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Cards In This Set
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Conflict
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Competition between opposing forces, reflecting a diversity of opinions, preferences, needs or interests.
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Cooperation
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Working together; achieving goals through collective action.
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Polis
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(Greek) City-state; classically understood to imply the highest or most desirable form of social organization.
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Polity
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A society organized through the exercise of political authority; for Aristotle, rule by the many in the interests of all.
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Anti-politics
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Disillusionment with formal or established political processes, reflected in non-participation, support for anti-system parties, or the use of direct action.
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Normative
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The prescription of values and standards of conduct; what ‘should be’ rather than what ‘is’.
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Objective
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External to the observer, demonstrable; untainted by feelings, values or bias.
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Empirical
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Based on observation and experiment; empirical knowledge is derived from sense data and experience.
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Positivism
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The theory that social, and indeed all forms of, enquiry should adhere strictly to the methods of the natural sciences.
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Behaviouralism
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The belief that social theories should be constructed only on the basis of observable behaviour, providing quantifiable data for research.
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Bias
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Sympathies or prejudices that (often unconsciously) affect human judgement; bias implies distortion (see ‘political bias’, p. 00).
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Game theory
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A way of exploring problems of conflict or collaboration by explaining how one actor’s choice of strategy affects another’s best choice and vice versa.
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Institution
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A well-established body with a formal role and status; more broadly, a set of rules that ensure regular and predictable behaviour, the ‘rules of the game’.
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Post-positivism
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An approach to knowledge that questions the idea of an ‘objective’ reality, emphasizing instead the extent to which people conceive, or ‘construct’, the world in which they live.
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Discourse
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Human interaction, especially communication; discourse may disclose or illustrate power relations.
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