Video Transcript:

Hello, students of history and political science! I’m Mr. Tesch, and welcome to Global Chat, where we explore the ins and outs of the field of study known as “Comparative Politics.”

In this video, we’re going to try to answer one big question: how do people organize themselves into political groups? Simply put, there are a lot of things that bring people together into communities. It may be that they have the same religion, language, culture, or even just values. And it turns out that groups like these sometimes also share political interests. They may want to vote for the same political parties or candidates, or are just supportive of the same system of government. 

There are many things that bring groups in society together. To better understand them, we will need to learn about political values, ideals, and how these kinds of views frame the policy choices people make. We’re also going to talk about how different values and beliefs can lead to divisions in society that political scientists call “cleavages.” Let’s get started!

To begin, we should explain what it means to talk about people’s political values and beliefs. If we want to talk about how the citizens of a country “feel” about politics and their political system, we can talk about their political culture. Political culture is made up of all of the attitudes, values, and beliefs of a citizenry and the norms of behavior in their political system. It is how people feel about their own government and what they believe the role of their government should be. People acquire this political culture through a process called “political socialization.” 

Political socialization is defined as the process of acquiring beliefs and values toward a political system. People’s political views are shaped by friends, family, religion, the news, and even social media. This is why authoritarian regimes seek to control things like the media or religious institutions. By promoting conforming beliefs among their citizens, authoritarian regimes try to ensure that their citizens are obedient and supportive of their system of government. 

Take China, for example. China is a state that very much has what political scientists would call an “authoritarian regime.” In its history, China has faced mass protests and other challenges to the government’s authority. Most famously, student protestors gathered in Tiananmen Square in 1989, calling for reforms and more political freedoms, including the right to free speech. To regain control, the government had to call in the military, and wound up brutally suppressing the demonstration. What the average person remembers most from these days of demonstration, though, is the act of one student, who walked out and stood peacefully in front of a line of approaching tanks, stopping their progress. This young man’s brave and selfless act was captured in this famous photograph that shocked the world. For people everywhere, this photo became a symbol for the importance of human rights — especially the right to free speech.

Unless you live in China, that is. If you were to search for the Tiananmen demonstrations from a computer or phone in China, you would have a very hard time finding anything at all. That’s because the Chinese government strictly censors everything that happens on the internet with an institution called the “Great Firewall.” Together with the “Golden Shield” project, an estimated 30 to 50 thousand Chinese police are employed in monitoring and censoring every email, website, and social media platform in the country. The big question here is why the Chinese government goes to such lengths to censor speech.

One big reason that the Chinese government goes to such lengths is not only to maintain control over their population, but to “save face” and the appearance of legitimacy. News sources that cover topics that are considered “defamatory against China” are among the most strictly censored. In fact, it is very unlikely that this video here would ever be allowed in China. The Chinese government is fearful that if their citizens became aware of the human rights abuses that they have committed, there would be massive protests and immense pressures for political reform. To continue to cling onto their monopoly over political power, the Chinese Communist Party understands that it needs to control what information is available to its people.

But while state control over the media is an important element of political socialization, there are others that shape Chinese society as well. In his book The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria maintains that as authoritarian as it is, the Chinese regime is still more liberal than its people. One reason for this has its roots in China’s Millennia long history. In the fifth century BCE, a philosopher called Confucius taught that for social harmony to exist, people needed to give up individual ambition and essentially “know their place” in society. This philosophy became hugely influential in China. For centuries, those who hoped to earn a position in the state bureaucracy had to prove that they had learned the philosophy of Confucius through something called the civil service exam. Over time, China’s political culture came to embrace many aspects of Confucianism, emphasizing the good of the group over the individual. This value is called “collectivism,” and is at the heart of the political ideologies of communism and socialism. 

That brings us to our next topic: political ideology. A political ideology is a set of values and beliefs about the goals of government, public policy, or politics. At the heart of every person’s political ideology are two fundamental guiding ideals: freedom and equality. A person’s expectations about how a government should exercise power to create a balance between these two ideals is what defines their political ideology.

The belief that emphasizes individual liberty and freedom as most important is represented by individualism. Individualism is often at the heart of the political cultures of highly democratic societies. We also refer to this ideology as liberalism, which holds that the protection of individual liberty is the central problem of politics. During the 1980s, the British Prime Minister Margarette Thatcher became a symbol for this political philosophy as she called for limited government intervention in the economy, the privatization of state industries such as British Rail, free trade, deregulation of businesses, and the elimination of many state subsidies. Thatcher’s views and specifically her emphasis on free market capitalism were so significant, we have a special term for them: “neoliberalism.” Margarette Thatcher was one of the most important Prime Ministers of the last 50 years, and we will be discussing her and her policies again in more detail when we study the United Kingdom.

On the flip side, there are also those who believe it to be the government’s role to promote equality, and that this role is more important than protecting individual freedoms. Socialism or Social Democracy is an ideology that places a high value on equality and collectivism, and that it ought to be the role of the government to reduce wealth and income inequality. A good example of this kind of thinking in practice might be the British Labour Party of the 20th Century, whose policy decisions were largely guided by a social democratic ideology. As the representatives of the working class, the Labour Party historically fought to expand legal protections for workers, increase unemployment benefits, regulate workplace safety, and more. The aim of these kinds of laws was to reduce economic inequality in the United Kingdom and promote the well-being of the British workforce. 

Now later on in our course, we will also be studying an ideology called communism. This one is especially complicated, because it is an ideology that has meant different things at different times and in different places. But in a nutshell, communism is a political ideology that advocates for absolute equality of all people, and to achieve this, calls for the elimination of private property. In history, Russia and China have tried to put communism into practice by transferring control over their economies to their governments. Later in this course, we look at how this experiment impacted political and economic development in these two states.

The last political ideology that we should discuss is fascism. Unlike the other ideologies that have come up, fascism does not value political freedom or equality. Instead, fascism holds that the strength of the state is the most important goal of any political system. There are examples of fascist regimes throughout history: Germany under Nazi rule, Italy under Mussolini, Russia under Stalin, and China under Mao. In the world today, North Korea is an example of a state where fascism thrives. What has been particularly disturbing about fascism in history is that it promotes extreme nationalism, where those who are in the ethnic majority are granted more rights than those who are ethnic minorities. In the 1930s, for example, it was the Nazi party’s goal to rebuild a strong German state for the benefit of only the German people. This was to be done at the expense of ethnic and religious minorities in Central Europe, especially the Jewish people, who suffered unspeakable horrors under Nazi rule. 

Any one of these ideologies can bring groups of people in society together. Under democratic systems, people who share a political ideology can come together to form political parties and win representation for their views in government. But as you can imagine, just as there are things that bring people together in society, there are also things that drive people apart.

All of the states that we will be studying in this course have what we call political and social cleavages. Cleavages are divisions that divide groups in society against one another because of conflicting political goals. Often, this affects voting behavior and party systems. In our last video, we talked about how the Scottish are a minority nationality in the United Kingdom, and how a referendum held in 1997 allowed for the creation of a Scottish National Parliament. We can also spot this political cleavage in UK parliamentary elections. In 2015, the Scottish National Party became the third largest party in Parliament, winning 56 seats in the House of Commons. Not surprisingly, all of those seats represent the electoral districts of Scotland. What is interesting here is the SNP’s support by one national group, the Scottish. Where other major political parties such as the Labour and Conservative Parties win support mostly on the basis of political values, the Scottish National Party is winning elections largely because a distinct national group in British society feels better represented by a party of their own.

This happens in other countries as well, especially those where ethnic and national tension are a big issue. Nigeria is by far the most diverse country that we study, and party support in Nigeria is becoming increasingly driven by religion. The most significant cleavage in Nigeria is religious, between the Christians who live along the Southern coast and Muslims who live in the North. Just this year, Nigeria had an election, and the Northern states voted almost exclusively for the All Progressive’s Party, while Southern states chose the People’s Democratic Party. The reason for this split in party support is not so much ideological, but religious in character. 

But apart from political consequences, Nigeria’s long-standing ethnic cleavages have also given rise to an extremist terrorist organization that calls itself Boko Haram. This group is now calling itself the Islamic State in West Africa, and has the goal of establishing an Islamic state in Nigeria. In 2009, Boko Haram began an armed rebellion against the Nigerian government, prompting the Nigerian military to respond. This conflict continues to the present day, even though the Nigerian government has taken at least some measures to represent different religious and ethnic groups in government.

In this video, we’ve talked about many of the things that bring people together into political groups. We’ve talked about political culture and how people acquire it, different political values, and how political and social divisions in society affect voting behavior. For more information and additional resources, please check in the description below this video. And remember to subscribe to catch more of our videos. Thank you for watching, and see you next time!