Political Sociology: Overview, Reading List, and Resources

Political sociology sets about exploring the relationships between politics and society.

Overview

Political sociology, with its founding development coming from the scholarship of Marx and Weber, sets about exploring the relationships between politics and society. The remit of this interdisciplinary venture is, therefore, rather large and how we set about understanding and defining these areas of the human world helps shape the inquiries that political sociology sets about doing (Rush, 1992).

Society is largely understood as an interconnected group of people who have persistent communication. This can also be further defined through geopolitical separations (e.g. countries), historical divisions, to technological connections. The boundary of what constitutes society is often blurry and flexible to the interpretation of the writer, although various elements of the above defining areas can be found throughout in mixed appearances.

Politics stands out as a unique aspect of society, so much so it has its own rich academic discipline and research. Here, it focuses not on the whole of society, but its processes. Politics can then be seen to study governments and governance, the management of public life and the community as a whole, of conflict resolution, and of power; the control an actor(s) has over outcomes (Bambra, Fox, and Scott-Samuel, 2005; Heywood, 2015).

Here, political sociology also broadens its areas of concern through seeing the political in the societal and vice versa. “Political sociology can be much more than a concern with the social background and implications of formal political processes. If we understand the political as the question of how we can and should live, then it can be concerned with the social forces behind political action or with the social context of politics understood as the contention of given authority, identities, relations and structures, as an attempt to change social reality” (Drake, 2013, p11).

Political sociology sits as a bridge between these two disciplinary focuses in trying to facilitate their common areas of interest. Concerned with how society and politics interact across government, institutions, and people that offer wide levels of analysis to be considered. Common themes explored include: how power is exercised and contested across political and societal levels, how political behaviour is shaped by society, how customs and values relate to a society’s politics, and understanding how societies change, remain the same, and reproduce their process over time (Rush, 1992, p13).

Reading List

Introductory

• Drake, M., (2013). Political Sociology for a Globalizing World. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Rush, M., (1992). Politics and society: an introduction to political sociology. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
• Spieß, C., Pehl, M., and Mitra, S., (2010) Political Sociology — The State of the Art. Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers

Resources

University of California, Berkeley Political Sociology Reading List

University of Oxford Reading List and Presentation Slides

Princeton University Reading List

UCL Reading List

University of Arizona Reading List

Aalborg University Political Sociology Research Group

American Sociological Association Section on Political Sociology

European Consortium for Political Research Political Sociology Standing Group

University of Amsterdam Political Sociology — Power, Place and Difference Programme Group

University of Cambridge Political Sociology Cluster

References

Bambra, C., Fox, D., and Scott-Samuel, A., (2005). Towards a politics of health. Health Promotion International, 20(2), pp. 187–193.

Heywood, A., (2015). Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations. London: Macmillan Education UK.

Rush, M., (1992). Politics and society: an introduction to political sociology. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.