What Is Politics:
- A process by which individual people with common interests and values make a decision. Politics exist because of the scarcity of resources from common wealth to the power of everyday knowledge. Politics also show competing interests and values as well as how our resources should be used.
Difference
Between Power And Authority:
- Power: The ability to do something or to make something happen
- Authority: The right to a particular action.
- Absolute Power: The ability to do as one wishes
- Persuasive Power: The ability to persuade others of the course of action
- Coercive Power: The idea that you can get what you want by pressing others using laws and penalties.
- Authority is based on the tradition of authority and authority is legitimate power for the people.
What
Is The State:
- A set of people who exercise authority, for example, the police, education and the NHS are all part of the State. The Queen is the head of the state so she has the ultimate power over everyone and everything.
What
Is A Democracy:
- Democracy is essentially “people power” with the government resting on the people with their power to vote
- The public do this directly by voting on issues
- Direct democracy: When people gather and vote directly on issues e.g referendums
- Indirect Democracy is when you get a speaker to say your point e.g elected MPs
Key
Elements Of A Modern Democracy:
- Popular control of policy making
- Open and organised opposition
- Political equality
- Political freedom
- Majority vote
- Free and fair decisions
- Law making
- A democratic political system is one in which public policies are made on a majority basis by a representative on that subject.
- They are conducted to the principle of political equality and many countries do claim that they are democratic.
- Elitism is the recognition that society should be governed by a small group.