and bureaucratic legacy of Taylorism.

Cubberley, E. P. 1916. Public school administration: A statement of the fundamental principles underlying the organization and administration of public education . Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

This volume, together with Strayer, et al. 1916 , formed the persuasive argument advocating separation of educational governance from civic government, giving rise to nonpartisan school boards and professionalized school superintendents. The model embraced by these men dominated school governance throughout the 20th century. Cubberley was also influential in calling for policy decisions to be based on empirical data collection and analysis.

Eliot, T. 1959. Toward an understanding of public school politics. American Political Science Review 53.4: 1032–1051.

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This essay sparked widespread recognition of how thoroughly political scholars and politicians had neglected the political dimensions of school organization and operations, thus stimulating the formation of a politics of education scholarly movement.

Strayer, G. D., F. P. Bachman, E. P. Cubberley, W. T. Bawden, and F. J. Kelly. 1916. Some problems in city school administration . Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book.

This volume and Cubberley 1916 constitute part of a large number of writings by these two men. Cubberley and Strayer dominated the managerial reform in school administration, championing close supervision of teachers, detailed specification of tasks, and reliance on formal surveys to secure the data needed for the new management framework.

Taylor, F. W. 2010. The principles of scientific management . New York: Cosimo Classics.

Originally published in 1911. Taylor articulated a rationale guiding the development of modern industrial management. Taylor led the revolution in task fragmentation and time-and-motion studies that made mass production possible. The archetype of the new fragmented and carefully monitored worker is a pig-iron hauler identified as “Schmidt.” Taylor describes how Schmidt is coached to become more efficient by following the dictates of his supervisors.

Tyack, D. B. 1974. The one best system: A history of American urban education . Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Reaching back to 19th-century roots, Tyack traces the evolution of American public education from a rural and agrarian ethos to becoming a partner in the transformation of the United States into an urban-industrial nation. While Tyack viewed his work as tentative, it has become the most widely read interpretation of how public education evolved into the bureaucratic, professionalized, and compulsory system of the mid-20th century.

By the mid-1960s, critics of the bureaucratic, scientific management reforms began to take a more sociopolitical view, challenging the appropriateness of an industrial management orientation and seeing it as promoting professionalization and reinforcing class divisions. Two important works summarize this critical and rather pessimistic view of the school reform processes of the early 20th century. The first to be published was Callahan 1964 , in which the author complains of a business-dominated “cult of efficiency” undermining the integrity of the schools. From a somewhat different perspective, Katz 1975 , a widely read critique, claims that bureaucratic and managerial reforms were mechanisms for reinforcing social class differences and reducing the capacity of public school students to escape the confines of low-wage, working-class futures. This argument is further developed and sharpened in Katznelson and Weir 1985 . See also Berube 1995 .

Berube, M. R. 1995. American school reform: Progressive, equity, and excellence movements, 1883–1993 . Westport, CT: Praeger.

The historical evolution of the reforms and their critique is described in some detail by Berube. This work extends the analysis presented in the earlier works cited in this subsection through the 1970s and 1980s.

Callahan, R. E. 1964. Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the social forces that have shaped the administration of the public schools . Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

This biting critique of the school transformation process sees the bureaucratic and managerial transformation of the school as the result of business interest in turning the schools into worker training rather than social development institutions. Callahan reviews Frederick Taylor’s influence and then describes the impact of the scientific management revolution as turning schools into “factories” controlled by “efficiency experts.”

Katz, M. B. 1975. Class, bureaucracy, and schools: The illusion of educational change in America . New York: Praeger.

Katz sees the early education reforms as driven by social-class structures promoted by the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization brought about the separation of work and living places and made work something that “working-class” men need to be trained to perform. Thus schoolchildren need to learn social discipline: taking direction from supervisors, working independently, and producing results that are evaluated and certified.

Katznelson, I., and M. Weir. 1985. Schooling for all: Class, race, and the decline of the democratic ideal . New York: Basic Books.

Reviewing the development of free, mass, compulsory public education, these authors note that only the Roman Catholic Church had serious reservations—because their schooling involved social culture and religious enlightenment as much as preparation for work. Acceptance of the repurposing of schooling to support the Industrial Revolution was well accepted in the United States—other nations encountered greater opposition over this redirection.

Three major national events in the 1950s sharply focused political attention on US public schools and, thus, stimulated rapid development of academic and civic interest in the politics of education. These three events were, in order of their occurrence, (1) the Brown v. Board of Education landmark desegregation case unanimously handed down in 1954; (2) the Sputnik satellite launching by the Soviet Union in 1957, which led directly to the National Defense Education Act of 1959; and (3) the widespread organization of teacher unions, which led to the widely publicized New York teacher strike of 1960. These events raised fundamental issues that inspired an explosive growth in both policy proposals and scholarly inquiry into school governance and operations. First reviewed in Mitchell 1982 , these events are elaborated in the opening chapter of Mitchell 2011 . This political upheaval helped keep Flesch 1986 on the bestseller list. MacKinnon 1960 , the first book-length treatment of the politics of education, is written by a Canadian. Two years later, the first book-length treatment appeared in the United States with Bailey and Marsh 1962 , a classic. Two years later, Cahill, et al. 1964 , which provides a more positive perspective on the relationship between schools and communities, was sponsored by the University Council for Educational Administration. In the same year, Masters, et al. 1964 appeared, which constitutes a field study of education politics in three states.

Bailey, S. K., and P. E. Marsh. 1962. Schoolmen and politics: A study of state aid to education in the Northeast . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press.

This book highlights informal but highly influential linkages between schoolmen (administrators and university-based scholars) and the state legislators who control school policy and funding. It notes that the political consensus among urban reforms and progressives, which aimed at “keeping politics out of education and education out of politics,” did not preclude debates over educational programs and policies. The political character of school finance and policy decisions is highlighted.

Cahill, R. S., S. P. Hencley, University Council for Educational Administration, and University of Oregon. 1964. The politics of education in the local community . Danville, IL: Interstate Printers.

This volume marks the earliest effort to bring together diverse scholarly perspectives on local education politics. It reviews the elitist-pluralist argument regarding community power systems and pleads for more attention to how political power structures influence educational processes and outcomes. The work is not particularly strong, but it constitutes an historical marker in the evolution of the field.

Flesch, R. 1986. Why Johnny can’t read: And what you can do about it . New York: Harper & Row.

Originally published in 1955. This book combines anxiety over children’s low academic achievement with shrill criticism of teachers and administrators—charging them with both moral and intellectual weakness. This is perhaps the most widely read part of the “red scare” literature, which viewed schools as failing to provide the political and technical socialization needed to keep America safe from its political enemies and economic competitors.

Iannaccone, L. 1967. Politics in education . New York: Center for Applied Research in Education.

Focusing on local communities and school districts, Iannaccone emphasizes the abiding issues of race, religion, and rural/urban conflicts in education policy—issues he calls the political “3-Rs.” Writing with a flair for image and metaphor, he describes local schools as the “secular religion” of the nation—reflecting Americans’ abiding faith in the efficacy of education for solving social problems and guaranteeing democratic governance.

MacKinnon, F. 1960. The politics of education: A study of the political administration of the public schools . Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.

The focus of this work is on politics in the Canadian educational system, but it is presented as an introduction to education politics throughout North America. Following Callahan 1964 (cited under Emergent Critics ), MacKinnon emphasizes the dominance of education by state civic government and the influence of bureaucratic administrators. He describes the schools as institutions that are easily penetrated by special interests and family demands.

Masters, N. A., R. H. Salisbury, and T. H. Eliot. 1964. State politics and the public schools: An exploratory analysis . New York: Knopf.

This work challenges the accepted wisdom of the time that school policy is determined at the local community level by local school boards. These authors see the state as the primary actor and identify the interplay of organized educators—particularly teacher organizations—and state political officials as the primary source of education policy and practice.

Mitchell, D. E. 1982. Governance. In Encyclopedia of educational research . Edited by H. E. Mitzel, J. H. Best, W. Rabinowitz, and American Educational Research Association, 730–738. New York: Free Press.

This is the first essay to explicitly distinguish the three political democracy research models used by politics of education research scholars: informed competition, issue response, and episodic dissatisfaction. It concludes that only the episodic dissatisfaction model is able to generate evidence indicating that school governance is meaningfully democratic.

Mitchell, D. E. 2011. The surprising history of education policy, 1950 to 2010. In Shaping education policy: Power and process . Edited by D. E. Mitchell, R. Crowson, and D. Shipps, 1–22. New York: Routledge.

This chapter provides a detailed review of the impact of major political events of the 1950s on the evolution of education policy and politics through 2010. It describes the substantial restructuring of school systems and governance and traces the surprising character of these changes to social values and explanatory paradigm shifts that operate to open and close policy decision windows.

Mainstream political scientists began making serious contributions to the politics of education with the publication of Zeigler and Johnson 1972 , a state-oriented analysis of education politics. Michael Kirst began the effort to develop a comprehensive textbook aimed at supporting formal graduate-level university instruction in the politics of education with the publication of Kirst 1970 . Two years later, Kirst teamed up with Frederick Wirt to produce the first of their jointly authored politics of education text books— Wirt and Kirst 1972 . Wirt and Kirst 1972 drew heavily on the already classic work Easton 1965 . This combination of intellects (Easton’s model combined with Wirt and Kirst’s knowledge of education) served to produce the most widely used textbook in the politics of education. Utilizing the simple but elegant political systems model generated in Easton 1965 , Wirt and Kirst 1972 draws together and summarizes a very large portion of the available political research on education policy decision making published up to the time of each edition’s publication date. Wirt and Kirst 1972 has undergone several name changes, but it has been repeatedly updated every few years to take account of new scholarly work in the field. The most recent edition of this work is Wirt and Kirst 2009 . See also Peterson 1974 .

Easton, D. 1965. A systems analysis of political life . New York: Wiley.

Using an elegantly simple graphic, Easton describes how political systems work. The graphic shows citizen and interest group demands and supports flowing into a “black box” decision-making system—the governmental policymaking machinery. Entry into the system requires the approval of “gatekeepers.” Outputs in the form of programs and policies then generate a feedback loop influencing the next round of demands and supports.

Kirst, M. W. 1970. The politics of education at the local, state, and federal levels . Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

With this book, Michael Kirst became one of the most widely recognized chroniclers of how the politics of education has been evolving as a field of scholarly study. Important as this historical landmark is, this work was quickly overshadowed by his joint work with Frederick Wirt ( Wirt and Kirst 1972 ).

Peterson, P. E. 1974. The politics of American education. Review of Research in Education 2:348–389.

This comprehensive review of published politics of education research through the early 1970s identifies two basic themes: school system autonomy from civic governance and systems of school finance. The review anticipates changes in research on these two themes, development of comparisons between education policymaking with that in other domains, and shifts from tax effort to financial inequalities.

Wirt, F. M., and M. W. Kirst. 1972. The political web of American schools . Boston: Little, Brown.

This book is in two parts: (1) a comprehensive review of education politics literature and (2) three studies of important topics in American education—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Supreme Court desegregation decisions, and curriculum policy decisions. This work began the Wirt and Kirst partnership that produced the longest running, repeatedly updated politics of education textbook.

Wirt, F. M., and M. W. Kirst. 2009. The political dynamics of American education . Richmond, CA: McCutchan.

This is the latest rendition of this textbook series and probably the last (Frederick Wirt died about the time of its publication). The work continues to be the most comprehensive review of research on American public education.

Zeigler, L. H., and K. F. Johnson. 1972. The politics of education in the states . Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.

This volume uniquely focuses on policymaking processes rather than policy content. Using a general systems framework, the authors identify factors such as family income, state and local taxes, and age that predict state financial support for schools. The authors contribute to an understanding of how education policy emerges from the interplay of a complex mix of factors.

Core Themes in the Emergent Politics of Education Research

With early scholars effectively dismissing the idea that schools and politics don’t mix and the start-up of a long-running textbook for the field solidly in place, studies on the politics of education began to develop a number of core themes—areas of study investigated by multiple scholars who developed important conclusions (and some equally important points of disagreement). One of the earliest themes to develop involved divergent efforts to answer the question of whether school governance is appropriately seen as democratic (with a small “d”) in some important sense. Local democratic governance and the nature of community-based political power are among the earliest areas of concentrated study.

Recognizing that local school board trustees constitute, by far, the largest number of elected officials in the nation, early politics of education researchers were understandably drawn to the question of whether these governance structures should be viewed as engaging in policymaking processes that should be viewed as more or less democratic in content, if not always in tone. Although teacher unions were bringing about fundamental changes in local district governance and state and federal policymakers were responding energetically to watershed political events of the 1950s, studies in the 1960s and 1970s tended to see local school district governance as the litmus test for democracy. Three rather divergent definitions of democratic governance were used to frame these early governance studies. Perhaps the most common definition of democracy is that utilized in Zeigler, et al. 1974 , a study of school board elections. The authors test whether “informed competition” exists for election to school boards. The second most popular definition, appropriately designated as “issue responsiveness,” is found in the works of a number of scholars studying desegregation politics. It is clearly articulated in Crain 1968 . Though a bit more mixed in perspective, Wirt 1975 analyzes the polity of the school in carrying this issue responsiveness assessment of democratic control across a number of important policy arenas. A line of work developed by Laurence Iannaccone and one of his students, Frank Lutz, offers a third conception of democracy that emphasizes episodic dissatisfaction with established power structures. This line has received reasonably strong empirical support over the years. The groundbreaking initial formulation is found in Iannaccone and Lutz 1970 . Lutz and Iannaccone 1978 updated the argument, this time with Lutz as lead editor of the edited volume. The most recent elaborations of this dissatisfaction theory of democratic control are found in Alsbury 2003 . Alsbury 2008 brings together a group of scholars interested in school board governance. The episodic realignment, or dissatisfaction, theory of democratic control is articulated as a powerful source of political change in mainstream civic politics in the seminal work Burnham 1970 .

Alsbury, T. L. 2003. Superintendent and school board member turnover: Political versus apolitical turnover as a critical variable in the application of the dissatisfaction theory. Educational Administration Quarterly 39.5: 667–698.

DOI: 10.1177/0013161X03257141 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

Explores potential links between school board member and superintendent turnover. Qualitative and quantitative data from 176 school districts in a northwestern state support use of dissatisfaction theory as a useful tool in describing the political sequence of events in local school governance and establish the necessity of distinguishing between political versus apolitical school board member turnover.

Alsbury, T. L. 2008. The future of school board governance: Relevancy and revelation . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

This book combines theoretical debate and empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness and relevancy of school boards. Original theorists of competing school board governance theories, current researchers, and researcher/practitioners provided the latest empirical data about the role of school boards as well as applications for practitioners in the field. Contributors include scholars in the fields of political science, educational administration, and sociology.

Burnham, W. D. 1970. Critical elections and the mainsprings of American politics . New York: Norton.

Burnham looks at dramatic realignments in national politics such as the emergence of the Democratic Party’s “Solid South,” which arose in part due to efforts to resist civil rights politics, points out that American political values tend to remain constant through multiple elections over decades, and then become reformulated quite quickly when a precipitous public issue comes into focus.

Crain, R. L. 1968. The politics of school desegregation: Comparative case studies of community structure and policy-making . Chicago: Aldine.

This work does not see electoral competition as the primary concern. Rather, Crain examines how school board members respond when an issue—desegregation—arises, testing whether popular demand leads to policy change. From a democratic governance viewpoint the data in this study are disappointing. It appears that popular demand leads more to board member resistance than to policy adjustment.

Iannaccone, L., and F. W. Lutz. 1970. Politics, power and policy: The governing of local school districts . Columbus, OH: C. E. Merrill.

This book constitutes a case history of a school district undergoing significant community conflict—conflict that eventually led to the defeat of an incumbent school board member and the involuntary departure of the district superintendent. Democracy in this work is identified with school boards, which are the “fly wheels” of governance that provide stability until significant public dissatisfaction leads to political upheaval.

Lutz, F. W., and L. Iannaccone, eds. 1978. Public participation in local school districts: The dissatisfaction theory of democracy . Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

In this volume, the defeat of an incumbent board member and the involuntary turnover of the superintendent are examined as the clearest and most definitive signal of community dissatisfaction. Data reveal, however, that some leaders recognize changing values and leave voluntarily “before the flooding of the arroyo.” And some superintendents adjust priorities to comply with new community expectations. The episodic dissatisfaction view of democracy is strongly supported.

Wirt, F. M. 1975. The polity of the school: New research in educational politics . Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

The sixteen chapters in this volume offer a somewhat more mixed assessment of evidence; however, the author continues to challenge the idea that school boards are democratic institutions in the sense either that school board elections serve to winnow competing demands for school policy or that school board decisions are deliberated on the basis of assessing the degree of democratic support for policy alternatives.

Zeigler, L. H., M. K. Jennings, and G. Wayne Peak. 1974. Governing American schools: Political interaction in local school districts . North Scituate, MA: Duxbury.

This work affirms that electoral democracy is realized through informed competition among electoral candidates. This conception of democracy assumes that competing candidates for office articulate alternative visions, promise to pursue their visions, and, once elected, produce policies consistent with their campaign rhetoric. Unfortunately, however, data results find that school board candidates are ill-informed about issues, often run unopposed, and emphasize reputation rather than policy differences.

A second issue that attracted the attention of early politics of education research scholars was discovering how school communities actually do influence school politics and policy. Because the exercise of power through school board elections was found to be relatively weak and infrequent, it became important to ask how influence is generated. Kirst 1984 highlights the diverse approaches to community influence studies that had emerged in the three previous decades. In works such as Hunter 1979 , other elite theorists pursued power structures by repeatedly asking individuals to identify the most influential elites in the community. As they conducted this questioning they discovered that only a small number of individuals were named by anyone as having substantial community power. Productive applications of the approach used by elite theorists are found in Kimbrough 1964 , Lynd and Lynd 1956 (a study of Muncie, Indiana), and Vidich and Bensman 1958 . The authors of Vidich and Bensman 1958 studied a small town in upstate New York, finding a tiny handful of influential community members. In contrast, Dahl 1961 approaches community power analysis in asking how specific public policy decisions had been made and who influenced them. This approach turns up a somewhat larger number of players, but it also finds that substantial power accrues to the political officials who are confronted with competing interests and who have to build coalitions to get decisions made. Secondary analysis of these early studies tended to conclude that the sharp divergence in their conclusions was, to a significant degree, a byproduct of their methods. Hawley and Wirt 1968 brings together in a comprehensive edited volume the major themes of work on community power structure analysis. Published three years later, Summerfield 1971 adds an analysis of organizational politics to community power analyses. Acceptance of politics as an important subdiscipline was signaled in 1969 with establishment of the Politics of Education Association as a special interest group within the American Educational Research Association. This legitimation of education as a subdiscipline brought political science methods and concepts to bear on educational problems and politics of education scholars subsequently began to proliferate and to develop clusters of research scholars with shared interests.

Dahl, R. A. 1961. Who governs? Democracy and power in an American city . New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.

Robert Dahl, in a study of New Haven, Connecticut, reached a very different conclusion. He found that influence was distributed among leaders with different civic and financial interests, and that the mayor of New Haven had considerable power because he was the person negotiating among competing interests and “making deals” to get things done.

Hawley, W. D., and F. M. Wirt, eds. 1968. The search for community power . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

The twenty-four chapters in this compact volume explore the major conclusions reached by various community power researchers. They review the primary methodological and measurement issues surrounding this research stream and point toward a research agenda aimed at further clarifying questions of community power analysis. The book did more to end the search for community power than to clarify or redirect it.

Hunter, F. 1979. Community power structure: A study of decision makers . Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.

Originally published in 1953. This classic elite power structure study of Atlanta, Georgia, found education leaders absent from governance processes dominated by business and industry. Hunter identified an inner circle of powerful individuals in civic governance that consisted of fewer than 150 individuals substantially controlling land use, financial, and other key policies. Elected officials were targets of elite influence, not originators of political direction.

Kimbrough, R. B. 1964. Political power and educational decision-making . Chicago: Rand McNally.

One important contribution of the Kimbrough study was the discovery that when community power structures are undergoing change, new community organizations and, particularly, new community banks or savings and loan institutions are willing to finance new economic development ventures.

Kirst, M. W. 1984. Who controls our schools? American values in conflict . New York: Freeman.

This question had been under investigation for some time in the mainstream political science world, accompanied by a vigorous debate over whether community elites use political systems to pursue private interests or community politics involves significant debate, negotiation, and compromise, displaying democratic policies and practices. The standard bearers for the mainstream political perspective included Floyd Hunter, Robert and Helen Lynd, and Robert Dahl.

Lynd, R. S., and H. M. Lynd. 1956. Middletown: A study in American culture . New York: Harcourt, Brace.

The Lynds, studying Muncie, Indiana, found a similar narrowness in the power structure but also concluded that much of the community power in this city was controlled by a single family, the owners of Muncie’s largest manufacturing plant.

Summerfield, H. L. 1971. The neighborhood-based politics of education . Columbus, OH: Merrill.

In this little book, Summerfield details the ways in which school principals (particularly secondary school principals) are able to resist and redirect district-level initiatives by relying on their neighborhoods to pressure district officials.

Vidich, A. J., and J. Bensman. 1958. Small town in mass society: Class, power, and religion in a rural community . Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

This book highlights the increasing dependency of small towns on social, cultural, and, above all, financial inputs from urban centers. However, it also demonstrates that elite power structures are to be found even in small rural communities. In this farming community, the farm implement dealer had far more than equal influence over community policies.

Initially, scholars examining the emergence of teacher unions concentrated on the effects of unionization on school budgets and work rules. As the political significance of the New York teacher strike in 1960 became more apparent, however, political scientists began concentrating more on the political power and influence wielded by the unions. A good overview of the unionization process is found in Murphy 1990 . By the late 1980s, it had become apparent that teacher unions were key players in school reform and improvement. Eberts and Stone 1984 seeks to link unionism with school performance while McDonnell and Pascal 1988 , published by the RAND Corporation, provides a confirming analysis. That same year, Charles Kerchner began what became for him a career-long effort to rethink the character and impact of teacher unionism. With Douglas Mitchell, he authored Kerchner and Mitchell 1988 . A decade later, Kerchner, et al. 1997 provides a more fully developed framework for interpreting teacher union impacts on school policies and practices. In Canada, calls for legal and political reforms concerning the rights of teachers to organize were being voiced—see, for example, Lawton 2000 . In the early 21st century, as several states have moved to abolish the rights of teachers to unionize, works such as Cooper and Sureau 2008 have begun to examine deeper motives in the political struggle. Political criticism of teacher unionism has become shrill, however, as illustrated in Antonucci 2010 and Moe and Wiborg 2016 . Shelton 2017 provides a mid-2010s summary of this history. For an overview of the most-recent research in this area see Ingle, et al. 2018 .

Antonucci, M. 2010. The long reach of teachers unions . Education Next 10.4: 24–31.

Antonucci reports that the largest political-campaign spender in America is not a megacorporation (at least until the full effects of the Citizens United Case are made manifest); rather, it is the National Education Association (NEA). This article discusses the extent of teacher union policy influence and provides a few examples. The implicit message of excessive union influence is clear.

Cooper, B., and J. Sureau. 2008. Teacher unions and the politics of fear in labor relations. Educational Policy 22.1: 86–105.

DOI: 10.1177/0895904807311298 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

These authors see union-management relationships as typically characterized by significant fear among workers, including teachers. Teachers, feeling exploited by school systems, turned to collective bargaining to gain power over their wages and working conditions. When policies change, as under No Child Left Behind, teacher unions feel the need to keep teachers safe from exploitation and harsh criticism.

Eberts, R. W., and J. A. Stone. 1984. Unions and public schools: The effect of collective bargaining on American education . Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

This work assesses teacher union collective-bargaining effects on specific contract outcomes, principally class sizes, operating costs, and student achievement. Data presented suggest that unionism is associated with an increase of 15 percent in operating costs but no change in achievement. In light of early-21st-century political debates regarding the legitimacy of teacher unions, this assertion needs to be considered carefully.

Ingle, W. K., B. Pogodzinski, and C. E. George, eds. 2018. Politics of Education Association special issue: The politics of unions and collective bargaining in education . Education Policy 32.2.

This Politics of Education Association special issue provides an editorial overview and eight research articles covering the most-important collective-bargaining issues at the time of publication.

Kerchner, C. T., J. Koppich, and Joseph G. Weeres. 1997. United mind workers: Unions and teaching in the knowledge society . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

The authors make the case for transforming teacher unions into champions of high-quality education. By organizing teachers as knowledge workers, it is argued that unions can position themselves as leaders in educational reform. By shifting from organizing around issues of job control, work rules, and uniformity to focusing on quality and productivity, teachers may be able to direct the restructuring of public education.

Kerchner, C. T., and D. E. Mitchell. 1988. The changing idea of a teachers’ union . London: Falmer.

This book describes three distinct stages in the working relationship between teacher unions and school districts. It emphasizes an emergent third stage, anticipating long-term challenges to the established governance system. Kerchner and Mitchell recognize that teaching is not an unskilled labor compatible with the labor-management model developed in the National Labor Relations Act and routinely incorporated into teacher union laws.

Lawton, S. B. 2000. The future of teachers’ unions: A call for change. Education Canada 40.1: 22–23.

Lawton argues for four changes aimed at making Canadian teacher unions more “customer-centered” and “competitive.” First, make union membership optional. Second, sell union services to members and nonmembers. Third, lobby for school-level concerns and conduct controversial political lobbying through arms-length organizations. And fourth, take more-supportive stances toward parental concerns.

McDonnell, L. M., and A. Pascal. 1988. Teacher unions and educational reform . Santa Monica, CA: RAND.

This study reviewed participation by teacher unions in education reform, analyzing the roles played at various governmental levels through collective bargaining and political action. Three issues are addressed: (1) whether teachers secure more professional teaching conditions, (2) the political responses of unions to school reform initiatives, and (3) how the activities of teacher organizations shape efforts to restructure the teaching profession.

Moe, T. M., and S. Wiborg, eds. 2016. The comparative politics of education: Teachers unions and education systems around the world . Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

This book, following the line of argument developed by Terry Moe in a 2011 volume, presents a sharp, neoliberal critique of public-school teacher unions, arguing that these unions act on behalf of teachers’ special interests and undermine or prevent meaningful school reform.

Murphy, M. 1990. Blackboard unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980 . Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.

This book describes the history of unionization, identifying organizational and political obstacles and illustrating contradictions faced by public employees when they turn from tenure to unionization in efforts to identify rights and work rules. The story is presented chronologically, beginning with the centralization of school authority at the beginning of the 20th century and the emergence of early teacher unions opposed to centralization and professionalism.

Shelton, J. 2017. Teacher strike! Public education and the making of a new American political order . 2d ed. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.

DOI: 10.5406/illinois/9780252040870.001.0001 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

Shelton provides a mid-2010s review of the wave of teacher strikes in the 1960s and 1970s and illuminates how this tumult helped shatter the liberal-labor coalition and opened the door to the neoliberal challenge at the heart of urban education today. Drawing on a wealth of research ranging from school board meetings to TV news reports, Shelton puts readers in the middle of fraught, intense strikes in Newark, St. Louis, and three other cities where these debates and shifting attitudes played out.

Testing and Standards-Based Accountability

Since the 1990s the single biggest change in education policy has been the linking of standardized tests, curriculum delivery standards, and significant accountability sanctions for students, teachers, and schools. The point of origin for this movement should, no doubt, be seen in US National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983 . It was not long before this report’s rhetoric of “unilateral disarmament” in public education was turned into serious demands for schools, teachers, and students to improve—to make regular and substantial improvement in learning measured by standardized tests in reading and mathematics. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the so-called STEM subjects) would come into focus soon enough, but the starting emphasis was clearly on basic literacy and numeracy skills. Within five years, the shape of the “accountability movement” in public education was being recognized. By the late 1990s, concern with accountability for school performance was recognized as an international topic of political interest. As a result, Macpherson 1998 is devoted to the topic. By 2002, more-aggressive critiques of standards-based accountability systems were appearing in such works as Chatterji 2002 , a prestigious review sponsored by the American Educational Research Association. Most recently, McDonnell 2018 argues that standards- and test-based accountability policies now fully dominate curriculum policy and practice in the public schools. Nevertheless, theoretical formulations of the intellectual basis for expecting accountability systems to work began to emerge. In a more optimistic take on the issue, Fuhrman and Elmore 2004 proposes redesigning accountability systems. See also Ornstein 1988 , Herrington 1993 , and Hanushek and Raymond 2002 .

Chatterji, M. 2002. Models and methods for examining standards-based reforms and accountability initiatives: Have the tools of inquiry answered pressing questions on improving schools? Review of Educational Research 72.3: 345–386.

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Chatterji synthesizes research on standards-based reforms and accountability, attending to purposes, models, and methods of inquiry. This article concludes that research efforts on these reforms have been largely nonsystemic in design and have thereby failed to adequately help individual schools, school systems, and statewide systems to develop in directions that are consistent with the mission of the reform movement.

Fuhrman, S., and R. F. Elmore. 2004. Redesigning accountability systems for education . New York: Teachers College.

This book argues that ongoing “accountability reform” is creating changes much more demanding than initiators foresaw, giving rise to a “clear and present danger” that testing programs produce grade retention and denial of high school diplomas to disadvantaged students. The authors point to places where “mid-course corrections” in accountability programs are possible and needed.

Hanushek, E. A., and M. E. Raymond. 2002. Lessons about the design of state accountability systems. In No child left behind? The politics and practice of accountability . Edited by P. E. Peterson and M. R. West, 126–151. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

This chapter examines incentives in different state accountability systems in questioning the extent to which different accountability measures reflect quality or performance accurately. It questions the assumption that accountability systems should be expected to generate improved student outcomes. The authors conclude that more extensive and focused analysis is needed before strong statements can be made about the effectiveness of accountability for raising student performance.

Herrington, C. D. 1993. Accountability, invisibility, and the politics of numbers: School report cards and race. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Atlanta, April 1993.

Herrington studied school report cards as accountability tools, finding that parents do not pay attention to them. Moreover, most principals believe that requiring schools to report performance data by race and ethnicity is divisive, increasing racial tensions. District and community officials see report cards as helping to support accountability for performance.

Macpherson, R. J. S. 1998. The politics of accountability: Educative and international perspectives; The 1997 yearbook of the Politics of Education Association . Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

This book describes an international research project examining educational goal attainment influences. The author studies how politics contribute to the reconstruction of accountability policies in a context of conceptual disarray, divergent reforms, blunt administrative instruments, and multiple political cultures. It reports on accountability politics in the United States, Canada, England and Wales, and Australia.

McDonnell, L. M. 2018. The paradox of curriculum policy. In Shaping education policy: Power and process . 2d ed. Edited by D. E. Mitchell, D. Shipps, and R. L. Crowson, 112–129. New York: Routledge.

This chapter elegantly argues that standards- and test-based accountability substantially dominates 21st-century curriculum policy, explores the consequences of this aggressive accountability emphasis, and strikes a cautionary note regarding how long this reform effort will be pursued.

Ornstein, A. C. 1988. The evolving accountability movement. Peabody Journal of Education 65.3: 12–20.

DOI: 10.1080/01619568809538609 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

Ornstein identifies several reasons for the increase in demands for teacher and student accountability. Minimum competency testing of students and teachers is identified as the primary tool of the accountability movement, and the implications of such testing as an evaluation tool are considered.

US National Commission on Excellence in Education. 1983. A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform; A report to the nation and the secretary of education . Washington, DC: National Commission on Excellence in Education.

This report sets out in shrill and uncompromising language a sweeping indictment of the academic performance of America’s public schools. It emphasizes the need for improvement in academic attainment as a prerequisite to maintaining national security through development of a strong economy.

By 2005, federal efforts to impose accountability on the schools came in for direct criticism. A direct challenge to the viability of the accountability strategy is found in Superfine 2005 . Standards-based accountability has failed to produce the desired results. Thomas and Brady 2005 examines the history of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), up to the 2000 reauthorization of this core federal policy known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The authors question whether the accountability emphasis reflects an adequate appreciation for the complexity of school operations. Ravitch 2010 , despite this author’s earlier leadership of the standards-based accountability movement, provides a full-blown critique, arguing that this movement is undermining the curricular integrity of the schools. The Obama administration ( US Department of Education 2011 ) continued to press forward with the accountability theme, threatening direct action for schools lacking measured progress. This administration’s Race to the Top program gave lip service to local flexibility, but the enforcement focus was nevertheless more clearly articulated. Waning political support for federal accountability policies was clearly evident in the 2015 reauthorization of ESEA, now called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA, at least symbolically, dialed down federal interventionism, passing more responsibility to the individual states and promising more locally determined priorities. Egalite, et al. 2017 raises concerns about the implications of the new law for educational-equity efforts. The 2016 election of Donald Trump and his appointment of conservative stalwart Betsy DeVos to head the US Department of Education further suggests less federal concern for accountability. Well-established state and federal regulations will, however, ensure that top-down accountability will remain a reality for most public schools.

Egalite, A. J., L. D. Fusarelli, and B. C. Fusarelli. 2017. Will decentralization affect educational inequality? The Every Student Succeeds Act. In Special issue: Implications and consequences of ESSA: Exploring the changing landscape of federal policy and educational administration . Edited by E. Fernández, K. LeChasseur, and J. Weiner. Educational Administration Quarterly 53.5: 757–781.

DOI: 10.1177/0013161X17735869 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

This article summarizes key provisions of ESSA, including the increased authority and flexibility it provides to states and new limits it places on federal and executive intervention, effectively loosening the coupling between state and federal education policy. The authors raise questions about the law’s implications for educational equality.

Ravitch, D. 2010. The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education . New York: Basic Books.

In this book, award-winning author, public intellectual, and former assistant secretary of education Diane Ravitch critiques a lifetime’s worth of school reforms and reveals the simple—yet difficult—truth that policies she spent years promoting are not those needed to create actual change in public schools.

Superfine, B. M. 2005. The politics of accountability: The rise and fall of Goals 2000. American Journal of Education 112.1: 10–43.

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Superfine traces the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the passage of the Goals 2000: Education America Act, laws expected to support the development of standards-based, systemic reforms in the states. Superfine argues that these laws faced serious implementation problems and that similar problems were appearing in the implementation of NCLB ESEA reauthorization.

Thomas, J. Y., and K. P. Brady. 2005. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act at 40: Equity, accountability, and the evolving federal role in public education. Review of Research in Education 29:51–67.

DOI: 10.3102/0091732X029001051 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

This article traces the history of the ESEA, focusing attention on related educational reform movements. The authors examine the complex issues involved in responding to changing needs among underserved schoolchildren. They argue that the accountability requirements under ESEA were developed without an adequate understanding of the complex issues involved in serving disadvantaged schoolchildren.

US Department of Education. 2011. Fair, flexible and focused: President Obama’s blueprint for accountability . Washington, DC: US Department of Education.

This report argues that NCLB has helped focus attention on student achievement, emphasizing the achievement gap. The report notes NCLB’s flaws, and the authors argue that President Obama’s blueprint will fix them by (1) asking states to set standards, (2) creating accountability systems that recognize growth and progress, (3) providing local flexibility, and (4) carrying out interventions in schools without demonstrated progress.

Politics and policy are not easily distinguished. Changes in social programs, governance structures, and organizational institutions are typically seen as policy changes, but many times they are changes made in order to alter the political balance of power, or they even constitute exercises in political coercion undertaken to defeat or bypass a political opponent. Viewed broadly, every political action has some kind of policy consequence and every policy emerges from some political process. Since the 1990s, policy analysis and political analysis have tended to become separate domains of scholarly activity, however, and analyzing the politics of decision making in various policy domains has been a major growth industry. This development is clearly evident in the insightful Kingdon 1984 . By the mid-1990s, leading politics of education scholars were hard at work trying to determine what characteristics of schools and communities were most likely to facilitate or inhibit effective policy implementation. An excellent introductory essay is Cibulka 1994 . Crowson, et al. 1996 both illustrates this shift in attention and constructively elaborates the institutional features of schools most important to policy implementation. Fifteen years later, the focus on understanding the organizational and social forces controlling education policy implementation is revisited in Mitchell, et al. 2011 . Jennings 2011 reminds us that, going into the 2012 election cycle, policy and politics were more entangled than ever in federal policy. The most recent comprehensive treatment of the politics of education policy formation is Mitchell, et al. 2018 .

Cibulka, J. G. 1994. Policy analysis and the study of the politics of education. Journal of Education Policy 9.5–6: 105–125.

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Declaring the study of educational politics in the United States to be locked within an intellectual straightjacket variously called pluralism, pragmatism, or behavioral science, Cibulka sees a shift from a behavioral paradigm to a policy paradigm. He discusses various policy research and analysis streams and the contributions of educational politics study to policy research, and he draws attention to other challenges.

Crowson, R. L., W. L. Boyd, H. B. Mawhinney, and Politics of Education Association, eds. 1996. The politics of education and the new institutionalism: Reinventing the American school; The 1995 yearbook of the Politics of Education Association . Education Policy Perspectives. Washington, DC: Falmer.

Noting that an avalanche of education reforms associated with the 1983 Nation at Risk report failed to produce much real change, the authors in this volume argue that these reforms misunderstood the institutional character of the public schools. This failure to understand the nature of school organizations is leading scholars trained in politics to turn to organizational sociology for new ways of thinking about reform.

Jennings, J. 2011. The policy and politics of rewriting the nation’s main education law. Phi Delta Kappan 92.4: 44–49.

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This applied view of the relationship between policy and politics analyzes the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Contentious issue debates are seen as linked to the 2012 elections. Renewal is threatened by the continuing failure of Republicans to work with Democrats. Also, national education organizations and newer reform groups may or may not support compromises.

Kingdon, J. W. 1984. Agendas, alternatives, and public policies . Boston: Little, Brown.

Observing that political systems attend to only a fraction of public problems easily recognized as important, Kingdon examines how policy problems enter political agendas and where the policy options for addressing them arise. Using the metaphor of opening and closing windows of opportunity, Kingdon shows that three streams—problem definition, policy development, and political opportunity—must converge for policies to be enacted.

Mitchell, D. E., R. L. Crowson, and D. Shipps, eds. 2011. Shaping education policy: Power and process . New York: Routledge.

This book provides an overview of education politics and policy during a turbulent period in American history. The twenty scholars contributing to this effort review the history of education policy to explain the political powers and processes that have influenced education, including the civil rights movement, federal involvement, the accountability movement, family choice, and the development of nationalization and globalization of education.

Mitchell, D. E., D. Shipps, and R. L. Crowson, eds. 2018. Shaping education policy: Power and process . 2d ed. New York: Routledge.

This substantially updated edition interprets political forces at work in several new topical areas, including a review of progressivism, examination of the politics of philanthropy, school-to-college disconnects, and locally based cross-sector collaboration.

In the late 20th century the study of micropolitics emerged as a relatively important topic in the American politics of education. The concept borrows loosely from the field of economics, where macrostudies of the behavior of an entire system are distinguished from microstudies of individual economic actors acting within the system. The parallelism is not perfect, because micropolitics in education often is used to mean only a focus on a small, contained political system such as a school or community in order to separate this small-scale arena from the larger arena of school politics. Individual actors are typically the focus of attention, but their action is seen in the context of a small social unit. The earliest published reference to this kind of study is House 1976 . In 1991, the journal Education and Urban Society produced a special issue devoted to micropolitics, which includes Iannaccone 1991 , Willower 1991 , and Marshall and Scribner 1991 . Blase 1991 is an edited book-length treatment of the same subject. House 1998 revisits the author’s earlier work on politics at the microlevel. Micropolitical analyses are typically American, but attention to this level in the politics of education is occasionally found in other countries. For example, Vann 1999 reviews the UK scene. Scholarly use of the micropolitical construct has declined in the early 21st century, perhaps due to emergence of a clearer distinction between civil society (where political actions are more micro in scope) and political regimes (where macro political is the norm).

Blase, J., ed. 1991. The politics of life in schools: Power, conflict, and cooperation . Newbury Park, CA: Corwin.

This book presents nine qualitative studies of school-level micropolitics. Empirical data illuminate formal and informal processes and structures constituting everyday political life in the schools. The studies explore how individuals and groups use power to achieve goals and the consequences of its use for others. Studies were conducted in school settings in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.

House, E. R. 1976. The micropolitics of innovation: Nine propositions. Phi Delta Kappan 57.5: 337–340.

This work presents propositions dealing with communication and implementation of innovations, but it does not represent an empirical study of micropolitics. More than twenty years later, however, House returns to this theme with what is arguably the most sophisticated take on micropolitics to date (see House 1998 ).

House, E. R. 1998. Schools for sale: Why free market policies won’t improve America’s schools, and what will . New York: Teachers College.

This book emphasizes the importance of “transaction costs” in undermining school reforms. Relying on Williamson’s work, House identifies the importance of three types of transaction costs: (1) opportunistic avoidance of reform demands, (2) specific assets made less valuable in the reform setting, and (3) bounded rationality limiting the ability to understand expectations. Transaction costs are rarely considered leading to underestimation of reform costs.

Iannaccone, L. 1991. Micropolitics of education: What and why. Education and Urban Society 23.4: 465–471.

DOI: 10.1177/0013124591023004008 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

Iannaccone argues that a micropolitical reference frame is needed to guide educational research. He illustrates the importance of this perspective by highlighting the stratified structure of statuses in school organizations—status differentials that tend to create caste-type social structures.

Marshall, C., and J. D. Scribner. 1991. “It’s all political”: Inquiry into the micropolitics of education. Education and Urban Society 23.4: 347–355.

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Marshall and Scribner summarize prior research into the micropolitics of education. They identify as core themes in this work: ideologies/values of teacher/administrator subsystems, bureaucratic myths, policy remaking in site-level implementation, bias in organizational life, reality creations in organizations as power studies, conflict privatization, and structures/tasks around which people/leaders/coalitions/loyalties develop.

Vann, B. J. 1999. Micropolitics in the United Kingdom: Can a principal ever be expected to be “one of us”? School Leadership & Management 19.2: 201–204.

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A principal describes her experience under the changes then-recently implemented in England and Wales. She describes leadership challenges and some strategies that use micropolitics to affect positive outcomes. She successfully employed tension and confrontation as steps toward change and encouraged participation in decision making.

Willower, D. J. 1991. Micropolitics and the sociology of school organizations. Education and Urban Society 23.4: 442–454.

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Using common sociological categories, Willower argues for a micropolitical perspective that takes into account teacher autonomy, order, time, and school administrators and the organization. From this perspective, he traces some implications for future micropolitical research.

One of the most powerful results of establishing the politics of education as a legitimate field of study in the training of educators and education policymakers was the recognition that curriculum content, previously thought to be primarily technical and based on educational psychology, came to be seen as fundamentally political and based on powerful social and political pressures seeking to use the schools for socialization and acculturation of the young. This political socialization is frequently even more important to policymakers than is the development of literacy and numeracy. Tanner 1988 is an edited volume reviewing critical issues in curriculum, commissioned by the prestigious National Society of the Study of Education. One of the nation’s leading curriculum theorists, Michael Apple, joined the discussion with Apple 1991 , which criticizes the educational goals of the conservative reform movement of the 1980s. Apple 1991 also addresses the implications of shifting curricular decision making from teachers to state legislators and local administrators. The author examines some alternatives that give poorer students access to new technologies and a broader skills base and that contribute to community development. An edited volume with provocative essays on curriculum politics, Altbach, et al. 1991 focuses sharply on the politics of curriculum and testing. Just three years later, Elmore and Fuhrman 1994 revisits curriculum politics. A British perspective on curriculum politics is found in Hargreaves, et al. 1996 . Some helpful empirical work on the consequences of alternative policy frameworks controlling curriculum exposure is found in White, et al. 1996 . A major effort to clarify the foundations of conflict over both math and reading curricula is found in Loveless 2001 . Moving away from addressing the political warfare involved in curriculum policy directly Yates and Grumet 2011 provides a detailed treatment of curriculum politics, addressing a more international perspective. McDonnell 2018 sees curriculum policy and politics through the lens of standards-based accountability policy, which the author argues now dominates curriculum policy development.

Altbach, P. G., G. P. Kelly, H. G. Petrie, and L. Weis, eds. 1991. Textbooks in American society: Politics, policy, and pedagogy . Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.

Various perspectives on the highly complex textbook debate are presented in this book, which includes essays by educators, publishers, policymakers, and scholars. Currently, the advocates of higher academic standards, coherence, and high quality occupy the strongest position in the debate.

Apple, M. W. 1991. Conservative agendas and progressive possibilities: Understanding the wider politics of curriculum and teaching. Education and Urban Society 23.3: 279–291.

DOI: 10.1177/0013124591023003005 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

Apple criticizes the educational goals of the conservative reform movement of the 1980s. He addresses the implications of shifting curricular decision making from teachers to state legislators and local administrators. And he examines some alternatives that give poorer students access to new technologies and broader skills and that enable contributions to community development.

Elmore, R. F., and S. H. Fuhrman, eds. 1994. The governance of curriculum: 1994 yearbook of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development . Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

This volume accepts the premise that the United States is moving toward a national, performance-based curriculum policy. At the time, the federal government was expected to play a role by pressuring states with national standards. The chief agents of change would be state and local constituencies. The national debate on educational standards and governance then in progress is reviewed.

Hargreaves, L., C. Comber, and M. Galton. 1996. The National Curriculum: Can small schools deliver? Confidence and competence levels of teachers in small rural schools. British Educational Research Journal 22.1: 89–99.

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This article criticizes the notion that small British schools are incapable of adjusting to demands for more-specialized instruction and other innovations. Although earlier research suggested this, more-recent data reveal a high degree of confidence and competence ratings among smaller schools. Many schools have adopted curriculum support strategies.

Loveless, T., ed. 2001. The great curriculum debate: How should we teach reading and math? Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

This collection focuses on public conflict surrounding reading and mathematics education. Thirteen chapters cover the history, theory, political conflicts, and reform strategies affecting mathematics and reading curricula. The curriculum debates are frequently called “wars” to highlight the tone of recrimination and intolerance that often accompanies policy disagreements. The chapter by Boyd and Mitchell emphasizes the global context for education curriculum politics.

In documenting the powerful link between accountability and curriculum policies, this chapter deserves attention. McDonnell argues that accountability efforts now substantially dominate 21st-century curriculum policy, and she raises questions about whether this is the intended purpose of standards and testing policies.

Tanner, L. N., ed. 1988. Critical issues in curriculum. Eighty-seventh yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I . Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

In this volume, four chapters address professionalism in curriculum development, covering history, curriculum instability, lack of knowledge application, and political pressure. Six chapters focus on issues of policy, ranging from testing to grouping and tracking. Two chapters address leadership in curriculum development. The authors were among the most respected curriculum scholars at the time.

White, P. A., A. Gamoran, J. Smithson, and A. C. Porter. 1996. Upgrading the high school math curriculum: Math course-taking patterns in seven high schools in California and New York. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 18.4: 285–307.

Building on previous work showing students enrolled in general math do not take or learn as much math as students in college-preparatory courses, the authors in this study examine course-taking patterns in seven high schools that enrolled lower-level students in higher initial math courses. Student transcripts revealed that transition math courses met with partial success, providing a common curriculum to students with diverse math preparation.

Yates, L., and M. Grumet, eds. 2011. World yearbook of education 2011: Curriculum in today’s world; Configuring knowledge, identities, work and politics . London: Routledge.

This book brings together contributions from around the world in which authors analyze and reflect on the way curriculum is configuring and reconfiguring that world.

Desegregation and the Pursuit of Equal Opportunity

Among the most agonizing and politically contested education policy decisions in America are those springing from this nation’s legacies of racial, ethnic, class, and gender biases that have worked to provide differing groups of students with access to very different qualities of educational service. The adjudication of educational rights in the United States has its historical origins in this nation’s enslavement of African Americans and in the grant of superior social, economic, and political benefits to males, property owners, and individuals without physical or mental handicapping conditions. From the founding of the nation until the Civil War, enslavement of African Americans was constitutional and defended by the courts. The politics of racial integration are described in this section, while issues related to other forms of bias are tackled in Judicial and Legal Politics . With regard to racial integration, it was not until the Brown v. Board of Education decisions in 1954 and 1955 that the Supreme Court declared racial segregation illegal. And it took two more decades before legislative and judicial decisions would provide equality of opportunity for women, language minorities, and children with various handicapping conditions. These rights were hard won. They required peaceful, but oftentimes disruptive, protests that even entailed calling out the National Guard to enforce the rights of nonwhite students to attend previously segregated schools. The achievement of equality of opportunity for various social groups is a narrative told in terms of judicial intervention and social activism. The first book-length treatment of school desegregation following the Brown decisions is Crain 1968 . Five years later, a follow-up study appeared with Kirby, et al. 1973 . During the 1970s, the focus shifted to northern and western urban school systems. A good introduction to the more complex ethnic issues involved in school integration is found in Bresnick, et al. 1978 . A similarly broad treatment of fundamental issues is found in Crain and Mahard 1982 . By the late 1980s, scholars began to document the end of substantial progress in reaching the goal of full school desegregation (as seen in Orfield 1988 ). Eight years later, Orfield, et al. 1996 is more direct in its argument.

Bresnick, D., S. Lachman, and M. Polner. 1978. Black/white/green/red: The politics of education in ethnic America . New York: Longman.

This volume covers ethnic tensions in New York schools. Examining interests separating community control advocates from integration activists, the authors describe the origins and dynamics of conflicts among black, Hispanic, and Jewish groups undergoing demographic changes. The authors tell the story of community conflict that led to reorganization of the district and brought to national prominence the leadership of Albert Shanker.

Cited in Core Themes in the Emergent Politics of Education Research addressing the nature of democratic control, it is mentioned again here for the insightful observations and statistical analyses of school integration decisions that it contains. Crain distinguishes among northern, border, and southern cities and tracks community elites, school boards, and civil rights groups. This is the most thoroughly documented study of integration before 1970.

Crain, R. L., and R. E. Mahard. 1982. Desegregation plans that raise black achievement: A review of the research . N-1844-NIE. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.

While the focus is on desegregation, this work describes specific policies that have worked to make some schools more effective. The authors identify techniques that work in all-white or all-black schools. Success includes (1) raising achievement, (2) establishing good race relations, and (3) overcoming student alienation. Success types display low correlation, indicating independent outcomes from school improvement efforts.

Kirby, D. J., T. R. Harris, and R. L. Crain. 1973. Political strategies in northern school desegregation . Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

This work expands on Crain 1968 . It looks at desegregation in ninety-one northern and western cities. Desegregation was the subject of national news, but, by 1970, desegregation pressure virtually disappeared—despite continuing racial separation. Integration efforts were abandoned because complete desegregation was unacceptable to whites, who would move to the suburbs before permitting their children to attend biracial schools.

Orfield, G. 1988. School desegregation in the 1980s. Equity and Choice 4:25–28.

Twenty years of desegregation are assessed as follows: (1) desegregation plans have been successful in many cities, (2) many schools without plans have become increasingly segregated, (3) the most desegregated schools are in northern states, (4) segregation for Hispanics is increasing, and (5) desegregation must be a concern of national politics.

Orfield, G., S. E. Eaton, and Harvard Project on School Desegregation. 1996. Dismantling desegregation: The quiet reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. New York: New Press.

This work traces judicial responses to segregation between the 1896 Plessy decision and the Missouri v. Jenkins case in 1995. The nation moved to implement desegregation only as the courts required. Desegregation was mandated between 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education , and 1973, with the Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1 mandate. By 1974, with Milliken v. Bradley concerning Detroit, the courts began to retreat.

By the late 1990s, scholars of desegregation began to question both the efficacy of judicial policymaking and the contributions of mandated school desegregation to the educational success of nonwhite students. Kirp 1997 describes the evolution of desegregation court decisions and legislative actions leading to a “retreat into legalism” as judicial interventions created a confused jumble of defiance, evasion, and delay. Hochschild and Scovronick 2003 frames the confusion in terms of a tension between private interests and public goods. Clotfelter 2004 argues that the civil rights movement produced substantial interracial exposure that was missing before the Brown decisions. But, the authors argue, white resistance blocked thorough desegregation because state and local officials abetted this resistance. Mitchell and Mitchell 2012 traces the rise and fall of desegregation court decisions, while arguing that technical and substantive issues regarding how to measure desegregation progress has prevented the courts from continuing the pursuit of social change articulated in Brown . A late 2010s review of the rise and fall of desegregation in the United States is found in Reed, et al. 2018 . A broader interpretation of current US school desegregation is found in the chapters of Bowman 2014 .

Bowman, K. L., ed. 2014. The pursuit of racial and ethnic equality in American public schools: Mendez, Brown, and beyond . East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press.

Chapters in this edited book trace desegregation policy and practice in US schools from the 1940s to the 2010s. The authors of this commemorative volume include leading scholars in law, education, and public policy, as well as important historical figures.

Clotfelter, C. T. 2004. After Brown: The rise and retreat of school desegregation . Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Clotfelter tracks the evolution of interracial student exposure in the public schools since the Brown v. Board of Education decisions. Two main conclusions are (1) interracial contact increased substantially, but (2) full integration is prevented by (a) white resistance to racially mixed schools, (b) devices used to avoid race mixing, (c) local official accommodation of white reluctance, and (d) discouragement among integration advocates.

Hochschild, J. L., and N. B. Scovronick. 2003. The American dream and the public schools . New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

This book sets the issues of racial segregation and integration in the context of tensions between private interests and public goods inherent in the “American Dream.” The private-public tension has often led to policies giving more opportunities to advantaged citizens. The authors observe that efforts to cope with racism through desegregation are over—mandatory desegregation has been a political failure.

Kirp, D. L. 1997. Retreat into legalism: The Little Rock school desegregation case in historic perspective. Political Science and Politics 30.3: 443–447.

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Kirp provides a detailed look at the judicial and legal challenges that have plagued school desegregation since Brown v. Board of Education . He maintains that from the moral high point of Little Rock, Arkansas, segregation rapidly descended into the swamp of defiance, evasion, avoidance, and delay. And he concludes that very little real progress has been made.

Mitchell, R. E., and D. E. Mitchell. 2012. The limits of desegregation accountability. In Urban education: A model for leadership and policy . Edited by K. Gallagher, R. Goodyear, D. Brewer, and R. Rueda, 186–199. New York: Routledge.

This chapter examines inconsistencies in the standard indexes used to measure desegregation and reviews judicial judgments from Plessy to the Seattle PICS case. It shows that the US Supreme Court has abandoned desegregation of public schools. In addition to loss of political will, the authors argue that confusing and inconsistent measurement of the degree of segregation has helped to undercut commitment.

Reed, D. S., T. K. Mitchell, and D. E. Mitchell. 2018. Civil rights of individuals and groups. In Shaping education policy: Power and process . 2d ed. Edited by D. E. Mitchell, D. Shipps, and R. L. Crowson, 65–93. New York: Routledge.

This chapter covers both students’ rights and school system desegregation efforts. It traces the optimistic accomplishments of the Brown v. Board of Education decisions (1954, 1955) and the gradual abandonment of that optimism over the next six decades.

One of the more recent additions to the politics of education has been an explicit recognition that political cultures serve to stabilize political systems and keep them from being fully responsive to social policy mandates and incentives. Wildavsky, et al. 1998 serves as a good anchor point for a discussion of the relationship between political culture and social policy. Wirt, et al. 1988 identifies four core cultural values that the authors see as competing for attention in a democratic polity. A more complete treatment of these values and other cultural dimensions in the formation of education policy at the state level is found in a book-length study, Marshall, et al. 1989 . A quite different set of cultural concerns with policy are found in works on the role of education in the culture of the nation. Among the most provocative of these is Gutmann 1987 , which provides an interpretation of how and why education contributes to the establishment and preservation of a democratic polity. Several scholars have attended to the role of culture and community values in the work-a-day life of the schools—see Louis 1988 , for example. Private schools, with their relative independence from public scrutiny and support, raise questions about how to understand the linkages between civic values and school curricula. Devins 1989 takes this up. Stout 1994 succinctly argues that cultural values define the content of educational politics. Mitchell 2018 outlines the ways in which disagreement about fundamental public values creates conflict and instability in education politics.

Devins, N. E., ed. 1989. Public values, private schools . London: Falmer.

This book takes as its starting point the controversy surrounding the responsibility of private education to emulate compulsory education’s role in inculcating values. Is there a duty, Devins asks, for private educational institutions to conform to constitutional norms? This book examines government regulation and resistance, legislative and judicial approaches, and issues of equality and educational effectiveness in the context of private schools.

Gutmann, A. 1987. Democratic education . Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Gutmann challenges the overemphasis in 1980s policy on using education for economic and political competition while ignoring its significance to the development and maintenance of political democracy.

Louis, K. S. 1988. Social and community values and the quality of teacher work life. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA, 5–9 April 1998.

Louis sees school value systems as influential elements in teacher working conditions. Public discourse on educational reform avoids discussion of deeply embedded values, however, limiting understanding of both academic outcomes and the quality of work in schools. A discussion of professional values compares teachers and school leaders in various countries. Value cohesiveness within communities is found to have significant effects on teachers.

Marshall, C., D. E. Mitchell, and F. M. Wirt. 1989. Culture and education policy in the American states . New York: Falmer.

This study developed methods for describing, organizing, analyzing, and predicting state cultural influences on education policy initiatives by assessing the values embraced by state-level policymakers. Data drawn from six states (Wisconsin, Illinois, California, Arizona, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania) document varied political cultures, fiscal stresses, and formal structures.

Mitchell, D. E. 2018. Progressive conflicts produced surprising policy changes. In Shaping education policy: Power and process . 2d ed. Edited by D. E. Mitchell, D. Shipps, and R. L. Crowson, 25–43. New York: Routledge.

This chapter describes competing social-science paradigms (pp. 30–36) and four core public values (pp. 36–40), showing how they influence education politics and practices.

Stout, R. T. 1994. Values: The “what?” of the politics of education. Journal of Education Policy 9.5–6: 5–20.

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Stout examines how divergent values and belief systems operate within educational politics. In doing so, he highlights five questions regarding (1) educational quality and equality, (2) schooling’s purpose, (3) curriculum decisions, (4) school policymaking, and (5) financial responsibility for schools. Value tensions raised in trying to answer these questions define much of the content in studies of micropolitics, school district politics, state politics, and national politics.

Wildavsky, A. B., S. K. Chai, and B. Swedlow. 1998. Culture and social theory . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

This collection of essays was published as a comprehensive review of Wildavsky’s insightful interpretation of the relationship between culture and social organization. The problem of culture and policy is framed in terms of group cohesion and group identity. Wildavsky sees culture as encapsulating the social values of cohesive groups and orienting these groups toward cooperation, competition, or conflict with other groups.

Wirt, F., D. Mitchell, and C. Marshall. 1988. Culture and education policy: Analyzing values in state policy systems. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 10.4: 271–284.

This article provides behavioral definitions of four basic public values—choice, quality, efficiency, and equity—in rendering them amenable to quantitative analysis. Meritocratic, egalitarian, and democratic cultures are identified through content analysis of the values in state education codes in Illinois and Wisconsin, showing that policy choices are culturally influenced. Results support Daniel Elazar’s “political culture” concept.

A substantial research literature covers international education programs and policy frameworks, utilizing a variety of theoretical frameworks. Given the extensive nature of international politics of education, we focus on K–12 (precollegiate) education, leaving the politics of higher education for future exploration. The field is dominated by, and largely a product of, European scholars. There is a long history of exporting, lending, or imposing educational systems and practices that can be traced to Western colonial imperialism of the 19th century (and even earlier). The emergence of the modern field of comparative politics is rooted in the post–World War II and 1950s era and coincides with the formation of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Education Organization (UNESCO). The introductory chapter of Mundy, et al. 2016 provides a synopsis of the historical context of the field, as well as key concepts such as policy convergence/divergence, coercion, and globalism. Early studies tended to focus on western European and North American countries or on Japan or China. The first book-length study of politics from an international perspective is MacKinnon 1960 , a study of Canadian politics. Insights from, and about, other nations began to grow during 1970s, and in the 2010s there are studies that examine a growing and diverse range of developing and industrialized nations around the globe. Some of these studies are truly comparative in nature, while others are more focused on a single country or region. For example, Carney 2009 looks at policy formation in Denmark, Nepal, and China, while Auld and Morris 2014 focuses only on England. Comparative studies that examined formal aspects of educational systems of two or more countries dominated most of the early work in the 1950s–1980s. Themes of policy lending or borrowing were central concerns. Public education was viewed as a positive, social welfare mechanism that could mitigate pressing problems, including poverty and illiteracy, and promote peace, modernization, and development. Beginning in the 1980s, growing concerns in industrial nations about declining economic growth and economic competitiveness shifted the focus and thought from education as a public good to education as human capital necessary for economic growth ( Hanushek and Woessmann 2010 ). Continuing advances in communications and technology vastly increased the global nature and discourse of educational politics. A focus on the globalization of education politics, policy, and discourse has taken center stage since the 1990s. Steiner-Khamsi 2010 discusses, and critiques, the evolution of the field of comparative education politics. Early-21st-century research emphasizes the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideology, driving the growth of market dogma, with an emphasis on privatization, choice, and competition, along with a focus on testing and measurement, “evidence-based” decision making, accountability, and standards. The growth in the number and prominence of global nongovernmental organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank, along with other advocacy networks, plays a large role in promoting neoliberal ideology. Ball 2012 highlights the oversized role that transnational organizations, corporations, and policy entrepreneurs play; using network analysis, the author traces how neoliberal enterprise works, documenting how intertwined organizations, corporations, policy entrepreneurs, and new philanthropy (seeking a return on investment), influence education policy and politics, viewing education as a marketplace and policy as profit. Mundy and Verger 2015 provides an account of the World Bank’s ascendance to its current position as a powerful player in educational agenda setting globally. The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)–based ranking system is probably the most influential global player. Meyer and Benavot 2013 , an edited book, examines the role that PISA, created by the OECD in the 1990s, plays in facilitating and compelling international comparison across countries. Nations such as Finland and Singapore that perform well on PISA are frequently identified as high-performing, world-class educational systems that can and should be emulated globally. Developing countries are often forced to adopt standards that demonstrate they are modernizing in order to qualify for economic aid ( Steiner-Khamsi 2010 ). However, many scholars point out that convergence on the level of discourse may be superficial or symbolic and should not be confused with true convergence in terms of policy enactment and educational practice ( Verger 2016 ). Other studies, such as Auld and Morris 2014 , question the validity of international benchmarks, and whether it is possible that educational systems from countries with unique cultural, historical, demographic, and economic profiles can or should be a blueprint. In terms of theoretical frameworks, researchers in the field use a broad mix, including world culture theory, path dependency and historical institutionalism, neo-institutionalism, rationalism, critical constructionism, political-cultural economy, and postcolonial theory. Qualitative research methodology dominates and ranges from single country or region case studies to multicountry comparisons and horizontal and vertical case studies. Other methodologies such as network analysis and discourse analysis are also used.

Auld, E., and P. Morris. 2014. Comparative education, the “New Paradigm” and policy borrowing: Constructing knowledge for educational reform. Comparative Education 50.2: 129–155.

DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2013.826497 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

Examines educational reform in England and documents the push, led by a network of international organizations, to adopt what is characterized by advocates as a “new paradigm” for comparative education. Indicators from test scores and data banks are used to make “evidence-based” transnational comparisons of student performance and economic outcomes to identify “world class” educational systems. Authors use discourse analysis to examine key educational documents in England that highlight this process.

Ball, S. J. 2012. Global Education Inc.: New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary . New York: Routledge.

Uses network analysis to document the role that networks of transnational, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), advocacy networks, consultants, policy entrepreneurs, private industry (“edu-businesses”) and new philanthropy play in global educational reform. These NGOs advocate, create, legitimize, and disseminate neoliberal ideology and solutions to educational and social problems.

Carney, S. 2009. Negotiating policy in an age of globalization: Exploring educational “policyscapes” in Denmark, Nepal, and China. Comparative Education Review 53.1: 63–88.

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This article explores policy implementation in three nations: Denmark, Nepal, and China. It emphasizes hyperliberalism in education, arguing that studies of education must be informed by an understanding of the nature of globalization and especially the new sociopolitical regimes it makes possible.

Hanushek, E. A., and L. Woessmann. 2010. The economics of international differences in educational achievement . NBER Working Paper w15949. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Links international variation in the labor market and economic growth to national scores on educational achievement tests (e.g., PISA, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study [TIMMS], and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study [PIRLS]). Argues that variations in human capital (cognitive skills) explains “vast” differences in economic well-being of countries.

Lingard, B., and S. Rawolle. 2011. New scalar politics: Implications for education policy. Comparative Education 47.4: 489–502.

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Argues that globalism has reallocated political authority away from the nation-state and to more global, transnational players such as OECD. Uses policy in Australia to illustrate.

This early treatment of education politics, which is mentioned also in the section First Politics of Education Scholars , is a discussion of politics in the Canadian educational system. Unlike the US pattern of separation between education and civic governance, Canadian education is dominated by state civic government, with high levels of influence accruing to bureaucratic administrators. MacKinnon sees Canadian schools as easily penetrated by special interests and family demands.

Meyer, H.-D., and A. Benavot, eds. 2013. PISA, power, and policy: The emergence of global educational governance . Oxford: Symposium Books.

The impact of PISA as a seemingly neutral tool of international comparison, and the role OECD in global educational governance, which transcends governance of nation-states.

Mundy, K., and A. Verger. 2015. The World Bank and the global governance of education in a changing world order. International Journal of Educational Development 40 (January): 9–18.

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Examines the role that the World Bank plays in global educational agenda setting. Traces the growth of the World Bank’s involvement in education from a minimal role in the 1960s to its early-21st-century position as one of the most powerful global forces in education reform policy.

Mundy, K., A. Green, B. Lingard, and A. Verger, eds. 2016. The handbook of global education policy . Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons.

This edited volume explores key issues and actors in global education policy and politics.

Rizvi, F., and B. Lingard. 2009. Globalizing education policy . London: Routledge.

Discusses the globalization of educational policy, the growth of international NGOS, and the influence of neoliberal global discourse on education policy in nation-states.

Steiner-Khamsi, G. 2010. The politics and economics of comparison. Comparative Education Review 54.3: 323–342.

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Comparative-education presidential address. Discussion of how the field of comparative education has developed over time.

Verger, A. 2016. The global diffusion of education privatization: Unpacking and theorizing policy adoption. In The handbook of global education policy . Edited by K. Mundy, A. Green, B. Lingard, and A. Verger, 64–80. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons.

DOI: 10.1002/9781118468005.ch3 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

Focuses on policy adoption of privatization reforms. Argues that policy convergence is occurring at a formal level, but that overfocusing on formal adoption obscures and deproblematizes context and complexity of actual enactment. Argues that critical constructivism or political-cultural frameworks are needed for nuanced understanding of policy adoption.

The judicial branch of government tends to be neglected in studies of the politics of education. In part this is because the common culture equates politics with the more overt struggles for power found in election or appointment of public officials, adoption of laws and regulations, formation of budgets, policy debates in the mass media, protests, or combinations of these. Neglect of judicial politics is also encouraged by judicial commitment to the doctrine of stare decisis (a belief that judicial decisions should conform to court precedents whenever possible). Neglect of judicial politics is also encouraged by an assumption that judges, once sworn into office, respond to the dictates of constitutional and statutory law without regard to their political consequences. This picture has been changing rapidly in the early 21st century, however. As symbolized in the increasingly strident partisan debates over the appointment of Supreme Court justices, political scholars are drawn to the study of the political importance of judicial processes and decisions. Jensen and Griffin 1984 draws attention to the fact that both administrative and policymaking processes have been significantly reshaped by the courts. Published two years later, Kirp and Jensen 1986 develops a more comprehensive analysis of the ways in which elaboration of schooling law and regulation have lifted into prominence the policymaking impact of court decisions. Compulsory education laws serve as the focus of Lines 1984 . A Canadian perspective is offered in Dolmage 1992 . The most thoroughgoing and detailed examination of the relationship between the judicial branch of government and the politics of education is found in Yudof, et al. 1992 , a comprehensive textbook that details the history of American education jurisprudence and provides insightful discussions of the underlying principles that can be expected to guide ongoing judicial decision making. Ruiz-de-Velasco 1998 provides an insightful review of how judicial consent decrees alter the social dynamics and political coalition building found in local school districts. Reed, et al. 2018 provides a review of judicial interventions into students’ due process and freedom-of-expression rights.

Dolmage, W. R. 1992. Interest groups, the courts and the development of educational policy in Canada. Journal of Education Policy 7.3: 313–335.

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This essay investigates the use by educational interest groups of the courts to force educational decision makers to implement policy changes in Canada. The investigation shows that the essential preconditions for establishing judicial-level educational policymaking have been met. Importantly, the author notes that many interest groups excluded from the policymaking process have the political will and resources to succeed in court.

Jensen, D. N., and T. M. Griffin. 1984. The legalization of state educational policymaking in California. Journal of Law and Education 13.1: 19–33.

Analyzes decisions of the California appellate courts and of the US Supreme Court made from 1858 to 1980 concerning education (with respect to educational policymaking).

Kirp, D. L., and D. N. Jensen, eds. 1986. School days, rule days: The legislation and regulation of education . London: Falmer.

The core thesis in this book is that the period from 1950 to 1985 brought about an explosive elaboration of school regulations and that these regulations brought into sharp relief the differences between adopting regulations and implementing them. The authors see centralized regulation as a natural reaction to local school inadequacies.

Lines, P. 1984. Compulsory education laws and their impact on public and private education . Denver, CO: Education Commission of the States.

This paper explores the implications of compulsory education for increasingly popular private schools and home instruction. Using prior research and interviews with 120 education leaders in fifteen states, the author reviews compulsory-education policies throughout the nation. The author recommends that compulsory-education requirements be kept at a minimum, and that reforms achieved through public education be so enticing that students want them.

The first half of this chapter reviews the legal theories used to adjudicate student due process and freedom-of-expression rights—the most-important student issues to reach the courts. Case law reviews serve to document the rise and fall of competing judicial theories.

Ruiz-de-Velasco, J. 1998. The politics of education in court-ordered school districts: A case study. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA, 13–17 April 1998.

This report assesses judicial-consent decrees mandating school reform, tracing judicial intervention begun in the 1990s. Though evidence that schools could achieve court reform objectives is often missing, court-supervised change may offer political benefits to client groups and school leaders alike and may address collective-action problems facing education stakeholders. Court supervision increases information flow and creates incentives for coalition building.

Yudof, M. G., D. L. Kirp, and B. Levin. 1992. Educational policy and the law . St. Paul, MN: West.

This volume, widely used in US law schools, covers the constitutional and statutory foundations of US educational policy. Court cases and commentary by leading scholars in law and education show how the rights and responsibilities of educators, students, and communities are established and enforced. Topics include compulsory education, tort liabilities, due process and freedom of expression, labor law, special education, and equality opportunity.

Urban Politics and Mayoral Control

A substantial majority of all schoolchildren are located in the central cities of large metropolitan areas. These central cities are characterized by political processes that differ substantially from the dynamics of suburban and rural areas. Peterson 1976 ably demonstrates in this delineation of big-city politics in Chicago that urban centers have strong interest groups that divide along social class and ethnic lines. Politics are complex and multifaceted; decision making follows different formats depending on the cohesiveness of interest groups and the clarity of their goals. Dawson 1984 constitutes a critical response to the popular view of the 1980s that citizen participation in urban school systems was largely symbolic and without significant policy impact. To the contrary, this study argues that in urban centers at least, participation has significant impact. By 1991, the subject of urban politics in the United States became important enough for the American Politics of Education Association to commission a yearbook devoted to this topic. Cibulka, et al. 1991 does a credible job of summarizing work on urban education politics up to that point. Clarence Stone and colleagues ( Stone 1998 ; Stone, et al. 2001 ) provide some of the most insightful analyses of urban school policy and politics. These works show just how hard it is to turn reform ideas into reform realities in the nation’s major cities. Wong and Jain 1999 adds newspaper analysis to the growing body of work seeking to account for the forces that control education politics and policy in the cities. Cibulka and Boyd 2003 raises the temperature on urban education analysis with the authors’ declaration that “time is running out” on the ability of reformers to prevent catastrophic collapse in the cities.

Cibulka, J. G., and W. L. Boyd. 2003. A race against time: The crisis in urban schooling . Westport, CT: Praeger.

After three successive waves of reform intended to turn around the dismal performance of urban schools, confidence that they can be saved is undermined by a mood of gloom and despair. The waves following the 1983 report A Nation at Risk included intensified achievement demands, restructuring school organization and governance, and radical system changes redefining schooling. A fourth wave—expanding choice—is emerging.

Cibulka, J. G., R. Reed, and K. Wong, eds. 1991. Special issue: The politics of urban education in the United States: The 1991 yearbook of the Politics of Education Association (PEA) . Journal of Education Policy 6.5.

This 1992 yearbook of the Politics of Education Association reviews urban school politics, problems, and possibilities. Twelve chapters review urban school politics, examine the condition of urban schools, and explore options for renewal. The renewal options include (1) a shift from enrollment integration to resource equalization, (2) a restructuring of federal aid, (3) decentralization of power and control, and (4) judicial delineation of rights and responsibilities.

Dawson, D. J. 1984. Community participation in urban schooling: A critical assessment. Urban Review 16.3: 177–186.

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Dawson analyzes the notion of community participation in urban education and argues against critics who hold it to be merely “symbolic.” Rather, from the perspective of a phenomenological approach grounded in an analysis of the school’s hegemonic role, community participation is seen as an emancipatory activity.

Peterson, P. E. 1976. School politics, Chicago style . Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

In this landmark study of school politics, Peterson emphasizes the role of political bargaining, finding four fundamentally different bargaining types—pluralistic, ideological, rational, and organizational. They reflect differences in cohesion among participants and in the clarity of policy options. For example, when close-knit groups have diverse goals and propose policy options clearly linked to outcomes, bargaining becomes highly ideological and contentious.

Stone, C. N., ed. 1998. Changing urban education: Studies in government and public policy . Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas.

This collection explores efforts to change urban education. Contributors show how hard it is to rearrange political relationships so that they will be conducive to school reform. Close study of major cities reveals that difficulties reflect racial and class segregation in housing, resistance to regional solutions, and jobs and economic development issues. Business involvement is seen as a source of significant leverage.

Stone, C. N., J. R. Henig, B. D. Jones, and C. Pierannunzi. 2001. Building civic capacity: The politics of reforming urban schools . Studies in Government and Public Policy. Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas.

This book examines civic capacity and urban education politics in eleven large cities. Education is caught in a complex web of policy subsystems, causing policy “reverberation” and making implementation and stabilization of change difficult. Civic mobilization analysis in the cities reveals that local history is a conditioning force, substantially influencing how political mobilization occurs.

Wong, K. K., and P. Jain. 1999. Newspapers as policy actors in urban school systems: The Chicago story. Urban Affairs Review 35.2: 210–246.

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Examines the influence of local newspapers on policy decisions related to public education, highlighting news reporting on educational issues in Chicago and applying two analytical perspectives (the pluralist bargaining and unitary actor models). Information from a database of news reports on Chicago’s educational matters by two major newspapers suggests a strong unitary tendency in news reporting by the two newspapers.

By the start of the 21st century, the role of mainstream civic governance in promoting urban education reform and improvement had become an important theme in the politics of education research literature. Kirst and Bulkley 2001 provides a broad framework for this line of scholarship, noting that big-city mayors have taken an increasingly active role in public education and that they have done so in a variety of different ways. Cuban and Usdan 2002 provides case studies of six major US cities in which various forms of mayoral influence have been chronicled. The authors find the effects to be relatively weak, however, and they are not very optimistic about their long-term impact. In Wong and Farris 2018 , the authors sound a more optimistic note, arguing that regime theory, with an emphasis on coalition building and negotiated policy decisions, indicates that the emergence of active mayoral involvement in the urban centers remains a promising source of energy and ideas for reform.

Cuban, L., and M. Usdan, eds. 2002. Powerful reforms with shallow roots: Improving America’s urban schools . New York: Teachers College.

This compendium addresses the complexities of urban school reform and shows linkages between school success and urban vitality. The work explores governance reform in six US urban centers—Chicago, Boston, Seattle, San Diego, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Except for Baltimore, where previous reforms are being reversed, cities are shifting authority from educators toward city mayors or noneducator executives (e.g., a former governor, general, or federal prosecutor).

Kirst, M. W., and K. E. Bulkley. 2001. Mayoral takeover: The different directions taken in different cities . Washington, DC: Educational Resources Information Center.

This report maps the variety of mayoral influence and control mechanisms that are currently reversing a century-long progressive view of school control as nonpartisan, professionalized, and separated from civic governance. Mayoral involvement in education policy control assumes a “new breed” of mayors is coming into office who possess a rational interest in educational improvement. The authors express limited confidence that mayoral takeover will have a substantial impact.

Wong, K. K., and E. Farris. 2018. Governance in urban school systems: Redrawing institutional boundaries. In Shaping education policy: Power and process . 2d ed. Edited by D. E. Mitchell, D. Shipps, and R. L. Crowson, 288–314. New York: Routledge.

This work explores the relationship between regime theory, with its emphasis on governing through political coalitions, and integrated governance theory, with its emphasis on establishing a single civic governing power center dominated by the mayor and city council. Wong and Farris argue that the integrated governance approach is a more promising strategy for generating effective urban schools.

Market Politics

Since the 1980s, school political decision making has moved paradoxically toward both dramatic centralization and substantial decentralization. The centralization thread is seen in dramatically expanded national-level and state-level policy controls relying on neoliberal market theories to centralize expenditure category–based fiscal controls and increased performance accountability requirements. Centralization is also supported by the realignment of school and civic governance in urban centers. At the same time, school policy control is undergoing substantial decentralization through expansion of family choice options, vouchers, and charter schools so as to allow finances to flow to private and parochial schools and end judicial enforcement of equal opportunity requirements. The result has been a rapid expansion in scholarly interest in the nature of marketplace decision making and the impact of market structures on school performance. The best early-21st-century summary of the simultaneous centralization and decentralization policy shifts is found in Malen 2011 . John Chubb and Terry Moe have had a very large impact on the decentralization of education policymaking. Beginning with their effort to provide a theoretical foundation for the finding by James Coleman and colleagues that private and Catholic schools tend to substantially outperform public schools when it comes to student achievement, these two scholars have mounted a consistent and, for many, a persuasive view that public educational systems are inherently incapable of producing the highest rates of student achievement. Their early foray into this analysis is Chubb and Moe 1985 . The argument made in Chubb and Moe 1990 is challenged directly in Rosario 1992 and challenged theoretically in Archbald 1988 . An international perspective is developed in Bondi 1991 . The underlying theory for decentralizing education policy and providing more opportunities for family choice in the provision of educational services is the theory that economic and sociological theorists refer to as “rational-choice theory.” This theory has had a broad array of defenders and critics. A good introduction to the theory and its controversial elements is Coleman and Fararo 1992 . The case of market choice dilemma for those interested in special education is addressed in Anastasiou and Kauffman 2009 . Harris, et al. 2018 provides a very readable interpretation of how market theories are reshaping education politics.

Anastasiou, D., and J. Kauffman. 2009. When special education goes to the marketplace: The case of vouchers. Exceptionality 17.4: 205–222.

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This article examines market-based policies in special education, focusing on voucher programs. It discusses school choice as the theoretical linchpin of a market model for educational reforms and shows why the market-driven rationale of vouchers erodes the public functions of special education.

Archbald, D. A. 1988. Magnet schools, voluntary desegregation, and public choice theory: Limits and possibilities in a big city school system. PhD diss., University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Archbald argues that school choice is advocated on the theory that deregulation and greater market control can restructure and improve education. While certain market strategies for improvement are worth exploring, complex production functions, unclear goals, and the political role of education in society limit the extent to which education can be understood and improved as a market.

Bondi, L. 1991. Choice and diversity in school education: Comparing developments in the United Kingdom and the USA. Comparative Education 27.2: 125–134.

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Bondi discusses the policies of choice and diversity in the United Kingdom and the United States, identifying commonalities and differences. Three factors stimulated changes: lower birth rates, public disenchantment, and expenditure cutbacks. National system contrasts are reflected in decentralization and family choice emphasis in the United States. UK policies emphasize reducing class differences; schools are thought to be classless institutions throughout US history.

Chubb, J. E., and T. M. Moe. 1985. Politics, markets, and the organization of schools. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, LA, 29 August–1 September 1985.

Presents survey results from about five hundred of the High School and Beyond schools, showing that private schools produce significantly greater gains in achievement than public schools. The authors present a comparative description of public and private schools and conclude that performance differences derive from political constraints on the public school environment.

Chubb, J. E., and T. M. Moe. 1990. Politics, markets, and America’s schools . Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

This book constitutes a provocative, widely cited challenge to public control of public schools. The authors argue that public control is incapable of stimulating reform and improvement due to a lack of incentives for excellence. The risks and benefits found in marketplace decision making create the incentives needed to stimulate fundamental change, whereas public control is cautious and captive to worker interests.

Coleman, J. S., and T. J. Fararo. 1992. Rational choice theory: Advocacy and critique . Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.

This review of rational-choice theory illuminates essential elements of the theory and the controversies surrounding its application to social analysis and policy formation. It provides an access to the attractiveness of rational-choice theory for analyzing educational policy and to critics’ beliefs that this theoretical approach risks misunderstanding central issues. A solid background for the applied work in Boyd, et al. 1994 (cited under Family Choice Reconsidered ).

Harris, D. N., J. F. Witte, and J. Valant 2018. The market for schooling. In Shaping education policy: Power and process . 2d ed. Edited by D. E. Mitchell, D. Shipps, and R. L. Crowson, 130–161. New York: Routledge.

This chapter identifies seven factors responsible for the rapid expansion of support for family choice and market-type decision making in American school systems. The authors note that the 2016 election has brought a strong advocate of voucher-based family choice into the cabinet-level position of secretary of education in the Donald Trump administration.

Malen, B. 2011. An enduring issue: The relationship between political democracy and educational effectiveness. In Shaping education policy: Power and process . Edited by D. E. Mitchell, R. L. Crowson, and D. Shipps, 23–60. New York: Routledge.

This essay carefully delineates the simultaneous centralizing and decentralizing tendencies of the previous several decades and concludes that power is not a zero-sum game in education—it is possible for multiple players to become more powerful as contexts and institutions change.

Rosario, J. R. 1992. On “politics, markets, and American schools.” Journal of Education Policy 7.2: 223–235.

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In Chubb and Moe 1990 , the authors advocate free-market principles that would give individual families the freedom to choose among competing schools. This review claims that Chubb and Moe’s empirical case is fatally flawed and that the market approach to choice they embrace threatens the ideal of a democratic education.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, politics scholars began to raise questions about whether choice theory and family choice policies could be expected to provide the kinds of school improvement originally anticipated. Boyd, et al. 1994 , while still trying to clarify how rational-choice theory should be incorporated into political analysis, began clarifying the limitations of this political model. Meyer and Boyd 2001 sharpens thinking about the limits of rational-choice policies, framing issues in an international context. Henig 1994 provides a book-length treatment of the core issues of market or rational-choice theory. An international perspective on the core issues of rational-choice theory is found in Meyer and Boyd 2001 . Finally, Henig 2009 , a contribution to the prestigious yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, returns to the issue of choice.

Boyd, W. L., R. L. Crowson, and T. van Geel. 1994. Rational choice theory and the politics of education: Promise and limitations. Journal of Education Policy 9.5–6: 127–145.

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Rational-choice theory and its three branches (game theory, collective-choice theory, and organizational economics) have altered the face of political science, sociology, and organizational theory. This paper reviews rational-choice theory, examines a small body of work that relies on the rational-choice paradigm to study educational politics, and comments on the promise and limitations of this approach.

Henig, J. R. 1994. Rethinking school choice: Limits of the market metaphor . Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Henig notes the linkage between the privatization movement and central education reform issues. The privatization movement generates persistent political pressure to shrink government and expand control by the private sector. He links expansion of parental choice to this movement, where it is made potent by linking school finance to the decisions families make regarding where their children should attend school.

Henig, J. R. 2009. The politics of localism in an era of centralization, privatization, and choice. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education 108:112–129.

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Henig challenges the wisdom of the international drift toward centralized education policymaking. He notes expansion of national policy control and a paradoxical corollary of growing market-oriented policies undermining control by local agencies. Centralizing and privatizing tendencies make local control seem inadequate and obsolete. Henig argues, however, that conclusions about the uselessness of local control are empirically suspect.

Meyer, H.-D., and W. L. Boyd, eds. 2001. Education between state, markets, and civil society: Comparative perspectives . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

This book taps a group of international scholars to examine how state policy systems and market forces differentially intersect in the control of education in European and North American nations at the turn of the 21st century. Policy frameworks in Germany, the Netherlands, England, and the United States are examined in detail. One important contribution is adding “civil society” to conceptual analyses in this policy domain.

Analysis of when and how research knowledge is utilized in the formation of education policy has been a significant topic in the study of politics generally as well as in the study of the politics of education. Wildavsky 2000 provocatively lays out the basic issues. Wirt 1980 sketches out basic issues associated with the use of social science research in the policymaking process. Mitchell 1981 is a book-length empirical study of scientific-knowledge utilization by state legislatures. And Clark and Astuto 1987 examines the role of social research in federal policymaking during the Reagan administration. By 1999, the Politics of Education Association commissioned the editors of one of their annual yearbooks to address issues of social science utilization, as provided in Cooper and Randall 1999 . Four years later, it was beginning to become evident that demands for “scientifically based” school reforms were producing highly contested claims and counterclaims in which evidence was quite clearly infused with preferred political values (as seen in Eisenhart and Towne 2003 ). Humes and Bryce 2003 brings a critical “post-structuralism” political framework to bear on essentially the same question. With increasingly diverse methods being applied to variously conceptualized educational problems and supported by an increasingly divergent set of research sponsors and interpreters, it quickly became clear that “synthesizing” various research findings was a major politics of education concern. See, for example, Andrews and Harlen 2006 . More-recent work led by the authors of Lubienski, et al. 2014 provides a summary of current issues in research utilization.

Andrews, R., and W. Harlen. 2006. Issues in synthesizing research in education. Educational Research 48.3: 287–299.

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These authors argue for synthesizing results from multiple studies to create coherent pictures of how policies are affecting practice. When studies are diverse in design and methodology, synthesis can be problematic. They present a brief review of the literature on the role of systematic reviews in education, together with a description of a staged process of systematic review.

Clark, D. L., and T. A. Astuto. 1987. The implications for educational research of a changing federal educational policy . Charlottesville, VA: Policy Studies Center of the Univ. Council for Educational Administration.

Clark and Astuto examine how social research influenced policy during the Reagan era. They see the “new federalism” in education as institutionalized, with bipartisan consensus supporting diminished federal and expanded state roles. Useful social science is narrowed and federal actions that are not research related are shaped by conservative values. They expected a reduction in research and regional laboratory support.

Cooper, B. S., and E. V. Randall. 1999. Accuracy or advocacy: The politics of research in education . Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Addresses a variety of instances of social science evidence collection and utilization in support of specific education policy options.

Eisenhart, M., and L. Towne. 2003. Contestation and change in national policy on “scientifically based” education research. Educational Researcher 32.7: 31–38.

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This work examines definitions of scientific research in legislation and policy and that are used in decisions about education programs and future education research. Different definitions of how to “base” policy on science findings, and alternative ways of combining them with public input, substantially alter research interpretations and change how they serve as the basis for adopting or operationalizing public policy.

Humes, W., and T. Bryce. 2003. Post-structuralism and policy research in education. Journal of Education Policy 18.2: 175–187.

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These authors examine some of the challenges to policy research posed by postmodernist and post-structuralist thinking. They argue that policy research poses particular problems because there must always come a point of closure on options, but researchers have difficulty bridging the relationship among research, policy, and practice.

Lubienski, C., J. Scott, and E. DeBray. 2014. The politics of research production, promotion, and utilization in educational policy. Educational Policy 28.2: 131–144.

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This article compares the role of research use in education policy to other issues, such as climate science, and highlights the growing role of intermediate actors as they shape research use. It also considers some common characteristics of these policy issues that may contribute to misuse or disuse, as well as to greater consideration of research. The authors provide an overview of the understanding of research use in education and point to the need to explore new theoretical frameworks and methodologies.

Mitchell, D. E. 1981. Shaping legislative decisions: Education policy and the social sciences . Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

This book reviews a study of social science utilization in state legislatures. Research findings are but one form of the “grounds for decision making” used by legislators to formulate their political positions. Other decision grounds include consistency with established law, interest group pressure, and trust networks among legislators. Legislators are more influenced by social scientists with whom they talk than by their scientific findings.

Wildavsky, A. B. 2000. Speaking truth to power: The art and craft of policy analysis . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Originally published in 1979. Wildavsky argues that policy research is as much art as science. Its artistic character arises because polices aim to solve problems, while science explains only how things work. He describes the policy analysis “craft,” a cycle of policy implementation turning into new problems for analysis. Policy solutions are also scientific hypotheses and represent conceptions of “how things work” that may, or may not, be true.

Wirt, F. M. 1980. Is the prince listening? Politics of education and the policymaker. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, August 1980.

Wirt explores the influence of research on educational-policy formation. After noting disunity in methodology and theory, he argues that shortcomings can be addressed using deductive theory. He sees research as political ammunition as well as an aid to problem solving and as a means of conceptualizing issues. Different types of research (descriptive, exploratory, critical, and forecasting) apply at different stages of the policy process.

In the United States, authority and responsibility for educational programs and practices have historically been highly decentralized. For a long time it was believed that the federal government had little or no responsibility for education. Until well into the 20th century, federal policymakers offered almost no fiscal support, adopted no substantial laws, and rarely discussed education as a matter of national concern. Although the states routinely incorporated education responsibilities into their constitutions, they were typically “paper tigers” when it came to education. School boards with their local roots and limited links to other political entities were formed even before some state constitutions were written, and, prior to the 1950s, they were seen as the authentic and legitimate agencies to control public education. By 1980, however, it was becoming quite clear that education policy was a national political priority. Guthrie 1981 outlines this development. Five years later, Astuto and Clark 1986 , in analyzing the Reagan administration’s approach to education policy, appears to confirm the expectation made in Guthrie 1981 . Five years later, Mitchell and Goertz 1990 constitutes a collection of essays that highlight an educational system that remains highly dispersed. Sroufe 1994 calls for increasing scholarly attention to the politics of the federal government, despite the relatively low level of federal commitment to education at that point. By the year 2000, when the American Educational Finance Association was preparing its yearbook, state-level centralization of power was widely recognized, but the return of the federal government was still off the screen. Theobald and Malen 2000 pulls together the analysis of school finance that was dominated by the question of how to balance local and state interests. The resurgence of federal-level politics is sharply delineated in DeBray 2006 . Published the next year, West and Peterson 2007 is an important work that returned attention to the state level as the authors examine the political and judicial pursuit of educational adequacy. DeBray-Pelot and McGuinn 2009 revisits federalism in the post–No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era. Malen 2011 articulates clearly the dramatic centralization of power in the hands of big-city mayors, state education agencies, and the federal government that has occurred during the previous six decades. Weiss and McGuinn 2017 provides a summary of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which moves some distance toward rebalancing state and federal power to control education policy, transferring responsibility for planning and enforcement to the states (though maintaining strong federal control over accountability). The extent or impact of this rebalancing is not yet evident in school practices.

Astuto, T. A., and D. L. Clark. 1986. The effects of federal education policy changes on policy and program development in state and local education agencies. Occasional Paper 2. Bloomington, IN: Policy Studies Center of the Univ. Council for Educational Administration.

Federal education policy during the Reagan administration emphasized procedural and substantive elements aimed at devolution of authority and responsibility from federal to state and local levels. Federal strategies included decentralization, deregulation, and diminution.

DeBray, E. H. 2006. Politics, ideology & education: Federal policy during the Clinton and Bush administrations . New York: Teachers College.

DeBray identifies the two core themes of this era as the emergence of a strong standards-based educational accountability movement and the appearance of increasingly sharp political partisanship, which interferes with effective policy development.

DeBray-Pelot, E., and P. McGuinn. 2009. The new politics of education: Analyzing the federal education policy landscape in the post-NCLB era. Educational Policy 23.1: 15–42.

DOI: 10.1177/0895904808328524 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

The authors develop a framework for thinking about education politics in the post-NCLB era, reviewing the evolution of national education policy over the previous ten years. They also analyze how the law has altered the national politics of education, including the growth and diversification of think tanks in the inter-reauthorization period. Implications for the future of federal education policy and politics are considered.

Guthrie, J. W. 1981. The evolution of federal educational policy . Paper prepared for the School Finance Project, authorized by Section 1203 of the US Congress Education Amendments of 1978 (P.L. 95-561).

Guthrie describes growth in federal money for schools during the 1960s and 1970s, labeling this the “federal era” in US education. Three initiatives are reviewed: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Compensatory and Bilingual Education Act, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. After executive and legislative actors controlled adoption of these policies, exclusion of educators backfired, yielding complaints about onerous federal regulations.

While documenting radical centralization, Malen insists that political power in education is not a zero-sum game in which increases in power for one agency or level of government necessarily mean the diminution of political power and influence by others. Malen sees power growing simultaneously in multiple places—bringing fuller control to the process rather than just creating winners and losers.

Mitchell, D. E., and M. E. Goertz, eds. 1990. Education politics for the new century: The twentieth anniversary yearbook of the Politics of Education Association . Falmer Press Education Policy Perspectives. London: Falmer.

This book describes forces shaping education politics and policy in the 1990s. Rather than federal control, these essays highlight different sources of influence. The decline in federal focus during the 1980s is reviewed, promoting educational inequality in urban schools. Local school systems are seen as disparate and incoherent in programs. Business involvement, economic rationalism, and technology utilization are growing influences.

Sroufe, G. E. 1994. Politics of education at the federal level. Journal of Education Policy 9.5–6: 75–88.

DOI: 10.1080/0268093940090509 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

Sroufe notes the federal government’s limited role in financing education since adoption of the Constitution. He urges study of federal politics because the federal government represents a singular set of institutions that are too large and noisy to ignore. This call comes just as the country began electing Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as the “education” presidents.

Theobald, N. D., and B. Malen, eds. 2000. Balancing local control and state responsibility for K–12 education . Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education.

The ten chapters of this edited book are fundamentally concerned with the issue identified in the title to the opening chapter: balancing local control and state responsibility. Increasing state-level activism is documented along with the influence of judicial action in school finance cases.

Weiss, J., and P. McGuinn. 2017. The evolving role of the state education agency in the era of ESSA and Trump: Past, present, and uncertain future. CPRE Working Paper WP 2017-1. Philadelphia: Consortium for Policy Research in Education, Univ. of Pennsylvania.

This working paper highlights key components of ESSA, noting that states have more responsibility and flexibility with this latest reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Act. The authors raise questions about the capacity and commitment of the states to provide oversight and support to districts.

West, M. R., and P. E. Peterson, eds. 2007. School money trials: The legal pursuit of educational adequacy . Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Educational adequacy lawsuits have, with little fanfare, emerged as alternative strategies for reforming education in the United States. Plaintiffs allege insufficient resources are provided to create state-guaranteed education quality, asking courts to order increased funding. Since 1985, more than thirty states have faced suits. The book examines how pervasive—and effective—this trend has become. So far, broad changes are unrealized.

The possibility and political pitfalls of asking schools to link educational with medical, social services, parks and recreation, and other civic services had been the focus of several serious politics of education scholars. Among the best works is Adler and Gardner 1995 . A second book-length treatment of this topic came three years later with Emihovich and Herrington 1997 . A more recent summary of evidence and theory concerning the linked services dialogue is provided in Crowson, et al. 2011 . A relatively optimistic picture of integrated service provision is found in Ream, et al. 2015 . A more cautious analysis of important issues arising as efforts are made to link schooling with other children’s services is contained in Reihl and Henig 2018 .

Adler, L., and S. Gardner, eds. 1995. The politics of linking schools and social services . Falmer Press Education Policy Perspectives. Washington, DC: Falmer.

This yearbook of the Politics of Education Association shows that linking schools and social services had become a nationwide and international movement by the mid-1990s. Chapters in this yearbook outline organizational, economic, and political issues and discuss important themes, including the necessity of clearly defining the ethos supporting school/social services linkages, and the central role of interpersonal ties in the collaboration process.

Crowson, R. L., C. E. Smrekar, and J. Bennett. 2011. Education as civic good: Children’s services perspectives. In Shaping education policy: Power and process . Edited by D. E. Mitchell, R. L. Crowson, and D. Shipps, 238–256. New York: Routledge.

After reviewing evidence for the effectiveness of linked services and noting the concentration of education policymaking power and authority in more-centralized governance structures, the authors argue for continued attention to the development of an integrated service delivery model, centered in the school and relying on local leadership and implementation.

Emihovich, C., and C. D. Herrington. 1997. Sex, kids, and politics: Health services in schools . New York: Teachers College.

This book examines practical, cultural, and political implications of putting health programs in schools. A study is made of three Florida school districts implementing a controversial statewide initiative; namely, health programs to reach medically underserved children and reduce teenage pregnancy. The book provides a framework for assessing whether programs are feasible, effective, and viable for meeting routine primary-care needs.

Ream, R. K., A. K. Cohen, and T. Lloro-Bidart. 2015. Whither collaboration? Integrating professional services to close reciprocal gaps in health and education. In Professional responsibility: The fundamental issue in education and health care reform . Edited by D. E. Mitchell and R. K. Ream, 287–307. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

Emphasizing the diversity in contexts for education and medical services, these authors argue for the development of a new class of professionals to serve as integrative-change agents. With this new role occupied, the authors see a positive future for linked health and education services.

Reihl, C. J., and J. R. Henig 2018. All together now: The apparent resurgence of locally based cross-sector collaboration. In Shaping education policy: Power and process . 2d ed. Edited by D. E. Mitchell, D. Shipps, and R. L. Crowson, 269–287. New York: Routledge.

Presented primarily in a case study format, this chapter examines in detail the complexities encountered in efforts to create integrated children’s services. The authors present a sobering picture of the potential roadblocks limiting success for this reform strategy.

Over the last half century philanthropic foundations and a set of private limited-liability corporations (LLCs) have emerged as substantial players in the politics of education. These players control billions of dollars in assets and annually direct programs and policy initiatives with hundreds of millions of dollars in goal-motivated incentive grants in aid. For those interested in the magnitude and character of these investments, the nonprofit Foundation Center tracks philanthropic data. An important summary of these players and their political motivations and strategies is provided in Reckhow and Snyder 2018 .

Foundation Center .

Data at this website are well organized and publicly accessible.

Reckhow, S., and J. W. Snyder. 2018. The political influence of philanthropic organizations. In Shaping education policy: Power and process . 2d ed. Edited by D. E. Mitchell, D. Shipps and R. L. Crowson, 208–237. New York: Routledge.

This chapter briefly reviews the history of education-related philanthropy and describes the substantive targets being philanthropically supported. It also describes the political affiliations of major foundations.

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What is liberalism?

Liberalism is a political and economic doctrine that emphasizes individual autonomy , equality of opportunity , and the protection of individual rights (primarily to life, liberty, and property), originally against the state and later against both the state and private economic actors, including businesses.

The intellectual founders of liberalism were the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), who developed a theory of political authority based on natural individual rights and the consent of the governed, and the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–90), who argued that societies prosper when individuals are free to pursue their self-interest within an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and competitive markets , controlled neither by the state nor by private monopolies .

In John Locke ’s theory, the consent of the governed was secured through a system of majority rule, whereby the government would carry out the expressed will of the electorate. However, in the England of Locke’s time and in other democratic societies for centuries thereafter, not every person was considered a member of the electorate, which until the 20th century was generally limited to propertied white males. There is no necessary connection between liberalism and any specific form of democratic government, and indeed Locke’s liberalism presupposed a constitutional monarchy .

Classical liberals (now often called libertarians ) regard the state as the primary threat to individual freedom and advocate limiting its powers to those necessary to protect basic rights against interference by others. Modern liberals have held that freedom can also be threatened by private economic actors, such as businesses, that exploit workers or dominate governments, and they advocate state action, including economic regulation and provision of social services , to ameliorate conditions (e.g., extreme poverty ) that may hamper the exercise of basic rights or undermine individual autonomy . Many also recognize broader rights such as the rights to adequate employment, health care, and education.

Modern liberals are generally willing to experiment with large-scale social change to further their project of protecting and enhancing individual freedom. Conservatives are generally suspicious of such ideologically driven programs, insisting that lasting and beneficial social change must proceed organically, through gradual shifts in public attitudes, values, customs, and institutions.

liberalism , political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty . As the American Revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best “a necessary evil.” Laws, judges , and police are needed to secure the individual’s life and liberty, but their coercive power may also be turned against the individual. The problem, then, is to devise a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power.

The problem is compounded when one asks whether this is all that government can or should do on behalf of individual freedom. Classical liberalism , an early form of liberalism, and modern "neoclassical liberals" (i.e.,  libertarians ), answer that it is. Since the late 19th century, however, most liberals have insisted that the powers of government can promote as well as protect the freedom of the individual. According to modern liberalism, the chief task of government is to remove obstacles that prevent individuals from living freely or from fully realizing their potential. Such obstacles include poverty , disease , discrimination , and ignorance. The disagreement among liberals over whether government should promote individual freedom rather than merely protect it is reflected to some extent in the different prevailing conceptions of liberalism in the United States and Europe since the late 20th century. In the United States, liberalism is associated with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal program of the Democratic administration of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt , whereas in Europe it is more commonly associated with a commitment to limited government and laissez-faire economic policies ( see below Contemporary liberalism ).

This article discusses the political foundations and history of liberalism from the 17th century to the present. For coverage of classical and contemporary philosophical liberalism, see political philosophy . For biographies of individual philosophers, see John Locke ; John Stuart Mill ; John Rawls .

Liberalism is derived from two related features of Western culture . The first is the West’s preoccupation with individuality, as compared to the emphasis in other civilizations on status , caste , and tradition. Throughout much of history, individuals have been submerged in and subordinate to their clan , tribe , ethnic group , or kingdom. Liberalism is the culmination of developments in Western society that produced a sense of the importance of human individuality, a liberation of the individual from complete subservience to the group, and a relaxation of the tight hold of custom, law , and authority. In this respect, liberalism stands for the emancipation of the individual. See also individualism .

Liberalism also derives from the practice of adversariality, or adversariness, in European political and economic life, a process in which institutionalized competition—such as the competition between different political parties in electoral contests , between prosecution and defense in adversary procedure , or between different producers in a market economy ( see monopoly and competition )—generates a dynamic social order. Adversarial systems have always been precarious, however, and it took a long time for the belief in adversariality to emerge from the more traditional view, traceable at least to Plato , that the state should be an organic structure, like a beehive, in which the different social classes cooperate by performing distinct yet complementary roles. The belief that competition is an essential part of a political system and that good government requires a vigorous opposition was still considered strange in most European countries in the early 19th century.

Underlying the liberal belief in adversariality is the conviction that human beings are essentially rational creatures capable of settling their political disputes through dialogue and compromise. This aspect of liberalism became particularly prominent in 20th-century projects aimed at eliminating war and resolving disagreements between states through organizations such as the League of Nations , the United Nations , and the International Court of Justice (World Court).

Liberalism has a close but sometimes uneasy relationship with democracy . At the centre of democratic doctrine is the belief that governments derive their authority from popular election; liberalism, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with the scope of governmental activity. Liberals often have been wary of democracy , then, because of fears that it might generate a tyranny by the majority. One might briskly say, therefore, that democracy looks after majorities and liberalism after unpopular minorities.

Like other political doctrines, liberalism is highly sensitive to time and circumstance. Each country’s liberalism is different, and it changes in each generation. The historical development of liberalism over recent centuries has been a movement from mistrust of the state’s power, on the grounds that it tends to be misused, to a willingness to use the power of government to correct perceived inequities in the distribution of wealth resulting from economic competition—inequities that purportedly deprive some people of an equal opportunity to live freely. The expansion of governmental power and responsibility sought by liberals in the 20th century was clearly opposed to the contraction of government advocated by liberals a century earlier. In the 19th century liberals generally formed the party of business and the entrepreneurial middle class, but for much of the 20th century they were more likely to work to restrict and regulate business in order to provide greater opportunities for labourers and consumers. In each case, however, the liberals’ inspiration was the same: a hostility to concentrations of power that threaten the freedom of individuals and prevent them from realizing their full potential, along with a willingness to reexamine and reform social institutions in the light of new needs. This willingness is tempered by an aversion to sudden, cataclysmic change, which is what sets off the liberal from the radical . It is this very eagerness to welcome and encourage useful change, however, that distinguishes the liberal from the conservative , who believes that change is at least as likely to result in loss as in gain.

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Politics and the English Language

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the permission of the Orwell Estate . If you value these resources, please consider making a donation or joining us as a Friend to help maintain them for readers everywhere. 

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad – I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen – but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien ( sic ) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate. Professor Harold Laski ( Essay in Freedom of Expression ). 2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate , or put at a loss for bewilder . Professor Lancelot Hogben ( Interglossia ). 3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? Essay on psychology in Politics (New York). 4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic Fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. Communist pamphlet. 5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens! Letter in Tribune .

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

Dying metaphors . A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution ) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on , take up the cudgels for , toe the line , ride roughshod over , stand shoulder to shoulder with , play into the hands of , no axe to grind , grist to the mill , fishing in troubled waters , on the order of the day , Achilles’ heel , swan song , hotbed . Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line . Another example is the hammer and the anvil , now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators, or verbal false limbs . These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative , militate against , prove unacceptable , make contact with , be subject to , give rise to , give grounds for , have the effect of , play a leading part ( role ) in , make itself felt , take effect , exhibit a tendency to , serve the purpose of , etc. etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break , stop , spoil , mend , kill , a verb becomes a phrase , made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove , serve , form , play , render . In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds ( by examination of instead of by examining ). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to , having regard to , the fact that , by dint of , in view of , in the interests of , on the hypothesis that ; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired , cannot be left out of account , a development to be expected in the near future , deserving of serious consideration , brought to a satisfactory conclusion , and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction . Words like phenomenon , element , individual (as noun), objective , categorical , effective , virtual , basic , primary , promote , constitute , exhibit , exploit , utilize , eliminate , liquidate , are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making , epic , historic , unforgettable , triumphant , age-old , inevitable , inexorable , veritable , are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm , throne , chariot , mailed fist , trident , sword , shield , buckler , banner , jackboot , clarion . Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac , ancien régime , deus ex machina , mutatis mutandis , status quo , Gleichschaltung , Weltanschauung , are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e ., e.g. , and etc. , there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite , ameliorate , predict , extraneous , deracinated , clandestine , sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers[1]. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing ( hyena , hangman , cannibal , petty bourgeois , these gentry , lackey , flunkey , mad dog , White Guard , etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind ( deregionalize , impermissible , extramarital , non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words . In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning[2]. Words like romantic , plastic , values , human , dead , sentimental , natural , vitality , as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living , he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy , socialism , freedom , patriotic , realistic , justice , have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy , not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot , The Soviet press is the freest in the world , The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution , are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class , totalitarian , science , progressive , reactionary , bourgeois , equality .

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes :

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit 3 above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing – no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective’ consideration of contemporary phenomena’ – would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyse these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes .

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think . If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry – when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech – it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash – as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song , the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot – it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with , is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4) the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink. In (5) words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning – they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another – but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities , iron heel , blood-stained tyranny , free peoples of the world , stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification . Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers . People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements . Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption , leaves much to be desired , would serve no good purpose , a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind , are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see: ‘(The Allies) have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write – feels, presumably, that he has something new to say – and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases ( lay the foundations , achieve a radical transformation ) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned , which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence[3], to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot , Achilles’ heel , hotbed , melting pot , acid test , veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

Horizon, April 1946

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History of Now

What Does George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Mean in 2024?

Now 75 years old, the dystopian novel still rings alarm bells about totalitarian rule

Anne Wallentine

In recent years, some conservative American groups have adopted the slogan “Make Orwell fiction again,” a line that suggests the dystopian depictions of totalitarianism, historical revisionism and misinformation found in George Orwell ’s 1984 are now reality. Liberal groups may agree with some of those concepts—but would likely apply them to different events.

Seventy-five years after its publication on June 8, 1949, Orwell’s novel has attained a level of prominence enjoyed by few other books across academic, political and popular culture. 1984 ’s meaning has been co-opted by groups across the political spectrum, and it consequently serves as a kind of political barometer. It has been smuggled behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War and used as counterpropaganda by the CIA; at moments of political crisis, it has skyrocketed to the top of best-seller lists.

The language and imagery in the novel—which Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange , once called “an apocalyptical codex of our worst fears”—have also been reinterpreted in music, television, advertisements and films, shaping how people view and discuss the terror of political oppression. The terms the book introduced into the English language, like “Big Brother” and “thought police,” are common parlance today. “ Big Brother ” is now a long-running reality TV show. 1984 -like surveillance is possible through a range of tracking technologies. And the contortion of truth is realizable via artificial intelligence deepfakes . In a world that is both similar to and distinct from Orwell’s imagined society, what does 1984 mean today?

Jean Seaton , director of the Orwell Foundation and a historian at the University of Westminster in England, says that 1984 has become a way to “take the temperature” of global politics. “It goes up and down because people reinvent it [and] because people turn to it … to refresh [their] grasp on the present. It’s useful because you think, ‘How bad are we in comparison to this?’”

In 1984 , three totalitarian states rule the world in a détente achieved by constant war. The all-seeing Party dominates a grimly uniform society in the bloc called Oceania. As a low-level Party member, protagonist Winston Smith’s job is to rewrite historical records to match the ever-changing official version of events. As a Party slogan puts it , “Who controls the past controls the future: Who controls the present controls the past.”

Winston begins to document his contrarian thoughts and starts an illicit affair with a woman named Julia, but the two are soon caught and tortured into obedience by the regime. Ultimately, Smith’s individuality and attempt to rebel are brutally suppressed. While most contemporary societies are nothing like the book’s dystopia, in the context of today’s proliferating misinformation and disinformation , the Party’s primary propaganda slogans—“War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength”—don’t seem all that far-fetched.

According to Orwell’s son, Richard Blair , the writer thought his novel would “either be a best seller or the world [would] ignore it. He wasn’t quite sure which of the two it would be.” But soon after its publication, 1984 ’s best-seller status became clear. The book has since sold around 30 million copies. It most recently returned to the top of the American best-seller list in January 2017, after a Trump administration adviser coined the doublespeak term “alternative facts.”

“It’s a very relevant book … to the world of today,” Blair says. “The broad issue [is] the manipulation of truth, something that large organizations and governments are very good at.”

Many other dystopian novels carry similar warnings. So why does 1984 have such staying power? Orwell’s novels “all have exactly the same plot,” says the author’s biographer D.J. Taylor . “They are all about solitary, ground-down individuals trying to change the nature of their lives … and ultimately being ground down by repressive authority.”

1984 , Taylor adds, is the apotheosis of Orwell’s fears and hypotheses about surveillance and manipulation: “It takes all the essential elements of Orwell’s fiction and then winds them up another couple of notches to make something really startling.” Orwell’s precise, nightmarish vision contains enough familiar elements to map onto the known world, giving it a sense of alarming plausibility.

The novel traces the dystopian future onto recognizable London landmarks. “The really scary thing for the original readers in 1949 was that although it was set in 1984, it’s there: It’s bomb-cratered, war-torn, postwar England,” says Taylor. The University of London’s Senate House inspired the novel’s “ Ministry of Truth ,” as it had housed the Ministry of Information during World War II’s propaganda push.

Born Eric Blair in 1903, Orwell had a short but prolific writing career, chronicling politics, poverty and social injustice before his early death from tuberculosis in January 1950, just seven months after 1984 ’s publication. Though an accomplished essayist, Orwell is best known for 1984 and Animal Farm , his 1945 satire of Stalinist Russia.

Born in Bengal when the region was under British colonial rule, Orwell studied at Eton College but left the school to follow his father into the civil service. He became disillusioned with the colonial British Raj while serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days . In 1927, Orwell returned to England and Europe, where he immersed himself in working-class poverty to write Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier . He fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, almost dying from a throat wound. The conflict reinforced his socialist politics : “Everything he wrote after that was against totalitarianism [and] for democracy,” Blair says.

Orwell wrote 1984 while battling tuberculosis on the Isle of Jura in Scotland, aware that his condition was deteriorating as he wrote the novel, Taylor says. Upon finishing the manuscript, he went to a London hospital for treatment, where he married editorial assistant Sonia Brownell from his hospital bed. The writer died three months later at age 46. Blair, whom Orwell had adopted with his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, shortly before her death in 1945, was 5 years old at the time.

Though Orwell described 1984 as a warning rather than a prophecy, scholars have demonstrated significant interest in mapping the author’s imaginings onto the modern world. “When I started writing, what I was involved in was something you could call ‘Orwell Studies.’ And now there's an Orwell industry,” says Taylor, who has published two biographies of the author. (His latest , released in 2023, was informed by new primary source material.)

Taylor attributes this popularity to Orwell’s “uncanny ability … to predict so many of the things that trouble us here in the 2020s.” He notes that in the United Kingdom, Orwell mainly draws political and literary audiences, while in the United States, scientific circles are increasingly curious about Orwell’s foreshadowing of modern technology and surveillance methods.

“There’s something about his work that keeps getting reinvented and reactivated” in relation to events that happened well after Orwell’s death, says Alex Woloch , a literary scholar at Stanford University. “I think of Orwell as a text that people can turn to in confronting many different kinds of political problems, and particularly propaganda, censorship and political duplicity.”

Orwell’s “main relevance in the U.S. was forged during the Cold War,” Woloch says. A democratic socialist and anti-Stalinist, Orwell was able to “represent the contradictions of the communist ideology, the gap between its self-image and its reality.” 1984 and Animal Farm “were understood as the exemplary anti-communist texts ,” embedded in U.S. curriculums and widely taught in the decades since.

“With the end of the Cold War,” Woloch adds, “Orwell’s writing could be claimed by many different people who were arguing against what they saw as various forms of political deceptiveness,” from the Marxist Black Panther Party to the ultraconservative John Birch Society .

“It’s very difficult to think of another writer who’s so much admired across all parts of the political spectrum,” Taylor says. “He’s almost unique in that way.”

Adapted to the needs of a broad range of readers, 1984 took on a life beyond its author and its pages. In her forthcoming book, George Orwell and Communist Poland: Émigré, Official and Clandestine Receptions , Krystyna Wieszczek , a research fellow at Columbia University, explores the use of 1984 as a tool of resistance. The novel “provided an easy-to-use vocabulary … that [readers] could use to name the phenomenon” of oppression, Wieszczek says. Copies were smuggled into Poland and other countries behind the Iron Curtain that divided Eastern Europe from Western Europe, some even in the diplomatic bag of a secretary to the French Embassy in Warsaw.

In the 1950s, a CIA operation sent Animal Farm and other “printed matter from the West [into communist countries] in gas-filled balloons,” Wieszczek says. But many Poles objected to this tactic, fearing a reprise of the devastating and unsuccessful 1944 Warsaw Uprising . Through distribution points across Europe, the U.S. also sent millions of copies of anti-communist literature, including 1984 , to Poland. According to Wieszczek, surveys suggest that as much as 26 percent of Poland’s adult population—around seven million people—had some access to clandestine publications in the 1980s. Polish émigré imprint s like Kultura in Paris also ensured banned publications reached audiences in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. Cheekily, one of Kultura’s editions of 1984 even used a “Soviet militant poster as a cover,” Wieszczek says.

“Many people read 1984 as a very negative, pessimistic book, but … it had a kind of liberating impact … for some readers,” she explains. They were reading a banned book about banned books that reflected, to an extent, their own circumstances.

“ 1984 is a horrible book,” Wieszczek adds. “You never forget—it stays with you, this big pressure on the chest and the stomach. But somehow, it brought hope. There was this man on other side of the Iron Curtain who understood us. … There is hope because people understand.”

A protean text for political, intellectual and underground movements, 1984 has also resonated in popular culture. Its myriad artistic interpretations are explored in Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 . The novel inspired television shows, films , plays, a David Bowie album (though Orwell’s widow, Sonia, turned down the artist’s offer to create a 1984 musical) and even a “ Victory gin ” based on the grim spirits described in the novel. It was cited in songs by John Lennon and Stevie Wonder and named by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as one of his favorite books. And its imagery continues to inform the public’s perception of what might happen if 1984 weren’t fiction after all.

In January 1984, an Apple Macintosh ad directed by Ridley Scott aired during the Super Bowl. It depicted a maverick woman smashing a Big Brother-esque screen that was broadcasting to the subordinate masses, and it ended with the tagline , “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’” The implication was that buying Apple products would set people apart from the crowd. In an Orwellian twist, although the ad positioned Apple as the underdog against the dominant IBM, the company actually had a competitive market share, claiming 25 percent to IBM’s 24 percent at the end of 1983.

While the term “Orwellian” can be used to describe Orwell’s style, “the classic use … is for politicians [who] grotesquely misuse language for ideological purposes and use language to disguise or pervert reality rather than to expose it,” Woloch says. Today, the phrase has become a “floating signifier,” Taylor says. “It’s so regularly used it doesn’t actually mean anything.” He cites a politician misusing “Orwellian” to complain about a perceived personal injustice (a canceled book contract).

“[Orwell’s] books have such widespread currency that you can use him to describe anything, really,” Taylor adds. “The word can mean anything and nothing at the same time.”

This is ironic, given how precise Orwell was about language. The reduction of language and creative thought to “ Newspeak ” in the novel figures largely in the population’s oppression. Orwell “was passionately committed to language as a contract crucial to all our other contracts,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Orwell’s Roses . He is “an exemplar of writing as the capacity to communicate other people’s experience,” Seaton says, “… so to read Orwell is, in a sense, to defend language and writing.”

Orwell’s main question, according to Woloch, “is how, as a thinking person and a fair-minded person, … do you confront the genuine pervasiveness of political problems that make up the world that we’re in?” The scholar quotes Orwell’s famous line from a 1938 New Leader essay : “It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”

“The big three themes [of 1984 ] that people ought to bear in mind,” Taylor suggests, “are the denial of objective truth, which we see everywhere about us, every war that’s currently taking place anywhere in the world and in quite a lot of domestic political situations, too; the manipulation of language … and the use of words to bamboozle people; and the rise of the surveillance society. … That to me, is the definition of the adjective ‘Orwellian’ in the 21st century.”

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Anne Wallentine | | READ MORE

Anne Wallentine is a writer and art historian with a focus on the intersections of art, culture and health. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and the Courtauld Institute of Art, she writes for outlets that include the Financial Times , the Economist , the Art Newspaper  and Hyperallergic .