Topic11: Social Institutions III: Political Institutions
Dr. Yuki Miyake
School of Social Innovation
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Today’s Topics
• Power and Authority
• Types of Government
• Problems in Democracy Today
• The nation
• Citizenship
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Power and Authority
Power
• In any society, someone or some group makes important decisions about how to use
resources and how to allocate goods.
• It needs the exercise of power and authority.
• It involves politics: who gets what, when, and how?
• Power lies at the heart of a political system.
• According to Max Weber, power is the ability to exercise one’s will over others.
• In the early 1900s, power is on the nation-state.
• Today, in the era of globalization, power is exercised on a global stage as well as a
national stage by countries and multinational corporations.
• There are three basic sources of power within any political system.
(1) Force is the actual or threatened use of coercion to impose one’s will on others.
(e.g. A leader execute opponents.)