Dominant group/Political science

"Aristotle defined [political science] as the study of the state." It is a social science concerned with the study of government and politics. "It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior."

In the precolonial era, Ternate was the dominant political and economic power over most of the "Spice Islands" of Maluku. Credit: Eustaquio Santimano.

Dominant group is a two-word term from group theory that identifies an entity of interest.

Politics

Main resource: Politics

Def. "[a] methodology and activities associated with running a government, an organization, or a movement" is called politics.

Def. "maneuvers or diplomacy between people, groups, or organizations, especially involving power, influence or conflict" is called politics.

"Politics ... is the art or science of influencing people's beliefs on a civic, or individual level, when there are more than 2 people involved."

Def. "[a]n organizational structure of the government of a state, church, etc." is called a polity.

Theoretical political science

Def. "[t]he analytical study of public policy and policies, past, present, and prospective" is called political science.

"Political science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government, and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior. Political scientists "see themselves engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions, and from these revelations they attempt to construct general principles about the way the world of politics works." Political science intersects with other fields; including economics, law, sociology, history, anthropology, public administration, public policy, national politics, international relations, comparative politics, psychology, political organization, and political theory. Although it was codified in the 19th century, when all the social sciences were established, political science has ancient roots; indeed, it originated almost 2,500 years ago [~2,500 b2k] with the works of Plato and Aristotle."

"Political science, in rudimentary terms, is the study of power."

Dominant group

Main resource: Dominant group

Examples from primary sources are to be used to prove or disprove each hypothesis. These can be collected per subject or in general.

• Accident hypothesis: dominant group is an accident of whatever processes are operating.
• Artifact hypothesis: dominant group may be an artifact of human endeavor or may have preceded humanity.
• Association hypothesis: dominant group is associated in some way with the original research.
• Bad group hypothesis: dominant group is the group that engages in discrimination, abuse, punishment, and additional criminal activity against other groups. It often has an unfair advantage and uses it to express monopolistic practices.
• Control group hypothesis: there is a control group that can be used to study dominant group.
• Entity hypothesis: dominant group is an entity within each field where a primary author of original research uses the term.
• Evolution hypothesis: dominant group is a product of evolutionary processes, such groups are the evolutionary process, produce evolutionary processes, or are independent of evolutionary processes.
• Identifier hypothesis: dominant group is an identifier used by primary source authors of original research to identify an observation in the process of analysis.
• Importance hypothesis: dominant group signifies original research results that usually need to be explained by theory and interpretation of experiments.
• Indicator hypothesis: dominant group may be an indicator of something as yet not understood by the primary author of original research.
• Influence hypothesis: dominant group is included in a primary source article containing original research to indicate influence or an influential phenomenon.
• Interest hypothesis: dominant group is a theoretical entity used by scholarly authors of primary sources for phenomena of interest.
• Metadefinition hypothesis: all uses of dominant group by all primary source authors of original research are included in the metadefinition for dominant group.
• Null hypothesis: there is no significant or special meaning of dominant group in any sentence or figure caption in any refereed journal article.
• Object hypothesis: dominant group is an object within each field where a primary author of original research uses the term.
• Obvious hypothesis: the only meaning of dominant group is the one found in Mosby's Medical Dictionary.
• Original research hypothesis: dominant group is included in a primary source article by the author to indicate that the article contains original research.
• Primordial hypothesis: dominant group is a primordial concept inherent to humans such that every language or other form of communication no matter how old or whether extinct, on the verge of extinction, or not, has at least a synonym for dominant group.
• Purpose hypothesis: dominant group is written into articles by authors for a purpose.
• Regional hypothesis: dominant group, when it occurs, is only a manifestation of the limitations within a region. Variation of those limitations may result in the loss of a dominant group with the eventual appearance of a new one or none at all.
• Source hypothesis: dominant group is a source within each field where a primary author of original research uses the term.
• Term hypothesis: dominant group is a significant term that may require a 'rigorous definition' or application and verification of an empirical definition.

Democracies

Main resources: Commonalities/Democracies and Democracies

"[B]ecause political democracies generally arise from a compromise between contending organized elites that are unstable to impose their will unilaterally or the unilateral action of one dominant group, usually the armed forces, this does not bode well for democratization in situations in which the armed forces are inextricably tied to the interests of a dominant (and antidemocratic) agrarian class."

Ethnicity

Main resources: Dominant group/Ethnicity and Ethnicity

"Ethnic and racial politics and the “hidden” nature of dominant group identity continue to preclude examination of dominant group ethnicity by social scientists."

"States' politics and policies are products of the cooperation, competition, and/or conflict between and among dominant and subordinant (minority) groups, not only of the dominant group(s) within a state (Key 1949; Blalock 1970; Burnham 1974; Giles and Evans 1986)."

"In numerous nationalisms, the ethnic identity of the dominant group is privileged as the core of imagined community (18, 27, 36, 36b, 50, 53, 77a, 88, 119a, 144)."

Feminism

Main resources: Rights/Women's and Feminism

"Consequently, they do not reflect on the challenges to the speaker's agenda and conceptual scheme created when marginalized women can structure the research or political agenda rather than only 'appear' in feminist agendas constructed by dominant group women."

Fieldworks

Main resources: Defense/Fieldwork and Fieldwork

"Within the community, many individuals felt that having attained their individual compensation the battle was over; there was no continued obligation to extend the human rights project and, more disturbingly, the settlement justified their growing sense of belonging to the dominant group."

Minority threats

"In contexts where the threat posed by a minority group is high, the dominant group's response is predicted to be more hostile than in contexts where that threat is low."

Political participations

"It involves the acceptance of the belief that fundamental differences exist between the interests of one's own group and those of the dominant group."

"Esman asserts that regimes committed to the dominance of one communal group at the expense of another (or others) will "always use three methods of conflict management": 1) proscribe or closely control the political expression of collective interest among dominated groups, 2) prohibit entry by members of dominated groups into the dominant community, and 3) provide monopoly or preferential access for members of the dominant group to political participation, advanced education, economic opportunities, and symbols of status such as official language, the flag, national heroes, and holidays, which reinforce the political, economic, and psychic control of the dominant group." "Esman emphasizes that, though "basically coercive ..., a network of controls for maintaining hegemony is often highly sophisticated and deeply institutionalized."" "Control is a concept that plays a central role in the study of many political phenomena, but only one body of theory and empirical evidence has significantly influenced the study of control relations in deeply divided societies, namely, that associated with the study of overseas European imperialism."

Powers

Main resources: Angels/Powers and Powers

"[T]he power of a dominant group lies in its ability to control constructions of reality that reinforce its own status so that subordinate groups accept the social order and their own place in it."

"[A] group is dominant if it possesses a disproportionate share of societal resources, privileges, and power."

"Racial boundaries reflect relations of power, in particular the ability of the dominant group to construct and impose definitions upon others."

Hegemony is the ""political, economic, ideological or cultural power exerted by a dominant group over other groups, regardless of the explicit consent of the latter" (Upton et al. 2001)."

The League of Nations failed to achieve “corporate unity to overcome the conflicts of nationalistic interest within the dominant group of the Great Powers.”

"[W]hat is significant for this analysis is that these challenging paradigms (reflecting the increased political power of historically dominated peoples) have focused upon subordinate group victimization and resistance or dominant group mechanisms of oppression".

"For purposes of this analysis, I define a dominant ethnic group as the ethnic group in a society that exercises power to create and maintain a pattern of economic, political, and institutional advantage, which in turn results in the unequal (disproportionately beneficial to the dominant group) distribution of resources."

Recognitions

Main resources: Knowledge/Recognitions and Recognitions

"They claim, in effect, that “it's the economy, stupid.” Conversely, some proponents of the politics of recognition, such as Charles Taylor (1994), insist that a difference-blind politics of redistribution can reinforce injustice by falsely universalizing dominant group norms, requiring subordinate groups to assimilate to them, and misrecognizing the latters' distinctiveness."

Rights

Main resource: Rights

"As I have argued at length elsewhere, the political Right in the United States has been very successful in mobilizing support against the educational system and its employees, often placing responsibility for the crisis in the economy on the schools. Thus, one of its major achievements has been to shift the blame for unemployment and underemployment, for the loss of economic competitiveness, and for the supposed breakdown of traditional values and standards in the family, education, and paid and unpaid work places from the economic, cultural, and social policies and effects of dominant groups to the school and other public agencies."

Withdrawals

Main resources: Extractions/Withdrawals and Withdrawals

"[W]hen the dominant group loses influence or withdraws-as occurred with the departure of colonial powers- ethnic competition may ensue among the remaining groups, for instance, Ibo, Hausa, and Yoruba in Nigeria; African and Asian (as well as between various tribes) in Uganda; Chinese and Malay in Malaysia; and Hindu and Sikh (as well as Moslem) in India."

Hypotheses

Main resource: Hypotheses

1. Politics is a deliberate creation of a dominant group to maintain and secure power for themselves.

See also

• Dominant group/Anthropology
• Dominant group/Business
• Dominant group/Economics
• Dominant group/Ethnicity
• Dominant group/History
• Dominant group/Language
• Dominant group/Psychology
• Dominant group/Religion
• Dominant group/Sociology
• Power
• School:Political science
• Wealth

Further reading

• Arthur H. Miller, Patricia Gurin, Gerald Gurin and Oksana Malanchuk (August 1981). "Group Consciousness and Political Participation". American Journal of Political Science 25 (3): 494-511. http://aurelien.lefoulgoc.free.fr/divers/articles_conso_news/1981%20-%20Group%20conscioussness%20and%20political%20participation%20-%20Miller%20-%20Gurin%20-%20Gurin%20-%20Malanchuk.pdf. Retrieved 2012-05-09. 

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