political sociology research topics

Research Topics & Ideas: Sociology

50 Topic Ideas To Kickstart Your Research Project

If you’re just starting out exploring sociology-related topics for your dissertation, thesis or research project, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we’ll help kickstart your research by providing a hearty list of research ideas , including real-world examples from recent sociological studies.

PS – This is just the start…

We know it’s exciting to run through a list of research topics, but please keep in mind that this list is just a starting point . These topic ideas provided here are intentionally broad and generic , so keep in mind that you will need to develop them further. Nevertheless, they should inspire some ideas for your project.

To develop a suitable research topic, you’ll need to identify a clear and convincing research gap , and a viable plan to fill that gap. If this sounds foreign to you, check out our free research topic webinar that explores how to find and refine a high-quality research topic, from scratch. Alternatively, consider our 1-on-1 coaching service .

Sociology-Related Research Topics

• Analyzing the social impact of income inequality on urban gentrification.
• Investigating the effects of social media on family dynamics in the digital age.
• The role of cultural factors in shaping dietary habits among different ethnic groups.
• Analyzing the impact of globalization on indigenous communities.
• Investigating the sociological factors behind the rise of populist politics in Europe.
• The effect of neighborhood environment on adolescent development and behavior.
• Analyzing the social implications of artificial intelligence on workforce dynamics.
• Investigating the impact of urbanization on traditional social structures.
• The role of religion in shaping social attitudes towards LGBTQ+ rights.
• Analyzing the sociological aspects of mental health stigma in the workplace.
• Investigating the impact of migration on family structures in immigrant communities.
• The effect of economic recessions on social class mobility.
• Analyzing the role of social networks in the spread of disinformation.
• Investigating the societal response to climate change and environmental crises.
• The role of media representation in shaping public perceptions of crime.
• Analyzing the sociocultural factors influencing consumer behavior.
• Investigating the social dynamics of multigenerational households.
• The impact of educational policies on social inequality.
• Analyzing the social determinants of health disparities in urban areas.
• Investigating the effects of urban green spaces on community well-being.
• The role of social movements in shaping public policy.
• Analyzing the impact of social welfare systems on poverty alleviation.
• Investigating the sociological aspects of aging populations in developed countries.
• The role of community engagement in local governance.
• Analyzing the social effects of mass surveillance technologies.

Sociology Research Ideas (Continued)

• Investigating the impact of gentrification on small businesses and local economies.
• The role of cultural festivals in fostering community cohesion.
• Analyzing the societal impacts of long-term unemployment.
• Investigating the role of education in cultural integration processes.
• The impact of social media on youth identity and self-expression.
• Analyzing the sociological factors influencing drug abuse and addiction.
• Investigating the role of urban planning in promoting social integration.
• The impact of tourism on local communities and cultural preservation.
• Analyzing the social dynamics of protest movements and civil unrest.
• Investigating the role of language in cultural identity and social cohesion.
• The impact of international trade policies on local labor markets.
• Analyzing the role of sports in promoting social inclusion and community development.
• Investigating the impact of housing policies on homelessness.
• The role of public transport systems in shaping urban social life.
• Analyzing the social consequences of technological disruption in traditional industries.
• Investigating the sociological implications of telecommuting and remote work trends.
• The impact of social policies on gender equality and women’s rights.
• Analyzing the role of social entrepreneurship in addressing societal challenges.
• Investigating the effects of urban renewal projects on community identity.
• The role of public art in urban regeneration and social commentary.
• Analyzing the impact of cultural diversity on education systems.
• Investigating the sociological factors driving political apathy among young adults.
• The role of community-based organizations in addressing urban poverty.
• Analyzing the social impacts of large-scale sporting events on host cities.
• Investigating the sociological dimensions of food insecurity in affluent societies.

Recent Studies & Publications: Sociology

While the ideas we’ve presented above are a decent starting point for finding a research topic, they are fairly generic and non-specific. So, it helps to look at actual sociology-related studies to see how this all comes together in practice.

Below, we’ve included a selection of recent studies to help refine your thinking. These are actual studies,  so they can provide some useful insight as to what a research topic looks like in practice.

• Social system learning process (Subekti et al., 2022)
• Sociography: Writing Differently (Kilby & Gilloch, 2022)
• The Future of ‘Digital Research’ (Cipolla, 2022).
• A sociological approach of literature in Leo N. Tolstoy’s short story God Sees the Truth, But Waits (Larasati & Irmawati, 2022)
• Teaching methods of sociology research and social work to students at Vietnam Trade Union University (Huu, 2022)
• Ideology and the New Social Movements (Scott, 2023)
• The sociological craft through the lens of theatre (Holgersson, 2022).
• An Essay on Sociological Thinking, Sociological Thought and the Relationship of a Sociologist (Sönmez & Sucu, 2022)
• How Can Theories Represent Social Phenomena? (Fuhse, 2022)
• Hyperscanning and the Future of Neurosociology (TenHouten et al., 2022)
• Sociology of Wisdom: The Present and Perspectives (Jijyan et al., 2022). Collective Memory (Halbwachs & Coser, 2022)
• Sociology as a scientific discipline: the post-positivist conception of J. Alexander and P. Kolomi (Vorona, 2022)
• Murder by Usury and Organised Denial: A critical realist perspective on the liberating paradigm shift from psychopathic dominance towards human civilisation (Priels, 2022)
• Analysis of Corruption Justice In The Perspective of Legal Sociology (Hayfa & Kansil, 2023)
• Contributions to the Study of Sociology of Education: Classical Authors (Quentin & Sophie, 2022)
• Inequality without Groups: Contemporary Theories of Categories, Intersectional Typicality, and the Disaggregation of Difference (Monk, 2022)

As you can see, these research topics are a lot more focused than the generic topic ideas we presented earlier. So, for you to develop a high-quality research topic, you’ll need to get specific and laser-focused on a specific context with specific variables of interest.  In the video below, we explore some other important things you’ll need to consider when crafting your research topic.

Get 1-On-1 Help

If you’re still unsure about how to find a quality research topic, check out our Research Topic Kickstarter service, which is the perfect starting point for developing a unique, well-justified research topic.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Political Sociology

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Political Sociology by Jeff Manza LAST REVIEWED: 27 July 2011 LAST MODIFIED: 27 July 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0001

Political sociology is the study of power and the relationship between societies, states, and political conflict. It is a broad subfield that straddles political science and sociology, with “macro” and “micro” components. The macrofocus has centered on questions about nation-states, political institutions and their development, and the sources of social and political change (especially those involving large-scale social movements and other forms of collective action). Here, researchers have asked “big” questions about how and why political institutions take the form that they do, and how and when they undergo significant change. The micro orientation, by contrast, examines how social identities and groups influence individual political behavior, such as voting, attitudes, and political participation. While both the macro- and micro-areas of political sociology overlap with political science, the distinctive focus of political sociologists is less on the internal workings or mechanics of the political system and more on the underlying social forces that shape the political system. Political sociology can trace its origins to the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, among others, but it only emerged as a separate subfield within sociology after World War II. Many of the landmark works of the 1950s and 1960s centered on microquestions about the impact of class, religion, race/ethnicity, or education on individual and group-based political behavior. Beginning in the 1970s, political sociologists increasingly turned toward macrotopics, such as understanding the sources and consequences of revolutions, the role of political institutions in shaping political outcomes, and large-scale comparative-historical studies of state development. Today both micro- and macroscholarship can be found in political sociology.

For beginning students, several introductory political sociology textbooks provide a more basic entrée to the field. While covering much of the same ground, these also vary somewhat in topics emphasized or covered. The most comprehensive introductory work, rare for giving significant attention to both micro- and macrotraditions in political sociology while still providing a discussion of theoretical classics, is that of Orum and Dale 2009 . Neuman 2008 provides a comprehensive introduction to the field in terms of topics treated (although giving relatively little attention to microquestions). Nash 2007 focuses on globalization, gender dynamics, and political change. Lachmann (2010 ) provides a historically grounded introduction to the rise of states and the relationship between states and domestic power structures.

Lachmann, Richard. 2010. States and power . Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010.

A wide-ranging survey of the rise of modern states across five continents, with a special focus on war-making and taxation that provides a key introduction to the macro-tradition in political sociology.

Nash, Kate. 2007. Contemporary political sociology: Globalization, politics, and power . Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Focuses on gender issues and globalization factors, as well as examining how culture impacts politics, and how cultural analysis might be brought into political sociology.

Neuman, W. Lawrence. 2008. Power, state, and society: An introduction to political sociology . Waveland.

Covers a wider range of topics than do other textbooks and introductions to political sociology, although it gives little attention to microquestions. Includes a chapter on the political sociology of policymaking.

Orum, Anthony, and John G. Dale. 2009. Political sociology: Power and participation in the modern world . 5th ed. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

A strong single volume introduction to the field that covers classical theoretical writings in political sociology, along with both the macro and micro sides of the field. A chapter on urban power describes political sociological work on local contexts. Two chapters on social movements provide an excellent introduction to the field.

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Bart Bonikowski Associate Professor of Sociology Resident Faculty, The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies

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Introduction to Political Sociology

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Politics is a struggle for power—power over access to and the distribution of resources, over personal and collective status, and over the ability to define legitimate categories of thought. While politics can be found in all domains of social life, the ultimate site of political contestation is the state, which holds the legitimate monopoly on physical and symbolic violence. Hence, much political sociology is concerned with the relationship between the state and society: how the modern state came to exist, how it came to be viewed as legitimate, what factors shaped processes of democratization, how cleavages based on class, race, and gender affect democratic representation, how liberal democracies structure their welfare state policies, how states create and manage markets, and how social movements strive to effect political change by making claims on state actors. This course will offer an overview of these varied substantive topics, while exposing students to the analytical power of a sociological approach to politics.

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This cluster explores interdisciplinary scholarship in socio-economic, cultural and political history. The focus is on the nature, dynamics and interacting influences of culture, politics and institutions, explored at all levels of analysis. Research is guided by the recurring theoretical problems of causality, origins, continuity and change. Research topics include the divergent developmental paths of capitalism and socialism; slavery, colonialism and their post-colonial consequences; the historical constructions of race-ethnicity and anti-racist strategies; the relationships between collective identities, political discourse, and political change; political and economic consequences of global and regional integration; and the origins, development and diffusion of major politico-cultural values and institutions such as freedom, liberalism and democracy. The department¹s Workshop in History, Culture and Sociology provides a forum for the presentation of scholarship in this cluster from across the university and region.

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Research subject Political Sociology

Political sociology can be understood as the study of how “society” engages in political processes. Another way of approaching this relationship is to consider how political power is contested by, distributed among, and impacting different social groups.

Topics pertaining to political sociology include power, nation-states and empires, the state as a political actor, political participation, revolutions, social movements, and globalization. A central, overarching theme is the interplay between macro-sociological processes and micro-sociological actors.    

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The overarching aim of the project is to further knowledge about the role of the welfare state for climate policy attitudes. Are people more willing to accept decarbonization policies if they are compensated by a generous welfare state?

This research project explains the dramatic trends in European elections in the 21st century. The project’s primary hypothesis is that these trends result not from attitudinal changes amongst Europeans, but from variation in what they see as the most important political issues of the day–issue salience.

Research on the historical origins of gender equality in political representation is scarce. This project applies insights about the historical origins of gender inequality on labor markets on the case of political representation.

How have policies influenced changes in everyday life one year after the coronavirus outbreak? Cross-national analysis of parents’ experiences with employment, work and care

The purpose of this research project is to conduct a comparative study of radical right-wing parties in Europe.The general aim is to identify factors that explain why such parties have succeeded in some countries, while largely failing in others.

The overall aim of the project is to increase knowledge about the importance of social class relations for social cohesion and political divides in modern welfare states. A central focus is how social networks and existing political institutions together shape contemporary sociopolitical cleavages, from a country-comparative perspective.

In this project we study how student support and tuition fee systems in different countries are associated with student welfare, and whether this has consequences for higher education participation.

Investigating forms of collective action and their influence on environmental policies.

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Political Science Research

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Political Sociology

Political sociology is a major subfield on the border of sociology and political science, combining explanatory factors and research interests of both disciplines. It developed from the work of the early founders of social science to include areas of inquiry that tackle the salient social and political processes of the twentieth century and the contemporary world. We discuss important theoretical and empirical advancements and the subfield’s continuous preoccupation with the interrelationships of ‘politics’ and ‘society’, political and social changes, and with issues of power, domination, and exploitation.

Introduction

Marx and class domination, capitalism, and revolution, weber and political authority, bureaucracy, and the modern state, the durkheimian tradition and pluralism, the mid- and late twentieth-century period, the contemporary period.

Political sociology bridges the fields of sociology and political science by addressing issues of power and authority with a focus on state/civil society relations. Political sociology differs from political science in that it includes and often focuses on the civil society side of the equation rather than placing an emphasis on the state and/or political elites. Core areas of research include state formation and change, forms of political rule, major social policies, political institutions and challenges to them (including reform-oriented and revolutionary social movements), political parties and the social bases of political attitudes and behaviors, class/power relations, and the political consequences of globalization. The field includes distinct major approaches, yet theoretical combination and synthesis is common. Many early and contemporary studies utilize comparative historical analysis, especially with regard to critical junctures and historical processes and developments, whereas current work has become methodologically more eclectic. Contemporary political issues and events, regimes in power, and cases relating to the United States and Europe tend to garner the most scholarly attention, though there is a steadily growing body of theory and empirical work beyond the core capitalist democracies.

We consider four somewhat distinct periods in the development of political sociology, while prioritizing the most recent period: (1) We trace political sociology’s inspiration in the mid-nineteenth century to the earlier philosophers who considered the state and social life, but note that it was not until the founding fathers of nineteenth-century social science began thinking of society and the state as distinct entities and analyzing the relationships between them, that political sociology was born; (2) The post–World War II period, which shifted the subfield’s focus to the prerequisites of democracy and voting patterns; (3) The late twentieth-century period, which saw political sociologists move toward a focus on state building and political change, using Marxist theories of capitalism and class as well as other theories; and (4) The contemporary period, which is characterized by a proliferation of topics relevant to politics such as globalization, race, gender, and culture. (Sections Historical Developments through Midand Late Twentieth-Century Period are largely abridged, paraphrased, and enhanced versions of the previous survey by E. Allardt in this publication. See Allardt (2001) for full references to these sections. Additionally, for broad works on political sociology, see Alford and Friedland, 1985; Janoski et al., 2005; Amenta et al., 2012.)

Historical Development of Political Sociology

The foundations of social sciences emerged in a context of epochal social and political transformations, including the development and unfolding of capitalist social systems and the modern state. These developments encouraged conceptualizations of the state and society as separate entities, making it possible to investigate their interrelations. Relying on earlier works on social life and politics by philosophers, historians, and legal theorists, sociology’s three founding fathers made important contributions to political sociology’s beginnings. Karl Marx challenged the idea that power concentrates solely in political offices and officeholders. Instead he focused on politics as emerging primarily from class conflict, just as the bourgeoisie and industrial working classes were becoming the principal social groups. He also emphasized the role of ideology in sustaining the powers that be. Max Weber responded to and critiqued Marx and added important analyses of authority, status categories, and social institutions (especially bureaucracy). Sociology’s third founding father, Emile Durkheim, did not have an explicitly political focus, yet his emphasis on social order, integration, and solidarity had important implications for analyses of society and politics. Others more directly associated with the emergence of political sociology include: Talcott Parsons, who was inspired by Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, and Gaetano Mosca, who made independent contributions by emphasizing the role of elites for social and political change (along with others who continued this concern, including Robert Michels, C. Wright Mills, G. William Domhoff, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Seymour Martin Lipset).

Marx was among the first to articulate an empirical political sociology, marking out historical materialism in his systematic general insistence on exploring the relationships between the mode of economic production and social property relations with state/political forms, social and political struggles, and consciousness, with a particular focus on capitalism and classes in capitalist societies. His was a firmly historical sociology, which emphasized human agency and historical contingency as being conditioned and constrained by structural features and processes, and consequently critically analytical of the character and dynamics of capitalism. Broadly, Marx argued that the division of societies into social classes is based on objective relations of domination and that the dominant class’ exploitation of dominated classes is central to many historically specific forms of economic production. In such situations, the state or central political power and authority generally maintains and reproduces the basic social systems, which are riven by the potentially explosive or revolutionary social antagonisms rooted in these relations of domination and exploitation. Despite varying and often contradictory interpretations of his extensive body of work, Marx’s framework is often seen as the primary source of political economy and class approaches.

Like Marx himself, several later Marxists had wide-ranging influence both in and outside of academia. Vladimir Lenin developed theories on revolutionary politics and change, imperialism, the state, and liberal democracy. Leon Trotsky’s work on the Russian Revolution is a milestone in scholarship on revolution and historical sociology, prioritizing mass political participation and the study of the political processes of the masses themselves in relation to political leaders and parties. He emphasized the historical unfolding of revolutionary struggles and the necessity of analyzing the structural conditioning, if not constitution, of such intense sociopolitical struggles in forms of economic development (hence the theory of combined and uneven development). Antonio Gramsci offered influential theories on hegemony, political conflict, and the distinction and relation between political society and civil society in capitalist democracies. Central to his work was the notion that bourgeois cultural values and institutions, (both those centered in the state and those that were not), help create situations of consented coercion, with continuous state formation acting to balance the interests of the ‘fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups’. These analyses demonstrate that political sociology includes politically-oriented analyses, and also that important historical actors are included as political sociologists.

Max Weber wrote many of his works in response to Marx, with considerable overlap and agreement as well as divergence. Also largely historical, Weber traced the “elective affinity” of capitalist development and Protestantism in Europe, highlighting their functional compatibility and the eventual coconstitutional development of economic forms with culture and ideology. Additionally, Weber’s work examined ideal typical forms of legitimate authority and domination, bases of individual and group social action, and perhaps most important, he offered a general theory of rationalization (i.e., instrumental rationality) as embodied in bureaucratic organizational forms and the wide-ranging bureaucratization of modern life – the latter process tied into the dynamic development of capitalism and the modern state. In contrast to Marx, who saw the modern state more or less in relation to powerful class interests, class struggles, and capital accumulation processes, Weber emphasized the modern state as an autonomous source of interests and power. Cultural scholars at times refer to Weber’s wide-ranging body of work and theory, yet his work is more often than not associated with and taken as a basis for statist approaches.

Many theorists have been influenced by Weber, including those who furthered the study of elites and bureaucracy. Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca were pioneers in the sociological study of elites. Pareto identified the governing elite, who ruled with a psychological preference for either force or fraud. He argued that the elite class is maintained by the circulation of especially apt nonelites into the ruling group. Mosca takes a more sociological approach to the study of elites by emphasizing structural and organizational factors in the maintenance of elite classes, such as their superior organization and their control of resources.

Robert Michels’ seminal work criticized party bureaucracies in modern states and addressed central themes such as the role of elites, leftist political movements, bureaucratization, and the gap between democratic theory and practice. Michels developed a thesis called “the iron law of oligarchy”, which argues that organization necessarily leads to oligarchy. In Michel’s words: “it is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says ‘organization’, says ‘oligarchy’” (1911/1968).

While Marx and Weber were clearly social and political theorists, Emile Durkheim is less often noted as a scholar of politics. However, his concern with social order, integration, and solidarity had clear implications for analyses of politics and society (Allardt, 2001). Durkheim attempted to overhaul the traditional concept of an increasing division of labor and social cohesion, in his insistence that modern societies can achieve a degree of cohesion surpassing their predecessors. He is often associated with those who emphasize culture, values and norms, and functionalism, with a linkage to later pluralist theorists that would come to dominate American social science.

The English translations of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution are standards in political sociology. In the former, he specified the conditions for pluralism and institutional democracy, arguing that in industrially developed societies, social cleavages, and group/strata competition are necessary for consensus. Plural democracy is created and sustained by voluntary associations and active, relatively autonomous local communities. Thus, de Tocqueville emphasized the role of social conflicts and cleavages in developing consensus in democracies (Allardt, 2001).

The Institutionalization of Political Sociology after World War II

In the postwar period, the prerequisites of democracy and the role of parliamentary elections as the major mechanism for establishing and securing democratic rule became important foci. After the war there were great hopes attached to the possibility of building a better world with the aid of social science and research. As political science became more preoccupied with constitutional problems and modes of state management and sociology focused on social structure and social group behavior, political sociology moved between the disciplines (Allardt, 2001).

Political sociologists undertook large-scale studies of voting behavior and developed fruitful theories and hypotheses, such as Lazarsfeld’s argument that cross-pressures lead to political passivity (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944; Allardt, 2001). Seymour Martin Lipset had already published important works, and his Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960) became a leading text of the period and helped give birth to institutional political sociology. Lipset’s and Rokkan’s Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (1967) would later apply Parson’s A-G-I-L scheme (an analytic model designed to explain stability by considering Adaption, Goal Attainment, Integration, and Latency) in an attempt to combine structural and institutional approaches to understand the social bases of politics and the effects of politics on social structures (Allardt, 2001).

It was in this context that the pluralist conceptualizations of social and political action arose in earnest. In this vein, Smelser emphasized the state, collective behavior, and culturalvalue change (1967); Easton focused on the political system (1965); and Gurr on political violence and relative deprivation (1970). Broadly, these studies tended to equate the political system with the state and considered individuals with distinct preferences and values to be the constitutive units of both organizations and societies (Alford and Friedland, 1985: p. 35).

While the study of electoral behavior and voting patterns became a specialized area of inquiry, political sociologists’ basic interest was in studying the conditions for democracy, regime type and breakdowns, state and nation building, modernization, and other processes of social and political change (Allardt, 2001).

Political sociologists, for example, have explored many aspects of democracy: the conditions for democracy in labor unions (Lipset et al., 1956), in the local community (Robert Dahl, 1961) and the conditions of conflict regulation in industrial society (Dahrendorf, 1959). Others focused on the breakdown of democracy and the rise and appeal of Fascism and Communism, such as Raymond Aron in The Opium of Intellectuals (1955) and William Kornhauser in The Politics of Mass Society (1959). C. Wright Mills The Power Elite (1990) examined the relationships and shared interests among US corporate, political, and military leaders; leading to the concentration of economic power and cultural influence in the hands of the relatively few and interchangeability of positions within these three institutions.

With the maturity and incorporation of electoral studies and studies of some other original political sociology topics in the 1960s and 1970s along with new critiques from the left, these topics disappeared from political sociology’s central agenda. Increasingly, the focus became large-scale patterns of societal change. S.N. Eisenstadt (1963/1993) examined the formation and fall of empires, Rokkan studied the historical formation of European centers and peripheries (Rokkan and Urwin, 1983) and Juan Linz analyzed the breakdown of democratic regimes (Linz and Stepan, 1978) (Allardt, 2001).

Yet the period was perhaps most substantially marked by the outpouring of Marxist or Marxist-oriented scholarship on class politics and major sociopolitical transformations as well as the structural contours and dynamics of global capitalism (Allardt, 2001). Unfortunately, a full review of this literature is not possible, here, and thus several important examples must suffice. Barrington Moore wrote an often-quoted major work The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), using indepth historical case studies to show how the varying class coalitions that emerged during agricultural commercialization impacted the forms of ‘political modernization’ in the modern world. E.P. Thompson (1963) explored workers’ life experiences and cultural outlooks in his historical analysis of the formation and consciousness of the British working-class. Jeffery Paige (1975) explored how specific agrarian organization and class relations encouraged certain forms of political action and revolution. Maurice Zeitlin (1984) and Zeitlin and Ratcliff (1988) analyzed the development of the Chilean state in light of struggles between segments of the dominant class and the interactions between international and domestic forces. G. William Domhoff (1967, 1990) combined class and institutional analysis to build his class dominance theory and explore how the power elite in the US (owners and top managers of major corporations) actually dominate policymaking. Immanuel Wallerstein (1974/2011) focused on international divisions of labor in his study of the origins and structural contours of the world capitalist system. On the borders of political sociology were the critical sociologists in the Frankfurt School of dialectical sociology and the Dependency theorists who pointed out how underdeveloped countries were enmeshed in a world dominated by international capitalism.

Interest in master patterns of change and in state and nation building proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s. Theda Skocpol (1979) helped reintroduce the state as the originator of social outcomes and Charles Tilly (1992) stressed a complicated web of warfare, fiscal policy, bureaucratization, and state-making as forming national developments. Goran Therborn’s (1995) studies of European states emphasized that national development is multidimensional and may be reversible.

Developments from this period onward made the borders of political sociology more permeable. For instance, studies considering the roles of ethnicity, ethnic groups, and ethnic identities in the formation of nations straddle the line between political sociology and race/ethnic studies. Studies in the political sociology tradition often emphasize the macro-level role that ethnicity and ethnic identities may play in the formation of nations and political development (Rokkan and Urwin, 1983).

Over the last few decades, scholars have expanded political sociology’s theoretical and empirical scope. Established approaches have persisted and developed, and have been challenged or supplemented by theories of rational choice (Tsebelis, 1990; Chong, 2000), culture (B. Anderson, 1983/2006; Bourdieu, 1984/2013; Inglehart, 1997), race (Gilroy, 1991; Winant, 1994), gender (Orloff, 1993; Paxton et al., 2007), and several institutionalisms (Amenta and Ramsey, 2010; Thelen, 1999). Oftentimes, these approaches influenced political sociology after migrating from political science, economics, or the humanities. While ‘new’ theoretical perspectives and explanatory models may initially seem to displace established approaches, their overly bold early claims may recede as scholars implicitly or explicitly adopt theoretical synthesis or accommodation, or bolster their approaches by accounting for or appropriating salient factors or processes emphasized by others. So, while Marxist scholarship which flourished in the 1970s lost much of its early fervor by the mid-1980s, political sociology has remained theoretically eclectic.

Scholars are also more likely to explore historical or contemporary empirical phenomena of diverse geographical settings, a trend bolstered by the growing numbers and diversity of academics and research institutions worldwide, e.g., political sociologists regularly examine social and political processes in cases outside of Europe and the United States. Further, not only do emergent and changing social and political circumstances tend to impact what is being explored (by providing cases) but also salient political trends and/or the configuration of political power holders may impact the explanations given.

Moreover, recent scholarship has benefited from methodological advances. While quantitative methods may predominate in the social sciences, the flourishing of work in comparative and historical methodologies (Abrams, 1982; Ragin, 1987; Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, 2003) has found fertile ground in political sociological research, both through within-case analyses and cross-case comparisons.

In this context, the following section not so much adjudicates theories but instead introduces empirical studies covering a range of research questions asked by scholars from different theoretical traditions. It is not an exhaustive review of recent literature; rather, it provides a brief look at some vital political sociology research areas, such as states and society, revolution, globalization, culture, immigration, macro-social theory, and also notes other substantive themes.

Scholarship on state formation continued in the decades after World War II, exploring processes of the formation of early modern European states, the global diffusion (uneven and varied) of their general political models, variations in regime type, welfare state formation, developmental states, and so on. While states differ along multiple axes, including over time and place, it is commonly held that national states originally emerged in early modern Europe (along with capitalism) and have thus received due diligence to the degree that it was from this temporal and geographical source that they exerted extensive gravitational pull on world history, so that state formation processes in later centuries – often accompanying Western imperialism – were reproduced across the globe as approximations of a single model. More generally, scholars explore modern states’ formation with varying emphases on processes of capitalist development, war, international relations, resource extraction, class or elite coalitions, and culture.

Political sociologists emphasize the ways in which social factors impact state formation processes, considering capitalism and class as well as culture and institutions. Seminal Marxist explanations focus on rural classes and capitalist agricultural development to explain the origins of liberal democracies and Communist or Fascist dictatorships in major states (Moore, 1966); or investigate the centralized states of European Absolutism, its regional variation, and its role in the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Anderson, 1974/2013). Tilly (1992) adopts a bellecist approach to explore the formation of national states in an environment of incessant military-strategic competition, and system-wide convergence on that model in Europe. The interplay of war making, state making, and capitalist consolidation, Tilly argues, proceeds in a dialectic of the increasing concentration and accumulation of capital and coercion, pressed by war making and preparation, fiscal extraction, administrative expansion, and the making of social alliances. Ertman (1997) prioritizes local political institutional path dependency and the timing of the onset of sustained geopolitical-military competition, to account for the diverse range of regime types and state infrastructures across Europe in the eighteenth century, whereas Gorski (2003) shifts to culture to unravel the emergence of strong centralized states in Germany and the Netherlands, arguing that Calvinism and its emphasis on public order and discipline heightened state capacities and functions, regarding education, crime and punishment, and military effectiveness.

While extending insights from European cases to other regions, scholars often avoid transplanting some universal European trajectory and note the impact of colonialism, Western geopolitical dominance, and how being ‘late’ developers may impact state formation in the Third World. Heydemann (2000) notes that interstate war between Middle Eastern and North African states was rare in the twentieth century, but that extensive war preparation and militarized government produced deep political consequences, with variation in state formation linked to discrete modes of resource extraction. Centeno (2003) likewise describes interstate warfare as rare in post-independence Latin America, and argues that this absence corresponds to the weakness of Latin American states and the national elites’ unwillingness to ally with them.

Scholars also study the development of welfare states and public social provision, the emergence and character of such systems, and/or their perceived ongoing decline in neoliberal capitalism (see Marshell 1950; Korpi, 1983; Huber and Stephens, 2001; Pierson, 1994). In general, political sociology emphasizes social inequalities along various dimensions and their impact on welfare states. Esping-Andersen (1990) explores the origins and role of welfare states in European capitalist countries, emphasizing the impact of working class power and varying class coalitions on the character of welfare states and regimes of public social provision. Fox (2012) explores the American social welfare system and how different racial and immigrant groups receive differential access to social welfare programs, whereas Misra (1998, 2003) analyzes family allowance policies, and the role of women’s movements and the perceived value of women’s paid and unpaid labor for variations in public social provision. Venturing to the global South, Sandbrook et al. (2007) look at social democratic movements and democratic developmental states, and how some peripheral states have balanced the achievement of economic growth through globalized markets with relatively progressive social and political policies.

In a world of stark international inequalities, studies of development attempt to unravel the social and political processes behind prosperous economies with a focus on class relations, the state, and economic institutions. These works often center on the concerted efforts of post–World War II ‘developmental’ states, traversing state building, economic development, and postcolonialism. A major thrust in this literature explores conditions in which states and state leaders gain the wherewithal to ignite and sustain industrialization. One broad statist explanation focuses on state capacity and autonomy to guide and discipline capitalists (and labor), thus bolstering state planning agencies to drive developmental policies (Amsden, 1989; Evans, 1995; Wade, 1990). Some challenge, or refine, this state autonomy/capacity thesis. Chibber (2003) brings back in structural political economy to consider class alliances and interests, state capacity and autonomy, and international economic opportunity to explain situations where local capitalists gain from, and thus support, the strengthening autonomous state economic planning agencies (as in South Korea) and, conversely, (in cases where capitalists would suffer from, and thus stifle these institutions), robust development agencies and planning (as in India). His study illuminates crucial class and state processes impacting relative success versus relative failure, and deepens the understanding of capitalist classes in developmental states. Finally, Mahoney (2010) studies the impact of colonial arrangements on postcolonial development, and how institutional fit (or non-fit) between colonizer and colonized greatly influenced longer-term economic development.

Recent scholarship on revolution has shifted focus from the ‘great’ social revolutions (Moore, 1966; Skocpol, 1979) to political revolutions and revolutionary movements, and their varying forms and outcomes, in the post–World War II world. Political sociologists emphasize social compositional factors, regime types, and socioeconomic structure. Parsa (1989) offers a sophisticated articulation of the multi-class coalition thesis, arguing that the ‘success’ of the Iranian revolution was rooted in multiple social classes mobilizing in a common oppositional front outside the formal power structure of the Shah’s autocratic regime. Accepting the import of class struggle, Goodwin (2001) refines a statist approach in his study of revolutions in Latin America, SE Asia, and East Europe, arguing that particular neopatrimonial state-regime types may not only incubate and encourage revolutionary movements but also impact the success of such movements in engendering political revolution. In a cultural turn, Slater (2009) holds that the political posture and emotive appeals of communal elites – those with religious and cultural authority – determines the emergence and outcome of revolutionary mobilization. Finally, Achcar (2013) extends and modifies Marx’s theory of social revolution to analyze recent uprisings in the Arab world, arguing that it is the specific modality of an economic mode of production, especially in the political and legal structures that block social and economic development, rather than the generic economic mode itself, that may provide crucial causes for popular uprisings and thus become the object of political revolution.

Globalization naturally attracts considerable scholarly attention, providing numerous areas of inquiry. Political sociologists tend to focus on power relations in global capitalism and the consequences for development, the political institutions that undergird attendant policies, as well as salient spatial and organizational transformations. Dependency scholars Cardoso and Faletto (1979) critique Modernization theory’s universal linear stage model of development, and prioritize asymmetrical and partially constitutive international power relations and their affects on national political and economic development. The world-systems tradition has long analyzed national and regional development in the light of the character and dynamic of global capitalism (Wallerstein, 1974/2011) and imperial hegemonies (Arrighi, 1994); yet many drop a level of analysis to examine crucial shorterterm political processes linked to a globalizing world. Babb (2009) explores institutional linkages between the American state (especially the legislative branch) and multilateral development banks, and Washington’s political sway over them. Others explore China’s rise and how it has helped reshape the structure and dynamics of global capitalism, as well as its geopolitical impact on China’s close neighbors (Hung, 2009), global cities (Sassen, 2001), international organizations (Boli and Thomas, 2003), and so on.

Relatedly, neoliberal globalization, many argue, fundamentally includes financialization and attendant transformations that diminish the quality of public social provision, and political sociologists have analyzed multiple facets of these phenomena. Tabb (2012) investigates the restructuring of capitalism from the 1970s onward, specifically with regard to banking practices, financial motives, and regulatory policies. Krippner (2011) studies the historical development of the US financial market and the creation of market policies conducive to financialization, arguing that these were not policymakers’ deliberate goals but the inadvertent results of attempts to solve pressing economic problems. Prechel and Morris (2010) explore the causes of financial malfeasance from 1995 to 2004 and how certain social structures create dependencies, incentives, and opportunities to engage in such behavior, i.e., neoliberal policies permit such activities, and largely result from well-financed and systematic corporate political strategy.

Immigration and citizenship in the globalizing world continues to capture scholars’ attention, with the migration of people across countries clearly linked to potentially salient social, political, and economic transformations. Portes and Rumbaut (2006) provide a prominent overview of immigrant social and political dynamics in the US, honing in on micro- and macro-level processes impacting immigrants’ individual lives as well as the wider social and political formations to which they belong. Bloemraad (2006) queries how countries that allow the entrance of immigrants and refugees can foster civic cohesion and political community, and tempers the widespread emphasis on features of immigrant communities by considering the impact of state policy for outcomes of citizenship acquisition and political participation. Furthermore, the global salience of ‘market fundamentalism’, argues Somers (2008), subjugates notions and practices of citizenship to market logic and yields deleterious results for people’s lives.

Scholars continue to investigate social bases of politics and political behavior, which has been a hallmark of political sociology since at least the 1950s. Domhoff (1990) and Domhoff and Webber (2011) refine the class dominance theory to look at social networks of power and the role of capitalist class segments on the origins of major social policies; while Manza and Brooks (1999) consider more broadly the role social group cleavages have on electoral politics. Clawson et al. (1998) investigate the role of financial contributions in policy formation, and the relationships that may develop between politicians and private contributors. Scholars in this general line of inquiry also explore issues surrounding political parties (Panebianco, 1988; Shefter, 1994), public opinion (Dalton, 2008), and interest groups and other political organizations (Wilson, 1995).

The concept of culture is not only disputed in terms of its specific meaning(s), but it is also broad, multifaceted, and at times muddled, with cultural studies of politics employing the concept in wide-ranging and varying ways. Using a dynamic theoretical framework, Campbell (1998) explores how ideas – paradigms, public sentiments, programs, and frames – may influence major policy-making innovations. For Ermakoff (2008), subjective orientations and patterns of interactions impact major political change and the surrender of democratic to nondemocratic authority, while Ikegami (2005) details the interconnections of arts and esthetics with state–society relations in a case of state formation where esthetic socialization compensated for state policies that fostered extreme social fragmentation. Others explore folk music’s unifying and galvanizing power, and the relation between cultural forms and social or labor movement activities (Roscigno and Danaher, 2004). In a different vein, important studies of the media examine the mass media in multiple ways, seeing a powerful and effective ideological institution that props the political status quo (Chomsky and Herman, 1988/2008) – society’s “master arena” where individual or collective political actors engage in contests over social meanings (Gamson and Andre, 2004), the interactions of media discourse and public opinion formation (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989), and the news media as a political institution (Schudson, 2002). Also, in an ambitious macrophenomelogical approach and in macro-social theory, the world societal perspective prioritizes global culture in the production and spread of ideas, policies, and institutions (Meyer et al., 1997).

Other than world-systems scholars (Wallerstein and Arrighi), Michael Mann (1986, 1993, 2012, 2013) is one of the few contemporary political sociologists who attempts to rigorously identify the principal social-structural trends across history and to explain the development and expansion of fundamental power structures. Mann proposes the IEMP model, which holds that human societies form around four power relations – ideological, economic, military, and political – that are intertwined although none is purely reducible to another. For Mann, contemporary globalization is the “plural extension” of these four relations, with the primary modern power organizations (capitalism, nation-states, and empires) congealing around them. This globalization thus consists of three main institutional processes, the globalization of capitalism, the nation-state, and empires (eventually just the American empire). These processes, however, crystalize in various, often competing forms and have thus been geographically and institutionally polymorphous.

Certainly there are remarkable areas of social and political inquiry not included in the above survey, and even those discussed are only briefly introduced. There are veritable literatures on the political processes of empire and imperialism (Harvey, 2003; Wood, 2005), nationalism (Breuilly, 1994; Hobsbawm, 1990), labor and labor movements (Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin, 2003; Fantasia, 1989), ethnicity and ethnic conflict (Varshney, 2003; Gutiérrez, 1995), and so on. Nonetheless, there are several clear features or trends that manifest in this survey. Political sociology literature continues to emphasize civil society and potentially vital socioeconomic factors, in contrast to much of political science. With the aid of methodological advances, political sociologists continue to develop various theoretical frameworks and to expand the substantive breadth and depth of this border field. Scholars enter empirical cases from differing levels of analysis to address an inherently wide set of questions.With these diverse research approaches, political sociologists continue to cultivate useful knowledge through rigorous empirical research on social and political change as well as the basic problems afflicting societies, and thus remain relevant to policy-oriented debates. Echoing the previous entry from the first edition, political sociology’s main general problem areas continue to revolve around the origins, character, and practices of social and political power and conflict; dominant and emerging cleavages; patterns of social, political, economic, and cultural change; the formation of states and nations as well as the breakdown of social and political orders; the conditions of different regime-types (e.g., democracy or authoritarianism); capitalist development; and multifaceted international relationships. For better or worse, these are vital areas of inquiry that will continue to provide attendant puzzles and problems to be scrutinized by political sociologists.

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• Heydemann, Steven (Ed.), 2000. War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East. University of California Press, Los Angeles and Berkeley.
• Hobsbawm, Eric, 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Huber, Evelyne, Stephens, John D., 2001. Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Hung, Ho-fung, 2009. China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
• Ikegami, Eiko, 2005. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Inglehart, Ronald, 1997. Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies. Princeton University Press, New Jersey.
• Janoski, Thomas, Alford, Robert R., Hicks, Alexander M., Schwartz, Mildred A. (Eds.), 2005. The Handbook of Political Sociology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Kornhauser, William, 1959/2013. Politics of Mass Society. Routledge, New York. Korpi, Walter, 1983. The Democratic Class Struggle. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
• Krippner, Greta, 2011. Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
• Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Berelson, Bernard, Gaudet, Hazel, 1944. The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. Columbia University Press, New York.
• Linz, Juan J., Stepan, Alfred C. (Eds.), 1978. The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, Latin America. Johns Hopkins University Press, DC.
• Lipset, Seymour M., 1960. Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Washington, DC.
• Lipset, Seymour M., Rokkan, Stein (Eds.), 1967. Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives. Free Press, New York.
• Lipset, Seymour M., Trow, Martin A., Coleman, James S., 1956. Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union. Free Press, Glencoe.
• Mahoney, James, 2010. Colonialism and Postcolonial Development. Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge), New York.
• Mahoney, James, Rueschemeyer, Dietrich (Eds.), 2003. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Mann, Michael, 1986, 1993, 2012, 2013. The Sources of Social Power, vols. 1–4. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Manza, Jeff, Brooks, Clem, 1999. Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and US Party Coalitions. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Marshall, Thomas H., 1950. Citizenship and Social Class: And Other Essays. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Meyer, John W., Boli, John, Thomas, George M., Ramirez, Francisco O., 1997. World society and the nation-state. American Journal of Sociology 103 (1), 144–181.
• Michels, Robert, 1911/1968. Political Parties. Taylor & Francis, New York.
• Mills, Wright C., 1956/1999. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Misra, Joya, 1998. Mothers or workers? The value of women’s labor: women and the emergence of family allowance policy. Gender & Society 12 (4), 376–399.
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• Panebianco, Angelo, 1988. Political Parties: Organization and Power. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
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• Sassen, Saskia, 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press, New Jersey.
• Schudson, Michael, 2002. The news media as political institutions. Annual Review of Political Science 5 (1), 249–269.
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100 Sociology Research Topics You Can Use Right Now

Sociology is a study of society, relationships, and culture. It can include multiple topics—ranging from class and social mobility to the Internet and marriage traditions. Research in sociology is used to inform policy makers , educators , businesses , social workers , non-profits , etc.

Below are 100 sociology research topics you can use right now, divided by general topic headings. Feel free to adapt these according to your specific interest. You'll always conduct more thorough and informed research if it's a topic you're passionate about.

Art, Food, Music, and Culture

• Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?
• How has globalization changed local culture?
• What role does food play in cultural identity?
• Does technology use affect people's eating habits?
• How has fast food affected society?
• How can clean eating change a person's life for the better?
• Should high-sugar drinks be banned from school campuses?
• How can travel change a person for the better?
• How does music affect the thoughts and actions of teenagers?
• Should performance artists be held partially responsible if someone is inspired by their music to commit a crime?
• What are some examples of cultural misappropriation?
• What role does music play in cultural identity?

Social Solutions and Cultural Biases

• What (if any) are the limits of free speech in a civil society?
• What are some reasonable solutions to overpopulation?
• What are some ways in which different types of media content influence society's attitudes and behaviors?
• What is the solution to stop the rise of homegrown terrorism in the U.S.?
• Should prescription drug companies be allowed to advertise directly to consumers?
• Is the global warming movement a hoax? Why or why not?
• Should the drinking age be lowered?
• Should more gun control laws be enacted in the U.S.?
• What bias exists against people who are obese?
• Should polygamy be legal in the U.S.? Why or why not?
• Should there be a legal penalty for using racial slurs?
• Should the legal working age of young people be raised or lowered?
• Should the death penalty be used in all cases involving first-degree murder?
• Should prisons be privately owned? Why or why not?
• What is privilege? How is it defined and how can it be used to gain access to American politics and positions of power?
• How are women discriminated against in the workplace?
• What role does feminism play in current American politics?
• What makes a patriot?
• Compare/analyze the social views of Plato and Aristotle
• How has labor migration changed America?
• What important skills have been lost in an industrialized West?
• Is the #MeToo movement an important one? Why or why not?
• What conflict resolution skills would best serve us in the present times?
• How can violence against women be dealt with to lower incidence rates?
• Should students be allowed to take any subject they want in High School and avoid the ones they don't like?
• How should bullies be dealt with in our country's schools?
• Do standardized tests improve education or have the opposite effect?
• Should school children be forced to go through metal detectors?
• What is the best teacher/student ratio for enhanced learning in school?
• Do school uniforms decrease teasing and bullying? If so, how?
• Should teachers make more money?
• Should public education be handled through private enterprises (like charter schools)?
• Should religious education be given priority over academic knowledge?
• How can schools help impoverished students in ways that won't embarrass them?
• What are ethical values that should be considered in education?
• Is it the state's role or the parents' role to educate children? Or a combination of both?
• Should education be given more political priority than defense and war?
• What would a perfect educational setting look like? How would it operate and what subjects would be taught?

Marriage and Family

• How should a "family" be defined? Can it be multiple definitions?
• What is a traditional role taken on by women that would be better handled by a man (and vice versa)?
• How has marriage changed in the United States?
• What are the effects of divorce on children?
• Is there a negative effect on children who are adopted by a family whose ethnicity is different than their own?
• Can children receive all they need from a single parent?
• Does helicopter parenting negatively affect children?
• Is marriage outdated?
• Should teens have access to birth control without their parents' permission?
• Should children be forced to show physical affection (hugs, etc.) to family members they're uncomfortable around?
• What are the benefits (or negative impact) of maintaining traditional gender roles in a family?
• Are social networks safe for preteens and teens? Why or why not?
• Should the government have a say in who can get married?
• What (if any) are the benefits of arranged marriages?
• What are the benefits for (or negative impact on) children being adopted by LGBTQ couples?
• How long should two people date before they marry?
• Should children be forced to be involved in activities (such as sports, gymnastics, clubs, etc.), even when they'd rather sit at home and play video games all day?
• Should parents be required to take a parenting class before having children?
• What are potential benefits to being married but choosing not to have children?

Generational

• Should communities take better care of their elderly? How?
• What are some generational differences among Generations X, Y, and Z?
• What benefits do elderly people get from interaction with children?
• How has Generation Y changed the country so far?
• What are the differences in communication styles between Generation X and Generation Y (Millennials)?
• Why could we learn from our elders that could not be learned from books?
• Should the elderly live with their immediate family (children and grandchildren)? How would this resolve some of our country's current problems?
• What are some positive or negative consequences to intergenerational marriage?

Spiritualism, religion, and superstition

• Why do some people believe in magic?
• What is the difference between religion and spiritualism?
• Should a government be a theocracy? Why or why not?
• How has religion helped (or harmed) our country?
• Should religious leaders be able to support a particular candidate from their pulpit?
• How have religious cults shaped the nation?
• Should students at religious schools be forced to take state tests?
• How has our human connection with nature changed while being trapped in crowded cities?
• Which generation from the past 200 years made the biggest impact on culture with their religious practice and beliefs? Explain your answer.

Addiction and Mental Health

• How should our society deal with addicts?
• What are ethical values that should be considered in mental health treatment?
• Should mental health be required coverage on all insurance policies?
• Is mental health treatment becoming less stigmatized?
• How would better access to mental health change our country?
• What are some things we're addicted to as a society that are not seen as "addiction," per se?
• Should medicinal marijuana be made legal?
• What are some alternative treatments for mental health and wellness instead of antidepressants?
• Has social media helped or harmed our society?
• Are video games addictive for young people and what should be done to curb the addiction?
• Should all recreational drugs be made legal?
• How has mental health treatment changed in the past 20 years?
• Should recreational marijuana be made legal?
• How is family counseling a good option for families going through conflict?

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Introduction: Theoretical directions in political sociology for the 21st century

2002, Research in Political Sociology

Related Papers

States, Civil Societies, and Globalization

Thomas Janoski

Nicholas J Rowland , Justin Kelly

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition,

Tyson Patros

Political sociology is a major subfield on the border of sociology and political science, combining explanatory factors and research interests of both disciplines. It developed from the work of the early founders of social science to include areas of inquiry that tackle the salient social and political processes of the twentieth century and the contemporary world. We discuss important theoretical and empirical advancements and the subfield's continuous preoccupation with the interrelationships of 'politics' and 'society', political and social changes, and with issues of power, domination, and exploitation. Political sociology bridges the fields of sociology and political science by addressing issues of power and authority with a focus on state/civil society relations. Political sociology differs from political science in that it includes and often focuses on the civil society side of the equation rather than placing an emphasis on the state and/or political elites. Core areas of research include state formation and change, forms of political rule, major social policies, political institutions and challenges to them (including reform-oriented and revolutionary social movements), political parties and the social bases of political attitudes and behaviors, class/power relations, and the political consequences of globalization. The field includes distinct major approaches, yet theoretical combination and synthesis is common. Many early and contemporary studies utilize comparative historical analysis, especially with regard to critical junctures and historical processes and developments, whereas current work has become methodologically more eclectic. Contemporary political issues and events, regimes in power, and cases relating to the United States and Europe tend to garner the most scholarly attention, though there is a steadily growing body of theory and empirical work beyond the core capitalist democracies. We consider four somewhat distinct periods in the development of political sociology, while prioritizing the most recent period: (1) We trace political sociology's inspiration in the mid-nineteenth century to the earlier philosophers who considered the state and social life, but note that it was not until the founding fathers of nineteenth-century social science began thinking of society and the state as distinct entities and analyzing the relationships between them, that political sociology was born; (2) The post-World War II period, which shifted the subfield's focus to the prerequisites of democracy and voting patterns; (3) The late twentieth-century period, which saw political sociologists move toward a focus on state building and political change, using Marxist theories of capitalism and class as well as other theories; and (4) The contemporary period, which is characterized by a proliferation of topics relevant to politics such as globalization, race, gender, and culture. (Sections Historical Developments through Mid-and Late Twentieth-Century Period are largely abridged, paraphrased , and enhanced versions of the previous survey by E. Allardt in this publication. See Allardt (2001) for full references to these sections. Additionally, for broad works on political sociology, see Alford and Friedland, 1985; Janoski et al., 2005; Amenta et al., 2012.) Historical Developments The foundations of social sciences emerged in a context of epochal social and political transformations, including the development and unfolding of capitalist social systems and the modern state. These developments encouraged conceptualiza-tions of the state and society as separate entities, making it possible to investigate their interrelations. Relying on earlier works on social life and politics by philosophers, historians, and legal theorists, sociology's three founding fathers made important contributions to political sociology's beginnings. Karl Marx challenged the idea that power concentrates solely in political offices and officeholders. Instead he focused on politics as emerging primarily from class conflict, just as the bourgeoisie and industrial working classes were becoming the principal social groups. He also emphasized the role of ideology in sustaining the powers that be. Max Weber responded to and critiqued Marx and added important analyses of authority, status categories, and social institutions (especially bureaucracy). Sociology's third founding father, Emile Durkheim, did not have an explicitly political focus, yet his emphasis on social order, integration, and solidarity had important implications for analyses of society and politics. Others more directly associated with the emergence of political sociology include: Talcott Parsons, who was inspired by Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, and Gaetano Mosca, who made independent contributions by emphasizing the role of elites for social and political change (along with others who continued this concern, including Robert Michels, C. Wright Mills, G. William Domhoff, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Seymour Martin Lipset). Marx and Class Domination, Capitalism, and Revolution Marx was among the first to articulate an empirical political sociology, marking out historical materialism in his systematic general insistence on exploring the relationships between the mode of economic production and social property relations with state/political forms, social and political struggles, and consciousness, with a particular focus on capitalism and classes 472

KAY217 - Political Sociology | Fall Semester Sllybus

Barış Mutluay

Course Description Politics is about power and authority. But the production, conservation and distribution of power and authority occur far beyond Capitol Hill: in family dynamics, neighborhoods, schools, welfare policies, social movements, nation-states and the globalized economy. In this course, we will examine such areas using the theoretical framework and analytic tools of political sociology. The course provides a broad overview of political sociology as a subdiscipline, focusing on a few central topics. Thus, rather than seeking to provide students with a complete understanding of the subfield, the central aim of the course is to introduce students to political sociology – including its possibilities, promises, and shortcomings – through a series of “workshop seminars” designed to promote student thinking and understanding. Course Learning Outcomes o Be familiar with central tenets in political sociology o Understand the meaning of central concepts and theories in political sociology o Be able to account for and analyze texts in political sociology in a clear, articulate and convincing manner o Be able to apply relevant concepts and theories from political sociology in order to analyze political phenomena o Be able to critically assess texts in political sociology in terms of their strengths and weaknesses

European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology

Ulrike M Vieten

Paddy Dolan

This seminar is an introduction to political sociology, a subfield within sociology that examines the state and other institutions of power, as well as broader political dynamics. The class is organized around the following themes: 1) the state, 2) nations and nationalism, 3) citizenship, 4) civil society and the civil sphere, 5) democracy and democratization, 6) authoritarianism, dictatorship, and totalitarianism, 7) social movements and political parties, 8) revolutions, 9) spatialities of power and resistance, and 10) who really rules? As we discuss each theme, we will engage with key theorists working in that area. As an introduction, in the first two weeks, will focus on the meaning of “the political” in the works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, and Antonio Gramsci. We will end the class with a discussion of emancipatory social science as outlined in Envisioning Real Utopias, by Erik Olin Wright

Dylan Kerrigan

Benedikte Brincker

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Top 50 Sociology Research Topics Ideas and Questions

Interesting Sociology Research Topics and Questions: Due to the vastness of the possibilities, coming up with sociological research topics can be stressful. In order to help narrow down the specificities of where our interests lie, it is important to organize them into various subtopics. This article will be focusing on various sociology research topics, ideas, and questions, one can venture into, to write an effective sociology research paper .

• Social Institutions

Interactions with social institutions are inextricably linked to our lives. Social institutions such as family, marriage, religion, education, etc., play a major role in defining the type of primary and secondary identities we create for ourselves. They also define the types and natures of our various relationships with fellow individuals and social systems around us and play a huge role in the type of socialization we are exposed to in various stages of our lives. Some topics that one can consider to examine the roles that social institutions play in different dimensions of our lives are as follows:

• Hierarchical creation of Distinction and Differentiation in cultures rich in Plurality
• Violence perpetuated in the structures of Family, Marriage and Kinship
• Sexually Abused Boys – The contribution of familial and societal neglect due to unhealthy stereotypes resulting in silenced voices of male victims
• The Institution of Dowry – Turning Marriage into an Unethical Transaction Process
• Gendered Socialization of young children in Indian households and how it feeds into the Patriarchy
• Marital Rape – An Examination on the Importance of Consent
• How do the institutions of Family, Marriage and Kinship contribute towards the Socialization of young minds?
• In the Pretext of upholding the Integrity of the Family – The Horrifying Prevalence of Honor Killing
• The Underlying Influence of Religion and Family in the cultivation of Homophobic sentiments – A Case Study
• The Roles of Family, Education and Society in both enforcing as well as eradicating negative sentiments towards Inter-caste Marriages.
• The effects of Divorce on young minds and their interactions with their social environments and the relationships they create. Are there primarily negative effects as society dictates, or could divorce also have possible effects for children in mentally/ physically abusive parents?
• Examining the Influence of class status on Parenting styles
• Social Issues

Our society is never rid of the conflict. It lies in our very human nature to create conflict-ridden- situations and seek multiple ways to resolve them. Conflict is ingrained in human society, and the more diverse it is, in terms of social institutions, nationalities, gender identities, sexualities, races, etc., the more prone to conflict we are. It is not always necessarily a bad thing, but a clear sociological examination of these social issues that stem from our various interactions is of utmost importance, in order to come up with optimal and rational solutions. Some social issues that one can focus on for delving into research are as follows:

• Reconceptualizing the underlying differences between Race and Ethnicity with the help of examples and examining the interchangeable usage of the two terms
• Assess from a Sociological perspective the rise in Xenophobia after the rise of Covid-19
• Examining the prevalence of gender-inequality in the workspace and solutions that can help overcome it
• Sociological Perspective on Ethnic Cleansing and possible solutions
• 10 Things that Need to Change in the Society in order to be more accommodative of Marginalized Communities and help tackle their Challenges
• The Directly Proportional Relationship between Privilege and Power – A Sociological Examination
• Demonization of the Occident by the Orient – A Case Study
• Dimensions of Intersectionality – An Examination through Feminist Theory
• Examining the Manner in which the Modern Education System feeds into Harmful Capitalistic Ideals with examples
• The perpetuation of differential treatment of male and female students within Indian Educational Systems
• Scarcity of Resources or rather the Accumulation of the World’s Resources in the Hands of a Few? – A Sociological Examination
• Links between Colonialism and Christianity and their effects on the Colonized
• Creation and conflict of Plural Identities in the Children of Migrants
• The Overarching need for Social Reform to precede and hence ensure Economic Reform
• Marxist Perspectives

Karl Marx was a renowned German Sociologist from whom comes the Marxist Theories. Through works such as “The Communist Manifesto” (1848) and other renowned works, his views on capitalist society, the unequal division of labor, class conflict, and other issues spread throughout the world, influencing many. His influential works significantly widened the Marxist perspective. He sought to explain and analyze the various inequalities and differences that were imposed on society and led to class conflict; for which the economic system of capitalism was blamed. His views on other topics like religion, education, interdisciplinarity, climate change, etc. were also highly praised. Here are some of the topics one can venture into for researching Marx’s perspectives.

• Marxist perspective on the Effect of Capitalism on the Climate Crisis
• Marxist perspective on the Importance of the element of Interdisciplinarity within Indian Sociology as an Academic Discipline
• Marxist Criticism of Normative Ethical Thought

Read: How to Apply Sociology in Everyday Life

The majority of the world’s population is exposed to various forms of media in today’s world such as, Films, Newspapers, TV Shows, Books, Online Sources, Social-Media etc. The consumption of such content has increased to such an extent that it now plays a huge role in the way individual identities are shaped and influenced. They also play a huge role in influencing the opinions and views we hold about the world’s issues and various phenomena, and now hold the power to become driving forces of social change in society. These are some areas that have the potential for in-depth sociological research:

• A Sociological Analysis of the Influence of Pop Culture in an Individual’s socialization process and building body image
• Influence of social media in the ongoing perpetuation of Western standards of Beauty
• A Sociological Analysis of Representations of Masculinity in Audio/Visual/Print Advertisements and the effects the pose for audiences who are offered this content
• A Sociological Analysis on the Fetishization of Queer Relationships as Token Diversity in Film
• A Sociological Perspective on the Perpetuation of Casteism in the Bollywood Industry by means of Endorsements for Colorist advertisements, as well as portrayal of Negative Stereotypes of Marginalized Communities on the big screen
• Popular Cinema – Possessing Potential to both Reinforce or Challenge Hegemonic Masculinity
• A Detailed Sociological Analyses of Cultural Appropriation in Media and how it perpetuates unhealthy Fetishization of certain cultures
• Trace Representations of Hegemonic Masculinity in Popular Media – Assessing spectator relationship

READ: How to Write Academic Paper: Introduction to Academic Writing

• Political Issues

Just as social issues, political issues are equally important. The various political systems of the world determine the kind of governance we are under and the nature of human rights we are ensured as citizens. A sociological assessment of the various relationships between the different political issues instigated by the numerous forms of political power is of utmost importance. Such sociological indulgence helps in assessing the nature of these issues and the effect these issues have on citizens. Colonialism, Caste system, Resource conflicts, Communism, etc. and their roles in the political arena, as well as the nature of the world governments of today, can be assessed using research questions/ topics such as these:

• Sociological Inspection on the International Peacekeeping Efforts in local conflicts
• Tracing the Role of Colonialism in the act of instigating Contemporary and Historical conflicts in post-colonial states – A Case Study
• Illustrating with examples the Vitality of Symbolic Representation of Indian Nationalism and how it contributes to Nationalistic Sentiments
• Comparative Analysis on the two cases of Palestine/Israel conflict and Kashmir/India conflict within the dimensions of State Violence, Separatism and Militancy
• Case Study outlining the influence of socio-economic and political factors that result in the creation and perpetuation of Conflict over Resources.
• Trace the Relationship between Naxalism and Intrastate Conflict
• Analyzing the existence of Caste based Violence in India
• Examination of the extent to which Freedom of Speech and Expression is allowed to be practiced and controlled under the Indian Government today
• Sociological Analysis on the Occupation of Kashmir within Dimensions of Militancy and Human Rights
• Sociological Analysis on the Occupation of Palestine
• Annihilation of Caste: A Review – Stirring the Waters Towards a Notional Reform to Attain Fundamental Social Reforms
• The demonization of Communism – A Sociological Perspective
• Role of Social Movements – A Sociological Case Study

We will update with more sociology research topics like Urban Sociology, industries, crime, mental health, Etc.

Also READ: How to write a Sociology Assignment – Guide

Angela Roy is currently pursuing her majors in Sociology and minors in International Relations and History, as a part of her BA Liberal Arts Honors degree in SSLA, Pune. She has always been driven to play a part in changing and correcting the social evils that exist in society. With a driving passion for breaking down harmful societal norms and social injustices, she seeks to learn and understand the different social institutions that exist in society like family, marriage, religion and kinship, and how they influence the workings and functioning of various concepts like gender, sexuality and various types of socializations in an individual’s life. She envisions herself to play a vital role in building safe places for today’s marginalized communities and creating a world that is characterized by equity and inclusiveness, free of discrimination and exploitative behaviors.

Sociology Research Areas

The department has a long-standing tradition of engaging and valuing theoretically driven empirical research. This approach to sociology uses sophisticated theoretical reasoning and rigorous methodological tools, many of which are developed by Cornell faculty, to answer fundamental questions about the social world, how it is organized and how it is changing.

In addition to the research areas below, the department also hosts several unique research hubs and institutes on campus. These include:

Center for the Study of Inequality

Center for the Study of Economy and Society

Social Dynamics Lab

Community and Urban Sociology

Community and urban sociology are foundational topics in sociology. The shift from rural to urban society is one of the largest and most profound shifts in the history of society.

Read more about Community and Urban Sociology

Computational Social Science

With the rapid increase in the availability and use of computers, and their capacity to process information rapidly, the value of knowledge associated with computational resources has increased substantially. T

Read more about Computational Social Science

Sociology overlaps with other social sciences (like anthropology) considerably. Students who take the culture of area will be expected to understand the relationships between social and other approaches (e.g., anthropological) to understanding culture.

Read more about Culture

Economy and Society

Economic sociology analyzes economic phenomena such as markets, corporations, property rights, and work using the tools of sociology.

Read more about Economy and Society

A student who specializes in the area of gender must demonstrate special knowledge of how biological sex and gender shape individuals’ identities, how they shape experiences in everyday social life, individuals’ experiences with major social institutions, and also, therefore, important life outcomes such as family, career, and health.

Read more about Gender

Inequality and Social Stratification

Sociologists of inequality study the distribution of income, wealth, education, health and longevity, autonomy, status, prestige, political power, or other desired social goods, often (though not exclusively) across groups defined by social classes and occupations, race, gender, immigrant status, age, or sexual orientation.

Read more about Inequality and Social Stratification

Methodology

Sociologists approach their objects of study in a number of ways.

Read more about Methodology

Organizations, Work and Occupations

Like families, organizations are important social institutions. This area is designed to increase students’ knowledge and mastery of a range of organizations, including business firms, non-profit organizations, and government bodies.

Read more about Organizations, Work and Occupations

Policy Analysis

Sociology is increasingly linked to issues of social policy. This includes public policy, health policy and related domains.

Read more about Policy Analysis

Political Sociology and Social Movements

This is a long-standing focus of the field of sociology at Cornell. The realm of political action is an important domain for understanding social structure at the national and local levels.

Read more about Political Sociology and Social Movements

Race, Ethnicity and Immigration

Students who specialize in this area focus on the role of the individual statuses of race/ethnicity and the experience of immigration (e.g., rates of in- vs out-migration)

Read more about Race, Ethnicity and Immigration

Science, Technology and Medicine

Like the sociology of health and illness, students to take this area are usually interested in concepts associated with health and medicine.

Read more about Science, Technology and Medicine

Social Demography

Demographers in the field of sociology carry out research on varied aspects of population composition, distribution, and change.

Read more about Social Demography

Social Networks

Social network analysis is a way of conceptualizing, describing, and modeling society as sets of people or groups linked to one another by specific relationships, whether these relationships are as tangible as exchange networks or as intangible as perceptions of each other.

Read more about Social Networks

Social Psychology

Social psychologists study how behaviors and beliefs are shaped by the social context in which people are embedded.

Read more about Social Psychology

Sociology of Education

The sociology of education is an important topic for understanding individuals’ outcomes with respect to things like occupation and labor market status

Read more about Sociology of Education

Sociology of Family

Family research in the field of sociology addresses patterns of change and variation in family behaviors and household relationships by social class, race/ethnicity, and gender.

Read more about Sociology of Family

Sociology of Health and Illness

There is increasing recognition (including within the field of medicine) that health and illness are a function of social factors (e.g., inequality).

Read more about Sociology of Health and Illness

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Political sociology.

Political sociology analyzes the operation of power in social life, examining the distribution and machination of power at all levels: individual, organizational, communal, national, and international. Defined thus, political science becomes a subfield of sociology. Parsons (1951), for example, treated the political as one of the four principal domains of sociological analysis. In practice, however, political sociology has developed as a sociological subfield, with its distinct concerns and fashions.

Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, or Montesquieu may rightfully claim to be the founder of political sociology insofar as they highlighted the social bases of power relations and political institutions. However, most contemporary scholars trace their intellectual lineage to Marx or Weber. Political sociology emerged as a distinct subfield in the 1950s, especially in the debate between pluralists and elite theorists. In the 1980s and 1990s political sociologists focused on social movements, the state, and institutions.

Marx and Weber

Elite theory, pluralism, and the third world, social movements, the state, and the new institutionalisms, redirecting political sociology.

According to Marx (and Engels), economic structure and class relations are the basis for all political activity (Miliband 1977). The dominant mode of production determines who wields power in society. Under the capitalist mode of production, the capitalist class controls the state, which serves to perpetuate its domination of subordinate classes and manage ‘‘its common affairs.’’ There are two principal strands in Marxist political sociology. The instrumentalists portray the state as the tool of a unified capitalist class that controls both the economic and political spheres. In this model, the state is virtually epiphenomenal to the dominance of the ruling class. The structuralists view the state (as well as politics more generally) as a relatively autonomous product of conflict between classes and sometimes within classes.

Whereas Marx viewed social classes as the basic units of competition, Weber (1978) recognized that competition occurs among many different types of entities, including not only social classes but also status groups (defined in terms of consumption, codes of honor, education and credentials, ethnicity, and other criteria), as well as political agencies and agents. Contestation for power occurs both across and within various institutions and organizations: heads of state clash with parliaments and civil service bureaucracies over legislation; trade unions and professional groups vie to influence legislators; politicians and bosses fight for control of a political party. The political sphere, while linked to events in other spheres, has its own logic of contestation.

Against the Marxian stress on the economy and class struggle, the defining feature of modern western societies for Weber is the ineluctable advance of rationality. Thus, the bases of political authority shift from traditional or charismatic claims toward legal rational forms of legitimation and administration. For example, the whim of a king or lord who asserts the right to rule based on dynastic precedent (traditional authority) or heroic acts and personal qualities (charismatic authority) is replaced by state control of the populace according to normalized standards and codified laws (legal rational authority). For Weber, the modern state also extends and entrenches its domination of society by expanding its coercive apparatus, chiefly in the form of bureaucratization. The central function of modern mass citizenship is to legitimize this iron cage; even in a democracy, real power would reside in the hands of a few.

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That power in society is always concentrated in the hands of a few is the basic assumption of the elite theory of society (Bottomore 1993). The elite theorists drew heavily on Weber, but placed greater emphasis than Weber on power rather than authority as the key to political dominance. Whereas Weber agreed that the power to make major political decisions always concentrates in a small group, he viewed the authority that stems from popular support as the foundation for all institutions that provide this power. For the elite theorists, it was the reverse: power made authority, law, and political culture possible.

Michels (1966) proposed ‘‘the iron law of oligarchy’’: the thesis that all organizations – whether political parties, trade unions, or any other kind – come to be run by a small group of leaders. He saw the oligarchical tendency as ‘‘a matter of technical and practical necessity,’’ citing several causes for this tendency: the impracticality of mass leadership, the organizational need for a small corps of full time expert leaders, the divergence of leaders’ interests from those of the people they claim to represent, and the masses’ apathy and thirst for guidance. Schumpeter agreed with elite theorists, including Pareto and Mosca, that mass participation in politics is very limited. Emphasizing the lability and pliability of popular opinion, he stated that ‘‘the will of the people is the product and not the motive power of the political process’’ (Schumpeter 1976).

With The Power Elite (1956), C. Wright Mills produced a radical version of elite theory. Mills described a ‘‘power elite’’ of families that dominated three sectors of American society: politics, the military, and business. The power elite was cohesive and durable because of the ‘‘coincidence of interests’’ among organizations in the three sectors, as well as elites’ ‘‘similarity of origin and outlook’’ and ‘‘social and personal intermingling.’’ Radical elite theory presumed the passivity of mass politics, which was articulated most influentially by Marcuse (1964).

Radical elite theory was largely a response to pluralism, which was particularly influential in US social science in the two decades following World War II. Pluralism has its roots in Montesquieu (1989), an advocate of the separation of powers and of popular participation in lawmaking, and Tocqueville (2004), who famously observed decentralization of power, active political participation by citizens, and a proliferation of associations in the early nineteenth century US. In addition to these earlier theorists, pluralists also drew inspiration from Weber, particularly in his view of the political sphere as a realm of constant contention.

The basic assumption of pluralism is that in modern democracies power is dispersed among many groups and no single group dominates. Power is dispersed in part because it has many sources, including wealth, political office, social status and connections, and popular legitimacy. Pluralists also note that individuals often subscribe to multiple groups and interests, making pluralist systems more stable in their opinion. In this model, the state is largely an arbiter facilitating compromise between competing interests.

The 1950s and early 1960s were the heyday of pluralist theory, coinciding with the apparent stability of liberal democracy in the US, which most pluralists viewed as an exemplar. David Truman’s 1953 book The Governmental Process was a defining work of the period, focusing on interest groups as its basic unit of analysis and examining how their interaction gave rise to policy (Truman 1971). In Who Governs? (1961), Robert Dahl argued that city policies in education and development were a function of input from many individuals and groups, and that neither individual office holders nor business leaders wielded overriding influence. Lipset and colleagues (1956) challenged empirically Michel’s iron law of oligarchy in their analysis of a trade union.

The Cold War directed attention to democratization in the face of rapid industrialization, transition from colonial rule, and other conditions that prevailed in the third world: the world outside of Europe and North America. Modernization theory posits that societies follow a stage by stage process of political, economic, and social development. It typically portrays western democracies as consummately ‘‘modernized’’ societies. Different modernization theorists have highlighted different social conditions as critical to democratization. For example, Lipset (1994) has argued for the importance of ‘‘political culture,’’ defined as popular and elite acceptance of civil and political liberties. Allied with pluralism, modernization theory delineated an optimistic, evolutionary account of democratization and development. Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) provided a profound critique – not only stressing the role of power and class struggle, but also the fact of distinct trajectories of political development – and laid the foundations for historically oriented political sociology. Dependency theory emerged in response to the apparent failure of modernization theorists’ prescriptions in the developing world. Drawing heavily on Marx, dependency theory argued that the economic and political problems of the developing world were not a function of ‘‘backwardness,’’ but rather of developing societies’ structural positions in the capitalist world economy (Cardoso & Faletto 1979). Dependency theory inspired much of world systems theory and would come to engage in dialogue with it (Wallerstein 1984).

Crises of authority and production shook the industrialized world in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Civil Rights Movement and pro tests against the Vietnam War in the US, the social upheaval of May 1968 and radicalization of the Left in France, and the global oil shocks and stalling of growth regimes. These events suggested flaws in pluralist models of democratic society that assumed stable competition among groups and consensus about the rules of the political game. Meanwhile, anti colonial nationalist movements in Africa and Southeast Asia drew further sociological attention to questions about collective behavior and the conditions for successful mobilization against state structures. In this environment the study of social movements evolved and gained prominence within sociology.

The three major theoretical models of social movements have corresponded with the pluralist, elite, and Marxist models of institutionalized power in society (McAdam 1982). The classical model of social movements portrays them as the result of structural pathologies that led to psychological strain and the desire to pursue non conventional channels for political participation in an otherwise open system. The ‘‘resource mobilization’’ model of social movements posits that they arise and grow because rational individuals decide that the benefits of joining outweigh the costs and because the necessary resources are available and worth investing. As such, they do not reflect social pathologies or psychological abnormalities, but are a natural feature of political life (McCarthy & Zald 1977). Finally, the political process model of social movements blends elite theorists’ position that power is highly concentrated in society with the Marxist conviction that the ‘‘subjective transformation of consciousness’’ through popular movements nevertheless has the immanent power to force social change (McAdam 1982). It stresses the interplay between activist strategy, skill, and intensity on the one hand, and the favorability of resources and political opportunity structures to movement tactics and goals, on the other.

One objection raised in the late 1970s to the dominance of post World War II theoretical models in the pluralist, elite, and Marxist camps was that social scientists had been focusing on social and economic activity and had largely ignored the operations of the state as an autonomous entity. Advocates of ‘‘state centered’’ approaches sought to remedy what they saw as a ‘‘society centered’’ bias in scholar ship. In the introduction to Bringing the State Back In, Theda Skocpol (1985) remarks on the trend toward viewing states as ‘‘weighty actors’’ that shape political and social processes. She notes that ‘‘states . . . may formulate and pursue goals that are not simply reflective of the demands or interests of social groups, classes, or society’’ – that is, states are autonomous.

Research on how the modern form of the state arose has been an important part of the movement to refocus attention on the state: how states became centralized, developed function ally differentiated structures, increased their coercive power over their populations, and developed national identities that superseded class and religious differences. The bellicist model of state formation points to the pressure to organize for, prosecute, and pay for war in an environment of interstate competition on the European continent as the driving force behind the evolution of the modern state. As Tilly (1979) put it, ‘‘states make war, and war makes states.’’ Other scholars have emphasized different factors. Anderson (1979) stressed the power of class relations and struggles. Gorski (2003) has called attention to the significance of religion and culture. Mann (1986) has traced European state formation and the growth of western civilization in general as a function of interrelations between four types of power networks – ideological, economic, military, and political – with each taking on different levels of importance at different stages and locales in European history.

The initial call to ‘‘bring the state back in’’ was followed by a recognition that as broad a concept as ‘‘the state’’ is best analyzed in terms of the various institutions that compose it. This led to a renewed focus on institutions, both within the state and outside it. The so called new institutionalisms build on the ‘‘old’’ organizational institutionalism of mid century. Selznick (1949) had called attention to the importance of informal institutions and extra organizational interests in shaping policy outcomes.

Each of the new institutionalisms defines and operationalizes institutions differently, largely a function of its origins in a social science discipline. Rational choice institutionalism, which grew out of the economics literature, defines institutions as the formal rules or ‘‘structures of voluntary cooperation that resolve collective action problems’’ (Moe 2005). Historical institutionalism defines institutions as formal and informal rules and procedures (Thelen & Steinmo 1992). Finally, organizational institutionalism is rooted in the sociology of organizations and embraces a wider definition of institutions than the other two institutionalisms. In addition to formal rules, it considers habits, rituals, and other cognitive frameworks to be institutions, thus situating a large part of the force of institutions within the minds of actors (DiMaggio & Powell 1983).

Recent changes in national and international political environments have taken political sociology in new directions. Political sociologists have participated in the proliferation of literature on globalization, including work on postnational citizenship (Soysal 1994) and transnational advocacy networks (Keck & Sikkink 1998). The postmodern turn in the human sciences has found adherents among students of post industrial politics (Bauman 1999). There is growing interest in the realm of ‘‘subpolitics’’ that analyzes power outside the traditional realm of politics as a contestation for state power (Beck 1992). In this regard, gender remains under studied in the realm of politics (Gal & Kligman 2000). Theorization of the politics of ethnicity and identity has taken on new urgency in the wake of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia (Lie 2004).

Theoretically, there are serious challenges to the very foundations of political sociology. Rational choice models are based on game theory, treating individual entities in political con texts as rational actors seeking to maximize their utility (Friedman 1996). In so doing, they deemphasize and at times ignore the social origins or dimensions of politics. From very different perspectives, Unger (1997), who argues for the autonomy of politics, and Foucault (1977), who probes the microphysics of power, bypass traditional sociological concerns with groups and institutions. For Unger and Foucault, political sociology misrecognizes the very nature and operation of power.

The evolution of political sociology has mirrored the great political movements of modern history. Just as class based models of state and society have drifted upward and downward with the political cachet of socialism and communism, and conservative elite theory linked itself to Italian Fascism in the 1920s, so pluralist models have been fellow travelers of liberal democracy’s credibility and theorists of social movements interrogated the global upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, as the meaning of national boundaries and identities changes in a global age, political sociology continues to expand its intellectual horizons and investigate new configurations of power.

References:

• Anderson, P. (1979) Lineages of the Absolutist State. Verso, London.
• Bauman, Z. (1999) In Search of Politics. Blackwell, Oxford.
• Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society. Trans. M. Ritter. Sage, Newbury Park, CA.
• Bottomore, T. (1993) Elites and Society. Routledge, London.
• Cardoso, F. H. & Faletto, E. (1979) Dependency and Development in Latin America. Trans. M. M. Urquidi. University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Dahl, R. (1961) Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. Yale University Press, New Haven.
• DiMaggio, P. J. & Powell, W. W. (1983) The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American Sociological Review 48: 147-60.
• Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. Vintage, New York.
• Friedman, J. (Ed.) (1996) The Rational Choice Controversy. Yale University Press, New Haven.
• Gal, S.&Kligman, G. (2000) The Politics of Gender after Socialism. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
• Gorski, P. S. (2003) The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Keck, M. E. & Sikkink, K. (1998) Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
• Lie, J. (2004) Modern Peoplehood. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Lipset, S. M. (1994) The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited. American Sociological Review 59: 1-22.
• Lipset, S. M., Trow, M., & Coleman, J. (1956) Union Democracy. Free Press, Glencoe, IL.
• McAdam, D. (1982) Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930 1970. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• McCarthy, J. D. & Zald, M. N. (1977) Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory. American Journal of Sociology 82: 1212-41.
• Mann, M. (1986) The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Marcuse, H. (1964) One Dimensional Man. Beacon Press, Boston.
• Michels, R. (1966) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Free Press, New York.
• Miliband, R. (1977) Marxism and Politics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Mills, C. W. (1956) The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, New York.
• Moe, T. M. (2005) Power and Political Institutions. Perspectives on Politics 3 (June): 215-33.
• Montesquieu, C. (1989) The Spirit of the Laws. Trans. A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller, & H. S. Stone. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Moore, B. (1966) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Beacon Press, Boston.
• Parsons, T. (1951) The Social System. Free Press, New York.
• Schumpeter, J. (1976) Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Allen & Unwin, London.
• Selznick, P. (1949) TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization. Harper & Row, New York.
• Skocpol, T. (1985) Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research. In: Evans, P., Rueschemeyer, D., & Skocpol, T. (Eds.), Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Soysal, Y. N. (1994) The Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Thelen, K. & Steinmo, S. (1992) Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics. In: Steinmo, S., Thelen, K., & Longstreth, F. (Eds.), Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Tilly, C. (1979) Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990 1990. Blackwell, Oxford.
• Tocqueville, A. de. (2004) Democracy in America. Trans. A. Goldhammer. Library of America, New York.
• Truman, D. (1971) The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. Knopf, New York.
• Unger, R. M. (1997) Politics, 3 vols. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Wallerstein, I. (1984) The Politics of the World Economy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society. University of California Press, Berkeley.

150+ Interesting Sociology Research Topics

Sociological research topics are one of the most interesting kinds of research that you can do. This is because topics of sociology are not only enlightening, but they also treat important aspects of life. Many people carry out sociology science research for different reasons. You may write sociology topics for essays, or other kinds of research papers. For whatever reason that you choose to carry out your research, there are a variety of topics that you can choose from. Finding the most interesting sociology topics should not pose a serious challenge for you.

Features of a good sociological research topic

Sociology topics dive into fields of human lives that may appear simple. For instance, writing a sociological research paper on eating, disparities between human races, politics, or cultural behaviors.

Carrying out research on topics in sociology means that you are adopting scientific means to provide whatever reports that your paper would contain. Hence, good sociological topics for research papers should be; Interactive, informative, current, based on facts, unbiased, and relevant.

The importance of good sociology research topics should not be undermined. This is because it determines what your research would entail, and the results that your research would produce.

Sociology Research Paper Topics on Culture and Lifestyle

• The general effects of art in everyday life
• The rising significance of prostitution
• Should babies be circumcised or get piercings even with their inability to give consent?
• The role and importance of music in human culture
• The significance of different dress culture
• Addressing the controversy of the LGBTQ community
• The rising awareness of women prowess in the society
• Feminism and its effect on the changing society
• Does traveling affect one’s life positively or negatively?
• What secret societies entail
• Should there be a universal ideal marriage culture
• The abuse of over-the-counter drugs and its effect on health
• The role that humans play in global warming
• African culture and beliefsSociology topics on Rape, Crimes, and Abuse
• Ways that people get abused emotionally and physically without knowing
• Addressing abuse from lecturer/ teacher to student in institutions of learning
• Ways that you abuse people emotionally and physically without knowing
• The growing culture of blackmail through sex
• The still occurring practice of kids marriage in different communities
• Empowering women for self-defense
• Helping rape victims overcome trauma
• Why do abusers do what they do?
• Should the punishment for rapists and abusers be more severe?
• The implications of the death sentence on criminals
• Looking into Innocent people that have served jail terms for crimes they did not commit.
• Employee – employer bully
• The importance of educating the male gender against rape
• Factors responsible for rape
• Drugs abuse and its effect on the society

Sociological Research Paper Topic on the Global Pandemic

• Adapting to the changing times of the pandemic
• Analyzing life before and after the pandemic
• The blessings that are hidden underneath the disaster of the coronavirus
• Debunking the myths and controversy surrounding vaccination against the deadly virus
• How can the world better prepare for unforeseen disruptions from similar cases of COVID-19
• Did countries of the world handle the effects of the virus in the best ways possible?
• The effects of the COVID-19 vaccine

Social Science Research Topics on Ethnicity and Nationalism

• How racism affects global development
• The way forward for cohabitation between different peoples
• The fast-rising trend of banditry and terrorism
• The role of ethnicity and religion in global unrest
• Countries with the highest rankings of racism and gender inequality
• The similarities between ethnicity and racism
• What are the disparities between modern nationalism and the traditional nationalism
• The unifying characteristics of language
• Acts that should be considered patriotic
• Your obligations to the state

Sociology Essay Topics on Social Media and the Internet

• The social media community and its role as a unifying factor
• How the social media aided the “black lives matter” campaign
• Should there be a restriction on access to the internet?
• The blessing and curse of the social media
• The effects of cyberbullying
• The right of social media founders to restrict activities on the internet
• Many ways that social media served as a platform for relaying extremely important information
• Online dating; positive/ negative effects, as well as realities for couples
• The life of social media influencers and their roles in instigating a change
• How does public opinion affect state politics
• Character representation in kids cartoons
• Mass media harassment

Social Scientific Research Topics on Youth, Politics, and Sexuality

• The subject of open sexuality in youths today
• Why do more youths fail to participate in politics
• Should explicit sexual contents remain censored even with how much exposure teens already have?
• What age bracket should be classified as youths?
• How does social media affect the behavior of youths and teens?
• Managing the life-threatening situation in the game of politics
• Why corruption lurks in politics
• The role of youths in elections
• Maintaining the voting rights of people
• Including politics into the school curriculum
• The right way to go about sexual education
• The fear of coming out as gay to family and loved ones
• Does sex play a role in a failing relationship?
• Addressing the issue of virginity in ladies
• The peer pressure of getting tattoos among teens

Social Research Topics on Education

• The bully culture in schools and why it still thrives
• Why do public schools Witness more indiscipline?
• The right to education; the heavy demands in private schools
• Should religion be inculcated into the basic school curriculum?
• Helping kids deal with trauma from being bullied
• Should every kid be assigned a teacher to monitor them?
• How feasible will it be for students to decide which teachers they’d like to tutor them?
• Are teachers underpaid for the services that they render?
• How effective is the tactic of examinations and tests in helping students?
• Should extracurricular activities be given more attention in schools?
• Is detention an effective tool for punishing offenders in schools?
• Handling social class discrimination in schools
• Do students who are homeschooled get the same values as those schooled in a classroom?
• The importance of making students wear uniforms
• Education values

Sociology Topics for Essay on Family

• The behavior and attitude of children in broken homes; how to help them overcome the trauma
• The importance of DNA; should it be made compulsory when a child is born?
• The responsibility of single parenting
• Should women pay child support if the man has custody of their child?
• Marriages; placing a legal age for people to get married
• Who should propose marriage in a relationship; the man or the woman?
• Should having children outside wedlock be considered illegal?
• How gender equality affects relationships
• Should there be restrictions on the number of kids a married couple can have?
• The issue of bad parenting and the best way to handle its effect
• Is love always the determining factor in relationships?
• What influence do gay parents have on the sexual decision of their kids?
• The mental effect of arranged marriages on both the parents and children
• Why failed marriages are a common recurring event.
• Should children be given physical painful punishments when they do the wrong things?
• The difference between modern and past methods of parenting
• Should family planning be made compulsory?

Sociological Paper Topics on Psychology

• Why do people opt for euthanasia
• The growing rate of anxiety and depression
• Understanding the life of addiction to drugs and alcohol
• Why do people shy away from seeking therapy after a trauma
• The ideology behind feminism
• The realities of PTSD
• How families of fallen soldiers battle grief
• Do males also go through sex discrimination?
• Inside a teenager’s head
• Unmasking the face behind the gothic lives of people
• How are female sex workers discriminated against?
• The role of religion in shaping ideology
• How social interaction helps tackle trauma
• Are antidepressants helpful
• Who are feminine men?

Sociology Paper Topics on Superstition, Art, and Science

• Do mermaids live in our midst
• The controversy of the incomplete Christian bible
• African historical culture; the practice of rituals
• What is in Pandora’s box?
• The accuracy of the big bang theory

Sociological Topics on Health

• Why intermittent fasting?
• Is dieting enough to lose weight?
• The exercise culture for overweight women
• How effective is yoga?
• The health benefits of exercises
• Why do people find it difficult to exercise
• How many people invest in food
• What happens in the gym locker rooms
• How expensive is it to eat healthily?
• How homeless people manage to eat healthily
• Are food supplements healthy?
• The phobia for hospitals
• Why nurses may appear rude
• Why do adults fear needles
• The importance of drug prescription

Sociology Topics for Research Paper on Class conflict

• Who sets the standard?
• Family training pattern of the rich and the poor
• The effect of class disparities in the society
• The effect of class disparities in social gatherings
• Do the poor hate the rich?
• Revenue distribution between opposite sides of the state
• Do the rich hate the poor?
• The history of class conflict
• The bias in class segregation
• Should the disabled get special treatments?
• Who belongs in the ghetto?
• The theory of equal opportunity for all classes

Final tips on sociology research paper topics

The categories of sociology topics to research range from economy to anthropology. They vary from lifestyle, alcoholism, education, family, as you can see from the list above. Pick the one that suits you and start writing.

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Political sociology and social movements are two major, overlapping areas of sociological inquiry, both nationally and internationally, and constitute a central focus of research and instruction within the UCI Sociology Department.  With the addition of new faculty in this area over the past six years, not only has this research cluster become one of the Department’s scholarly cornerstones, but it has also become one of the top programs in the country in which to study social movements and related forms of collective action. The vitality of this research cluster is attributable partly to the number and prominence of participating faculty as well as to the substantive, theoretical and methodological breadth of their research, as indicated by the listing of a few of their respective recent publications and some of their current research projects. Faculty in this area, just as in the Department in general, work closely with students; so students are likely to find themselves working closely with faculty on one of their projects or working with a mentor as they pursue their own projects. Two organizational appendages of this cluster offer additional opportunities to students: the developing Center for the Study of Collective Action, which brings together interested faculty and students from across the UCI campus to engage in joint research, seminars and workshops; and the Social Justice & Social Movement seminar, which meets twice monthly to discuss works in progress relevant to politics and social movements.

Edwin Amenta *

David Frank, Department Chair

Ann Hironaka

David S. Meyer , Cluster Coordinator  *

Francesca Polletta *

Evan Schofer

David Smith

David A. Snow , Distinguished Emeritus Professor* 

Judith Stepan-Norris , Professor Emerita*

Yang Su , Co-Graduate Director *

*Members for whom the study of social movements and collective action is a primary research specialty.   

SELECTED ONGOING FACULTY RESEARCH PROJECTS

• Examination of processes through which collective action frames are produced, negotiated, and modified
• Investigation of the interactive dynamics that affect the course and character of celebratory and protest crowds/gatherings
• Assessment of the ebbs and flows of anti-war and antinuclear weapons activism in America since World War II, with particular attention to the relationship of protest to policy
• Investigation of the relationship between shop-floor networks and union leadership
• Examination of the ways in which racial identity, gender relations, class stratification, and generational differences have facilitated or impeded various forms of political formation and mobilization among African-Americans in the post-1960s era    
• Study of the AFL-CIO's Union Summer Program, which recruits mostly college students to help with individual union organizing, strike, and other union efforts
• Data collection project on U.S. unions over the last hundred years.
• Examination of state-sponsored mass movements in the communist society
• Study of popular resistance in transitional China
• Investigation of the spatial dimensions of work, ethnicity, and religion, and how they are involved in the development of community politics in Detroit, Michigan during the 1950s
• Examination of collective action, quasi-legal structures, and abusive authority in organizations
• Examination of the relationship between deliberation and contention, through an investigation of decisionmaking about the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan in the wake of 9/11
• Examination of the relations between culture, structure, and strategy in social movements
• Examination of the influence of U.S. old-age pension movements on social security
• Study of America’s most publicized challengers, mapping and analyzing the population of political SMOs as they have appeared in national newspapers
• Examination of the relationship between deliberation and contention, through an investigation of decision-making about the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan in the wake of 9/11
• Study of how well “victim stories” serve activists in the court, media, and legislative hearings
• Investigating gender differences in citizenship norms and behaviors cross-nationally
• Study of gender influences on social policy and welfare state development internationally
• Study of the sources of cross-national variation in voluntary organizations
• Examination of the effects of domestic and international associations on environmental policy reform
• Theorization of the role of the international community in civil and interstate warfare

CLUSTER FIELD EXAMS & GRADUATE COURSES

Specialization in the area requires students to pass an area field exam. To qualify for the exam, students must take at least two core seminars and one elective seminar.

Core Seminars: 

Elective Seminars:

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Political Sociology Research Paper

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Political sociology is a border field between political science and sociology, and the term encompasses the overlap between these two neighboring disciplines. It denotes the analysis of the inter-relationship between the social and the political, social structures and political institutions, between the society and the state. There is no stable consensus of what counts as political sociology in contrast to sociology and political science proper. There have been great variations over time in the popularity of political sociology and in the tendencies to emphasize it as a genuine field of its own. Nevertheless a common element is that political sociology is related to the distinction between the social and the political.

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Get 10% off with 24start discount code, 1. historical roots of political sociology.

The historical development of political sociology can be roughly outlined by emphasizing three periods of special importance.

(a) The birth of political sociology can be dated to the mid-nineteenth century, when the founding fathers of social science began to conceive of the social and political, the society and the state as separate entities, and to analyze their relationships (Runciman 1963, pp. 22–42, Pizzorno 1971, pp. 7–18). This type of inquiry had its intellectual roots in the writings of earlier philosophers about the state and the social life, however, as a broad and joint interest of an academic community, political sociology emerged in the scholarship of the nineteenth-century fathers of social science.

(b) The post-World War II studies of the conditions for and the citizen activities in political democracies with a special focus on parliamentary elections conceived them as expressions of the political competition between different social groups. The joint focus on the prerequisites of democracy and voting patterns proliferated during the 1950s and 1960s, receiving institutionalized expression in the work and activities of the Committee of Political Sociology, founded in 1959 with Seymour Martin Lipset as chairman and Stein Rokkan as secretary and functioning under the auspices of both the ISA (International Sociological Association) and the IPSA (International Political Science Association) (Rokkan 1970, pp. 1–20).

(c) The late twentieth-century studies of nation and state building placed a special emphasis on great political transformations and breakdowns of regimes. This type of inquiry received a strong impetus from the renaissance of Marxist thinking in the 1960s and 1970s, but it was not restricted to social scientists with a leftist orientation (Linz and Stepan 1978, Skocpol 1979).

1.1 The Establishment Of A Distinction Between Society And State

In a great number of their texts, most of the path breaking social science theoreticians of the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century analyzed the relationships between the social and the political. One of the first thinkers to delineate an empirical political sociology was Karl Marx in his systematic insistence on seeing politics as an expression of conflicts between different social classes. His theorizing had a factual historical background in the emergence of the bourgeoisie and the industrial working class as distinct and dominant social groups (Pizzorno 1971, pp. 7–9).

Max Weber on his part wrote many of his works as rejoinders to Marx, but even apart from his counterclaims against Marx, there is in Weber’s writings continuous analyses of the social institutions and the types of authority existing in modern society (Runciman 1963, pp. 53–7).

Among the great founders of sociology Emile Durkheim is not normally thought of as a scholar of politics, but his preoccupation with order, social integration, and social solidarity had considerable implications for the analysis of the relationship between society and politics.

Vilfredo Pareto was a pioneer both in econometrics and in the sociological study of elites. His ability to relate the circulation of elites to large-scale social and political changes makes him one of the founding scholars of political sociology.

Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto were not primarily political sociologists, but instead more generally the great founding fathers of social science theory building. There are, however, some nineteenth-century scholars who can be labeled as specialists in political sociology. They are not unknown as scholars in history and in the study of politics, but their fame rests basically on the fact that they were important creators of the tradition of political sociology with its focus on the relationship between society and politics. Among them Lorenz von Stein, Alexis de Tocqueville, Mosei Ostrogorski, and Robert Michels deserve special mention.

Lorenz von Stein (1815–90) was a forerunner of Marxism in the sense that he explicitly emphasized how material and social conditions mould political development. His Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich (1850) contains not only a history of the French Revolution but also analyses of the importance of the property distributions and educational opportunities for political activities, and of the phenomena of class struggles and sudden outbursts of social change. It has been emphasized how some of Karl Marx’s ideas were influenced by the writings of von Stein.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) descended from an ancient and distinguished noble French family. His visit to the United States in 1831–2, which was of decisive importance for his scholarship, resulted in a study of American democracy published in two volumes De la democratie en Amerique (1835, 1840). Although the work made him well known, his great scholarly fame was established only after the Second World War and to a considerable degree by the then growing political sociology. Especially the English translations of his works, Democracy in America (1945) and his study of the French revolution, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1955; originally published in French in 1856), became standard works for political sociologists. His great contribution was that he specified the conditions for pluralism and democratic systems. He argued that social cleavages and competition between social groups and strata are necessary conditions for consensus in industrially developed societies. He emphasized voluntary associations and active, partially autonomous local communities as crucial in creating and sustaining a plural democracy. In the texts of political sociology, de Tocqueville has often been contrasted to Marx. While Karl Marx envisaged conflicts and social cleavages as one-sidedly destructive, de Tocqeuville emphasized their importance for obtaining consensus in wellfunctioning democracies (Lipset 1960, pp. 4–9).

Although Mosei Ostrogorski (1854–1919) was born in Tsarist Russia and died in the Soviet Union, during important parts of his life he worked in Paris and London. Early in his career he published studies of the suffrage demands of the women’s movement, but his main work was a critique of party democracy in Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (1902). Although it was an empirical study of the political party organizations in Britain and the United States, its main theme was that the mechanical and massive organization of political life into bureaucratized political parties, aimed at manipulating individuals and masses, was harmful for real democracy.

As was Ostrogorski, Robert Michels (1876–1936) was a critic of the emerging party bureacracies in modern states. Through his education and activities Michels had background liaisons with Germany, France, and Italy. Politically he started as a socialist with a syndicalist orientation but developed later profascist opinions. He took Italian citizenship in 1913, and although he was active as a professor and scholar in many countries he regarded Italy as his home country. His major work Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (1911) is considered a classic in political sociology. It treats many of its central themes, including the theory of elites, political movements on the left, processes of bureacratization, and the gap between democratic theory and practice. His central thesis, known under the name of the iron law of oligarchy, is that organization necessarily leads to oligarchy, or as Michels summarized it, ‘it is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy.’ Despite Michel’s pessimism and one-sidedness, his work and the iron law of oligarchy has inspired a great number of studies of political and other civic organizations.

1.2 The Institutionalization Of Political Sociology After World War II

The period between World War I and II, and especially the 1930s, were poor as regards studies in political sociology. The European political scene was turbulent, little support was given for studies in the social sciences, and in the 1930s the Nazi, Fascist, and Communist regimes ended most social science research in a number of countries. During the period between the world wars there were nevertheless some path breaking studies of voting and electoral behavior. Already before World War I Andre Siegfried had introduced the analysis of geographical variations in electoral behavior by studying voting patterns in French constituencies. A summary of his results was published in Tableau des partis politiques en France (1930). His central conclusion was that electoral behavior was steered by stable, deep-seated, regional traditions. After Siegfried the concept of political traditions became central in descriptions of voting patterns. Another innovator was the German-American Rudolf Heberle, who had started his career with an analysis of the tendencies to radicalization of the Swedish labor movement. His leading work From Democracy to Nazism (1945) about the appeal of Nazism to the rural population in the German province of Schleswig Holstein was published when he already had settled as professor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA.

Large-scale studies of voting behavior, however, were not undertaken until after World War II, and this subject became a leading problem area of political sociology during the first postwar decades. It had a background in the postwar situation, as great hopes were attached to the possibility of building a better world with the aid of social science and research. Studies of the prerequisites of democracy became important, and parliamentary elections were seen as the major mechanism for establishing and securing democratic rule. Studies of the social background of political behavior represented an almost empty space between political science and sociology. Political scientists had been mainly preoccupied with constitutional problems and methods of steering the states, whereas sociologists had focused their interest on studies of social structure and behavior in social groups. Political sociology moved into a vacuum, and it became soon both an important field of research and an activity of interest to the general public. Although the study of electoral behavior later became mainly a field within political science, the first path-breaking studies were made by sociologists. Theoretically fruitful conceptions and hypotheses, such as the tendency of cross-pressures to lead to political passivity, were developed at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University under the inspiration and leadership of Paul Lazarsfeld (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944).

It was, however, through the founding of the Committee of Political Sociology at the International Sociological Association’s Fourth World Congress in Stresa in September 1959 that political sociology became an established and institutionalized field of research. It led to a new kind of cooperation between political scientists and sociologists, and the committee also became a research committee of the International Political Science Association. The Committee’s first chairman, Seymour Martin Lipset, had already published several innovative books in political sociology, and its first secretary, Stein Rokkan, had started to develop means for comparative, cross-national research. The year 1959 represented in many senses an important mark in the development of political sociology. In 1959 Lipset obtained the copyright for his Political Man. The Social Bases of Politics (1960), which became the leading text of the period of birth of an institutionalized political sociology.

The references and data sources in Lipset’s book reflect the fact that at the end of the 1950s political sociology had become a small industry with young researchers all over the industrially developed world digging up data about the social bases of politics. The work of the Committee led to new developments. This is evident by a comparison of Lipset’s Political Man and the first comprehensive book produced by cooperation within the Committee, namely Lipset’s and Rokkan’s Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (1967). It contains a lengthy and theoretical introduction by Lipset and Rokkan, and chapters about individual countries, including the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Spain, West Germany, Finland, Norway, Japan, Brazil, and some West African states. Both the theoretical introduction, with its application of Talcott Parson’s A-G-I-L scheme, and most of the country chapters, reflect attempts to combine a structural and institutional approach and to study both the social bases of politics and the effects of politics on social structures. One of the members of the Committee, Giovanni Sartori, described the change in orientation in a paper entitled From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology (1969). Political sociology had ceased to be a subfield of sociology and had become a genuine border field of its own.

Studies of voting patterns were by no means the only ones conducted and presented at the conferences of the Committee and by its members. The first part of Lipset’s book on the Political Man consists of an analysis of the prerequisites of the democratic order. At the turn of 1950s and 1960s several studies analyzed the conditions of democracy. In addition to the formal criteria of democracy such as popular representation and individual freedoms, political sociologists were keen to stress some factual social conditions as prerequisites of a democratic order. Of particular importance were effectiveness, the government’s capacity to implement policy, efficacy, peoples’ subjective feelings of being important for the politicians, and legitimacy, beliefs that the existing political institutions are appropriate and lawful. Some of the studies were particularly focused on breakdowns of democracy and the rise and appeal of Fascism and Communism, such as Raymond Aron’s l’Opium des intellectuels (1955) and William Kornhauser’s The Politics of Mass Society (1959). Democracy was studied from many angles, such as in the study done by Lipset and his associates on the conditions for democracy in labor unions, Robert Dahl’s studies of democracy on the local community level, and Ralf Dahrendorf ’s analyses of the conditions of conflict regulation in industrial society.

Even if studies of and data about voting and electoral behavior formed a central point of departure for the political sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s, their aim was more general than to give information about how people behave during elections. The basic interest was in studying conditions for democracy, breakdowns of regimes, nation and state building, and master processes of societal and political change. From the 1970s onward the electoral studies became methodologically more sophisticated at the same time as they increasingly became a preoccupation of specialists of political issues and mass media effects within the field of political science. Initially such studies had a center at the University of Michigan under the leadership of Angus Campbell.

1.3 The Re-Entry Of The State And Its Transformations

The disappearance of electoral studies from the central agenda of political sociology was not an isolated phenomenon. From the beginning of the 1970s many of the original topics of political sociology lost much of their popularity. One of the reasons was that the student rebellions and leftist radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s had severely criticized the agenda of the prevailing political sociology. Another reason was that some fields of research had become routine and were incorporated into either sociology or political science.

Despite a decline of the distinctiveness of political sociology, some research themes have remained central and typical for political sociology. The problem sphere of political sociology comprises increasingly master patterns of societal change, i.e. simultaneous changes and pressures to change in the political order, the social system, and the socioeconomic composition of societies. Such studies had been initiated by members of the Committee of Political Sociology already during its preoccupation with voting studies. Thus, there were studies of the formation and fall of empires by S.N. Eisenstadt (1963), studies of the historical formation of European centers and peripheries by Stein Rokkan (Rokkan and Urwin 1983), and studies of the breakdown of democratic regimes by Juan Linz (Linz and Stepan 1978). Also many scholars who never had been associated with political sociology as such wrote influential texts. An outstanding representative in this category is Barrington Moore’s often-quoted major work The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966).

In the 1980s and 1990s interest in master patterns of change, and in state and nation building proliferated. The state was reintroduced as a truly central concern. Major representatives of the new orientation were especially Theda Skocpol (1979), who penetratingly emphasized the state as the originator of social outcomes, and Charles Tilly (1975), who rather than seeking one particular important unit, has stressed how national developments were formed by a complicated web of warfare, fiscal policy, bureacratization, and state-making. Goran Therborn’s (1995) studies of modern developments in the European states have also emphasized the multidimensional nature of national development and warned against beliefs in irreversible tendencies. The increased interest in state and nation building also went beyond a focus on national states by studies of worldwide tendencies of development, as seen in the work of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) about the origins of the European world economy in the sixteenth century.

The developments from the 1970s onward made it increasingly difficult to define the borders of political sociology. There was for instance a recrudescence of studies of ethnicity, ethnic groups, and the role of ethnic identities in the formation of nations. The studies of ethnicity are sometimes counted as part of political sociology, sometimes as a field of its own. Yet, the borderline problem is fairly clear. It is a question of where the main emphasis is. When the aim is to describe the role of ethnicity and ethnic identities in the formation of nations and political development on the macro level, as in Stein Rokkan’s (Rokkan and Urwin 1983) studies of the formation of European centers and peripheries, they are of great relevance for political sociology.

It is much more difficult to evaluate the character and place of Marxist-oriented and radically critical studies which multiplied from the second half of the 1960s onward. Earlier this type of scholarship had been mainly carried out by specific individuals. In studies of the power elite, C. Wright Mills definitely treated the relationship between the social and political, but he was not generally counted among the political sociologists (Kimmerling 1996). In the 1960s there was a rise—indeed a renaissance—of whole schools of critical sociologists such as the Frankfurt School of dialectical sociology and the dependence theorists who emphasized the hopeless fate of the underdeveloped countries in a world dominated by international capitalism. It is an open question whether these and kindred groups should be included in political sociology. Usually they were not counted as such. It is again a question of how one conceives of their main emphasis. If the main intent is to present social critique, the studies are usually not counted as political sociology, however, if the studies present hypotheses and concepts useful in most studies of societal and political development, they are regarded as political sociology. In the 1980s the radical thrust in the social sciences came to an end. The studies in political sociology began to combine elements from studies of very different political shades. It is characteristic of most of the studies of nation and state building mentioned above that they had assimilated elements from both Marxist and liberal thinking and scholarship.

2. The Consciousness-Creating Functions Of Political Sociology

Whatever solution is reached as regards the labeling of radical social critiques, it is obvious that political sociology is always directed towards expanding and creating awareness of macro changes and fundamental problems of societies. Nevertheless, it is seen as important that political sociology should not basically serve political aims. There are strong claims that political sociology should be empirically oriented, aim at theory building, employ a comparative approach, and systematically consider historical factors. The combination of the two claims, the consciousness-expanding function on one hand, and the quest for systematic comparative, historically based, and theoretically oriented studies on the other, has been astutely analyzed by Birgitta Nedelmann (1997) in a critique of the failure of German postwar political sociology to account for the period of National Socialism in German history.

Even if a successful delineation of political sociology never emerges, some main problem areas can be listed with the help of the two claims and objectives listed above. Political sociology studies (a) master patterns of simultaneous social, cultural, and political change in society, (b) dominant sociopolitical and emerging new cleavages, (c) the formation of states and nations as well as breakdowns of social and political orders, (d) prerequisites of and threats to democratic regimes, (e) problematic features of modern states such as bureaucratization, centralization, tendencies to corporatism, and (f ) the political consequences of globalization such as the formation of continent-based political units and institutions.

Bibliography:

• Aron R 1955 l’Opium des intellectuels. Calman Levy, Paris
• Eisenstadt S N 1963 The Political System of Empires. The Rise and Fall of the Historical Bureaucratic Empires. The Free Press, Glencoe, IL
• Heberle R 1945 From Democracy to Nazism: A Regional Case Study on Political Parties in Germany. Louisana University Press, Baton Rouge, LA
• Kimmerling B 1996 Changing meanings and boundaries of the ‘political’. Current Sociology 44: 152–76
• Kornhauser W 1959 The Politics of Mass Society. The Free Press, Glencoe, IL
• Lazarsfeld P F, Berelson B, Gaudet H 1944 The People’s Choice. How the Voter Makes up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. Columbia University Press, New York
• Linz J J, Stepan A (eds.) 1978 The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
• Lipset S M 1960 Political Man. The Social Bases of Politics. Doubleday, Garden City, New York
• Lipset S M, Rokkan S (eds.) 1967 Party Systems and Voter Alignments. Cross-National Perspectives. The Free Press, Glencoe, IL
• Michels R 1911 Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. Untersuchungen uber die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens. Klinkhardt, Leipzig, Germany
• Moore B Jr 1966 The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Beacon Press, Boston, MA
• Nedelmann B 1997 Between national socialism and real socialism. Political sociology in the Federal Republic of Germany. Current Sociology 45: 157–86
• Ostrogorski M Y 1902 Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties. MacMillan, London
• Pizzorno A (ed.) 1971 Political Sociology. Selected Readings. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, UK
• Rokkan S 1970 Introduction: international cooperation in political sociology. In: Allardt E, Rokkan S (eds.) Mass Politics. Studies in Political Sociology. The Free Press, New York
• Rokkan S, Urwin D W 1983 Economy Territory Identity. Politics of West European Peripheries. Sage, London
• Runciman W G 1963 Social Science and Political Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
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• Skocpol T 1979 States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge University Press, New York
• Siegfried A 1930 Tableau des partis politiques en France. Grasset, Paris
• von Stein L 1850 Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich on 1789 bis auf unsere Tage. Leipzig
• Therborn G 1995 European Modernity and Beyond. The Trajectory of European Societies 1945–2000. Sage, London
• Tilly C (ed.) 1975 The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
• Tocqueville A C de 1835, 1840 De la democratie en Amerique I–III. Paris. [Published in English 1945 Democracy in America. Knopf, New York]
• Tocqueville A C de 1955 The Old Regime and the Revolution. (trans. from French), Doubleday, New York
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