A definition of political authority as the decision-making power granted by a population to those who govern them.
People have different requirements for how they want to be governed, as described earlier in this book (2.1). They have collective needs, for security and public services for example, which must be administered. They need to agree how these needs are to be met, and to decide who is entitled to make decisions on their behalf. The negotiation process by which they reach agreement on these topics is referred to as politics.
Michael Oakeshott defined politics as:[*]
"the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together. In this sense, families, clubs, and learned societies have their ‘politics’."
Oakeshott’s definition can apply to any group of people. Group members put pressure on each other to conform to group behaviour, as described earlier (4.3.2). The definition of political authority in this book refers to a different kind of power. It is formal, granting powers over all the other dimensions of governance: control over the “general arrangements” of the public realm. It is the focus of this chapter.
The authority of politicians to make decisions on behalf of a population, to meet collective needs, is the power to change people’s lives. Those who seek that power might have ideas about how to make people’s lives better, but some are only seeking personal advantage. Politicians are often viewed negatively – as described in Tony Wright’s article The problem of politics as a game:
“People perceive politicians to be playing a game in pursuit of political advantage rather than work earnestly to solve the issue of the day. The corrosive consequence of the game of politics is that everything that a politician says, or does, is treated with suspicion because of negative assumptions about why it is being said or done.”.
Politicians need to be given power to achieve their aims. Many of the “games” that they play are related to their attempts to gain and hold power. And they don't always offer policies that would be in the best interests of the population that they serve. That negative aspect of politics appears repeatedly in this chapter.
A political system can be thought of as providing a means of continuous negotiation between a population and the politicians to whom they entrust many governance decisions. And in this book it is asserted that political authority should always be used to serve the population. The role of politicians is described next (6.1.2).
(This is an archive of a page intended to form part of Edition 4 of the Patterns of Power series of books. The latest versions are at book contents).
[*] Oakeshott gave his definition of politics in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics. The lecture was published as Political Education, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, where the above quotation appeared on page 112.