About “Politics and Political Science” from Michael. J. Sodaro

For the American internationalist Michael Sodaro, Politics is the process by which communities pursue collective goals and address conflicts within the framework of a structure of rules and procedures of institutions, with the aim of reaching solutions and adopting applicable decisions by the state authority to the whole of society. Politics is concerned with how people organize their communities for the purpose of collectively addressing the problems that it pledges to. A community can be any collectivity of interacting individuals, from the smallest village to the world as a whole. Within the organization of states, relationships with society are established and political regimes are established, these can have democratic or dictatorial forms.

The democratic regime means that citizens have the right to determine who governs them and hold rulers responsible for the actions they undertake and, in the dictatorial regime there are a diversity of variants ranging from the dictatorship led by a single party, a charismatic leader, or military leadership or a monarchy. Although democracy and dictatorship are considered as totally opposite regimes, this can be mixed in reality. Among democratic, semi-democratic, semi-dictatorial, or dictatorial governments, they make decisions about community goals and conflict management.

Within these forms of government, a common priority objective is to deactivate the conflicts that arise within their communities. In order to achieve this, politics has to make use of negotiation as a process or through which individuals and Groups create compromises and agreements through a relatively peaceful process. And on the other hand, cohesion implies the use of force or the threat of using it.

When Political Science studies the Political behavior of elites in democracies, it tries to identify observable patterns among people who aspire to political leadership. Students of Political Science also investigate the attitudes towards politics of society and elites, they are particularly interested in the basic attitudes of people towards institutions and political representatives.

For political scientists, conflict is an essential part of reasoning the process of development of societies; power, resources, ethnic and cultural characteristics, religion, sex and gender, ideas, and values, are transcendental to analyze and understand the type of conflicts that may exist in a community.

At present, there are two aspects of Political Science research: The works that are described explain the political facts are ascribed to empirical political science, while those that speculate on the norms and values ​​according to which the political community must guarantee they are classified as normative political theory or political philosophy. Put succinctly, empirical political science is concerned with being, and normative politics with ought to be.

Political Science allows us to make sense of the many political events published daily by the media. These facts have meaning when we visualize them as guidelines, trends, general correlations or if we want to understand the meaning of the different events of political life, we must integrate them into more general processes and contexts with political science: Between the concepts of the general explanation.

In Political Science, the theory can have different meanings, the most basic refers to the thought about politics and its practice is put. Theorizing implies in this case creating generalizations about politics, the theory can also be a generalization or a set of generalizations that try to explain, and perhaps predict, relationships between variables. Within empirical political science, research approaches are given and these express a reference of what to observe when approaching reality, an approach illuminates the part of reality, it is never in its entirety. An approach does not explain anything by itself, but allows theories to be built, and a theory is a reasoned and precise speculation about the answer to a research question, and includes a statement of why that answer is the correct one. Consequently, the agility in approach is provided by the richness and validity of the theories that it allows to generate.