9
Community: Who is member?
Authority:
Who gets to make
policy decisions?
Chart 4: Politics is Community and Authority
Questioning the politics of world order allows us to ask about who gets, what, when, and
how and how expectations are structured in a world (Lasswell 1936). Then a framework
to think politics is to distinguish between different aspects of politics. It must be able to
address (a) who is a member, what questions we may talk about, and what are the ground
rules, (b) how conflicts between competing interpretations of collectivity are actually
solved inside the accepted system of rules, and (c) instances of partial compliance, the
sometimes unfair haggling cases that fall outside the accepted system of rules. This can
be described in the following framework:
What we want to talk about when we talk about politics
Metapolitics
How can we delineate political space?
What is considered political?
Politics
How can we adjudicate between conflicting
interests when we accept certain rules?
Parapolitics
How can we legitimize specific acts, on a
case-by-case basis?
Chart 5: Framing Politics