Add to the list of concepts: informal politics
Long ago, Debra Perry, who teaches in Columbia, Missouri, asked about informal politics, a term she and her students ran into. Specifically, she asked about whether patron-client systems like guanxi or nomenklatura were examples of informal politics.I replied that I found a reference to the term informal politics in John Cross' book Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City.
Cross used the term to describe grassroots politics that is not institutionalized. The term is based on the idea of the informal economy. That's one in which everything is temporary and "ad lib:" anonymous day laborers, street corner hiring, cash wages, curb side-car trunk stores, little kids' kool-aid stands, etc.
I also found a reference to, Informal Politics in East Asia, a Public Affairs article from 2001, in which Joseph Yu-Shek Cheng describes "the various forms of informal politics within different East Asian political cultures with a strong Confucian legacy emphasizing personal relationships and reciprocity..."
I also found this in a paper by Liisa Lasko (University of Helsinki) delivered at a workshop “Democracy in the Third World: What Should be Done?”, ECPR, Mannheim, March 26-31, 1999:
"Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz in their recent book on African politics haveintroduced an idea... '[that] in Africa political action operates… largely in the realms of the informal, uncodified and unpoliced - that is, in a world that is not ordered in the sense we usually take our own polities in the West to be.'
"As a contrast '[i]n an ordered, regulated polity, political opportunities and resources are defined explicitly and codified by legislation or precedent.' (1998, xix)... the point Chabal and Daloz are making that 'formal politics' plays virtually no role in Africa, deserves a closer look. Is it true that lack of institutionalisation and disregard for the formal political rules is a dominant feature of African politics?"
So it seems that informal politics means personal, reciprocal, for-the-moment political ties that are outside of the established and institutionalized procedures.
Patron-client systems, like the grassroots systems (the lowest levels of prebendalism at least) in Nigerian villages would be informal, but the PRI system in Mexico might not. At the grassroots level I suspect the family/clan/tribe/"congreational" links among people in Iran might fit, but the bonyads, and the basiji (as informal as they might appear to bureaucratic Westerners) would not.
So, how important is the concept of informal politics for AP students? I doubt the term will appear in a multiple-choice question, but it might show up in an FRQ. The term is not in the index of any of the comparative politics texts I have on my shelf.
If it does show up, I'd tell my students to look carefully at the definition and context in the question and to began a response by clarifying or expanding that definition and using examples that are as specific as possible. A question about informal politics might be one of those FRQs that benefits from a briefly supported thesis.
While I'm on the subject of FRQs, no one has attempted to answer any of the questions at studying comparative yet. So all the questions, including today's that will be posted very shortly, are available to students. And all those prizes are unclaimed.
posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:24 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home