STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM
- Political elites
➢ [as an approach] a tool for comparing political systems
➢ what is being observed does not have to be a state, but
is definitely a political system
➢ based on the notion that every political system at one
point had a political structure
➢ all systems have the same functions but structures
may be different; likened to comparative anatomy in
biology
// ∴ the aims of research on political systems must be: (1) to discover
and compare capabilities profiles summarizing the flows of inputs
and outputs between these political systems and their domestic and
international environments; (2) to discover and compare the
structures and processes which convert these inputs into outputs;
and (3) to discover and compare the recruitment and socialization
processes which maintain these systems in equilibrium or enable
them to adapt to environmental or self-initiated changes. //
- Almond, 1965
David Easton: (in comparison to political systems)
● Inputs
- demands : for goods and services for
regulation of behavior for participation in
the political system, and for symbolic inputs
(e.g. supporting national teams)
- supports : material obedience to law and
regulations, participation and manifestation
of deference to public authority, symbols,
and ceremonials
● Source of Inputs
- Domestic society
- International environment
● Outputs
- Extractions (e.g. ROTC)
- Regulations of behavior
- Allocation or distributions of goods and
services
- Symbolic (e.g baybayin; is a demanded
output for nationalism)
❏ inputs may be 100% converted to outputs
❏ but the political system can have gatekeepers \ not all inputs can
be considered
❏ at the end of the day, political systems strive to attain equilibrium
Functional-system theory condition implications:
● functional requisites - tasks that enable the system
to persist
● interdependence - the system gets affected by
changes in any of its components
● equilibrium - stability (homeostasis); all systems
tend toward equilibrium
● boundary conditions - boundaries have roles
● exchanges or actions across boundaries - being
an economic factor changes your behavior toward
the political system
Types of Functions:
● capabilities – the system’s total function vis=a-vis
other system (or its environment)
● conversion – functions internal to the system
● system maintenance and adaptation
The Political System
// when we speak of the political system, we include all of the
interactions—inputs as well as outputs –which affect the use of threat
of use of physical coercion. The political system is not the only system
that makes rules and enforces them, but its rules and enforcements the political system to individuals and groups in the
go ‘all the way’ in compelling obedience or performance // society
- Almond, 1965 - Symbolic – rate of effective symbol from the
❏ similar to the concept of the state
political system into the society and the
❏ not all are substantial states, but they are political systems (states
to Almond are the likes of US and Britain; post-colonial states are international environment; nationalistic
NOT considered states because being a state is empirical) - Responsive – an estimate of the degree to which
outgoing activity is the consequence of demands
in order to decide whether a political system is efficient
arising in the environment of the political system
or not, look at:
❏ if you are questioning what you are doing, the political system is
1. Converse Functions inadequate
- Interest articulation – when a group articulates ❏ how responsive are people to the environment
their interests to be forwarded by a political system 3. System maintenance and adaptation
(interest groups) ● Political recruitment
- Interest aggregation – bundling up of interests - To maintain a system, you need new
(political parties)
people; the political system needs
- Political communication – if it’s not politically
communicated, an interest cannot be converted human resources (e.g. lawyers,
into an output (mass media) bureaucrats, politicians)
- Rule-making – assembly (senate, congress; - Dysfunctional inputs: when the
legislative) political system is not good at
- Rule-execution – execution of laws (mayors, recruiting
president, military; executive) - Bureaucracy (are the fittest for their
- Rule adjudication – interpretation of law (courts;
positions supposedly)
judiciary
❏ one to one correspondence; no structure can have two functions - That’s why people recruit university
at the same time (liberalist-pluralist) graduates. We have great doctors and
2. Capabilities – are all interconnected lawyers, but the medical and justice
- Extractive – measures of the range of performance
system are weak
of the political system in drawing material and
human resources from the domestic and - Another aspect is political party, if it’s
international environment bad… universities are supposed to be
- Regulative – control over behavior and of individual the initial pool for recruitment
and group relations stemming from the political ● Political socialization
system - Legitimacy is anchored on citizenship and
- Distributive – allocation of goods, services, honors, the feeling of being a part of a political
statuses, and opportunities of various kinds from system
 - Process of socialization to be more good 1. Useful tautologies
citizens (e.g. learning the national anthem) - cannot be tested
and to be politically recruited - a statement that is always true (repetition)
- Concerns education - ‘useful’ because tautologies are useless
e.g. all swans are white,
meaning whiteness comes with
being a swan
2. Empirical statements
- can be tested
- goes back to useful tautologies to define
terms of statement
e.g. bobo and mga POS
students sa math; but what is
bobo?
3. Neither ‘useful’ tautology or
empirical statement
- would remove moral or religious
context
e.g. Killing is bad; but what is
killing? What is bad?

❖ Core Characteristics
BEHAVIORALISM
❖ Context
- Inductive
- Dominance in the 1950s and 1960s
- Reflective of positivist social science
➝ August Comte - one of the pioneers of scientific
approach to society (sociology)
➝ ‘Vienna Circle’ of 1920s
➝ Alfred Ayer and Carl Humpel : Three Categories
of Statements:
- Focus question: why do people behave
the way they do?
e.g. Why do students love to cram?
What is loving cramming?
- It presupposes the empirical
- Emphasis on:
1. Observable behavior as focus of analysis
2. Explanations of observable behavior should be
susceptible to empirical testing
↳ test statement by defining
each term by concept independently
(Popper’s logic of falsifiability)
 ➢ you can separate and give a different definition
e.g. all swans are white
- Separate the whiteness from the swans,
and then define swans separately from the
whiteness. because if all swans are white,
there is nothing to correct. But test by
defining swans, i.e. a long-necked bird.
- We test empirical statements to render
them falsifiable.
- You cannot avoid generalizations. You need
to make generalization, but make them as
falsifiable as possible.
❏ Marxism, according to Popper, is nonsense because: what does
Marx mean by class struggle?
Empirical theory – a set of interconnected abstract
statements, consisting of assumptions, definitions, and
empirically testable hypotheses which purports to
describe and explain the occurrence of a given
phenomenon or set of phenomena. ● Commitment to
Explanation – a causal amount of the occurrence of
some phenomenon or set of phenomena; consists in the
specification of the minimum non-tautological set of
antecedent necessary and sufficient conditions required
for its (their) occurrence
e.g. At what point does democratic transition ● Operationalization
happen?
A necessary but not sufficient condition
would be economic development.
Behavioralists then try to summarize a ● Operational Definition
minimum set of conditions for the
dependent variable to come up.
Characteristics for a good empirical theory
1. Internal consistency ● Operationalization
– must not contradict itself
e.g. if an authoritarian government’s
shift to a democracy is because of
economic development, economic
development cannot be the reason for
a democracy to turn into an
authoritarian government
(contradictions: secularization tries to privatize
religious expression and transfer power from church
to state, but some people claim that this furthers
the desire to experience religious experience even
in the extremes ∴ it is internally inconsistent)
2. External consistency
– common in hard science for inconsistency;
relative
e.g. you’re inside a bus and a plane is
outside, but is the plane moving to
you?
3. Capable of generating empirical
predictions that can be tested against
observation
- The systematic use of all the relevant empirical
evidence rather than a limited set of illustrative
supporting examples
- The logic of falsification (everything must be made
clear; the importance of operationalization)
- The process of specifying what particular
indicator(s) one will be for a variable
e.g. what is love and how do you measure it?
- Prescribes which measurements are
appropriate to measure a concept
e.g. GDP measures wellbeing
→ Qualitative methods (bottom-up)
 - Tendency to observe problems and not the
structures is because onecannot observe
certain things in the first place
- Has to be measurable
- Which is why there are racist and ethnicist
→ Quantitative methods tendencies (e.g. the Aetas are uncivilized,
(top-bottom) because uncivilized means wearing g-
strings)
● Assumed independence of theory and observation
- When we observe, there are objective
observations. But because humans are
simply just interpreting and not observing
- Giving up theory and observation would
mean not having a good explanation
Example of operationalization
economic development
↓
level of economic growth
↓
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate
➢ *insert name of concept* - how do we know if it is
present? maybe because of economic growth. how
do we know there is economic growth? maybe
through GDP.

❖ Criticisms
● Objections to the claim that statements which are
neither definitions (useful tautologies) nor
empirical are meaningless
e.g. philosophical language
Marcellian language (behavioralists
look at the problems but not the
mysteries)
● Tendency towards mindless empiricism
- What if it’s not observable?
 ❖ Core characteristics
● Salience of equilibrium
Equilibrium – in game theory, a set of strategies,
one of each player, such that no player can
RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY increase his/her payoff by hanging strategy
❖ Context given that no other player changes strategy (the
- Deductive goal is to increase self-interest and decrease the
- Rooted in economics and mathematics other)
- A fundamental assumption of human beings ● The Problem of Collective Action
being rational - Individual incentives fail to produce the optimal
- Developed in the 1960s outcome for the group, even if everybody would
- Gained prominence in the early 1980s
in principle be willing to do their share in
❖ Key assumptions:
1. Rationality exchange for a promise that others will also do
● Complete information – people know what they’re their share
getting into and the consequences of their actions - Free riders – individuals who attempt to enjoy
● Relationship between actions and outcomes is the benefits of the collective good without
unaffected by the actions of another individual contributing to its productions
● Each individual is able to rank order e.g. The Prisoner’s Dilemma and terrorist
outcomes/actions vs. government: peace negotiations will
➢ Like coming to class, but not really being there fail because there is no overarching
➢ There is a calculus/hierarchy of interest authority; you question the legitimacy of
e.g. you want to eat but not get fat, so you the authoritative theory
start choosing what kind of bread you
should eat by knowing all the types of ❖ Criticisms
bread - People are not (always) rational
∴ every decision would have some rational calculation - People are not (always) selfish (see altruism)
if A > B > C then A > C - The theory ignores individual agency and ideas
e.g. if being in POS is better than being in - The theory has very poor empirical records
Chem, and if Chem is better than CW,
- The theory depends too much upon
then POS is better than CW.
equilibrium explanations
2. Self-Interest
- The theory is a political project

INSTITUTIONALISM
 ❖ Context ● Institutions as rules and not organizations
● Institutionalism was political science e.g. organization: AdMU, institution:
- Dominant until the 1950s (game was to be as Magna Carta, handbook, etc.
close to natural science as possible) ● Institutions as formal as well as informal
- Traditional institutionalism e.g. formal: ID-wearing (there is an
● Institutional turn in politics and development enforcing authority; repercussions)
- The 1990s was the decade of institutions informal: CLAYGO (no force, but
- The emergence of ‘new’ institutionalisms there is public shaming)
Traditional Institutionalism ➢ sometimes, the informal is more powerful because
- Normative, being concerned with ‘good it relies on symbolic disincentives (i.e. filial piety)
government’ New Institutionalisms
- Structuralist, positing that formal structures Institutions are:
determine political behavior (explains how actors - stable
move) - ‘… durable social rules and procedures, formal and
- Historicist, positing the central influence of history informal, which structure—but do not determine –
- Legalist, positing that law plays a major role in the social, economic, and political relations and
governing (esp. constitutions) interaction of those affected by them’ (Leftwich
- Holistic, being concerned with describing and and Sen 2011, 321 emphases in original)
comparing whole systems of government ● Economic Institutions
New Institutionalism - Form formal definitions and protections of
● What’s new? property rights, to norms, traditions, conventions
- Defining institutions (before 1950, governing access to opportunities
institutions were not defined) ● Political Institutions
- Systematic explanation on how institutions - To form formal definitions on how power is
affect behavior (e.g. one day coding with obtained, used, and controlled, and by whom, to
cars) informal definitions on how authoritative decisions
➝Path dependency, this is how it’s always are made (and not only at the level of the state)
been done so let’s keep doing it ● Social Institutions
➝Benefits people, rational choice - Include cultural and/or religious (i.e. collective)
institutionalism: it’s rational/benefits people patterns of behavior (e.g. utang ng loob/debt of
who follow the institution gratitude, and hiya/guilt)
➝Are able to shape what is and isn’t ● Institutions as embodying values and
appropriate power
- Shaping ideas, interest, beliefs, and incentive
- Making sense of institutional persistence
structures
and change
 - Acemogive and Robinson (2012): Nations fail to ● Accounting for institutional genesis
develop due to the presence of extractive - Institutional design (e.g. core curriculum)
economic institutions supported by extractive - Accident
political institutions - Evolution
● Institutions as contextually embedded ● Compatibility between the ‘new’
institutionalisms
Interregnum - Samuel Huntington’s political → Emphasis on modes of institutional
development as institutionalization constraints
1. Political development as the institutionalization of - Rules
political organizations and procedures - Practices
2. Institutionalization: “effective establishments of - Narratives
authority over society through specially created
political structures and agents” (Kamrara 2000) Therefore,
Mobilization – institutionalization dynamic Ontology Anti-Foundationalism
measure of how mobile people are
↳ high education, literacy, civil society, Epistemology Interpretivism
political actors Methodology Quantity privileged

Differences between social and physical/natural

phenomena
Political
- Social structures, unlike natural structures, do not
Institutionalization
exist independently of the activities they govern
Social high low - Social structures, unlike natural structures, do not
Mobilization exist independently of the agents’ conceptions of
what they are doing in their activity
high civic corrupt - Social structures, unlike natural structures, may be
only relatively enduring (so the tendencies they
low contained primitive ground may not be universal in the sense of
space-time invariant)
❖ Dilemmas (new institutionalism)
● What are institutional rules?
- Specific to a particular political or governmental
setting;
- Recognized by actors
- Collective (rather than personal)
- Subject to some sort of third party enforcement
 CONSTRUCTIVISM
- Seeks (an) understanding of the world
- Subjective meanings of experiences
INTERPRETIVISM - Meanings are varied, multiple
- Complexity of reality
- Knowledge is theoretically- or discursively-laden - Reliance (as much as possible) on the participants’
- Double hermeneutic: the world is interpreted by views of the situation being studied
the actors (one hermeneutic level) and their - Questions are broad and general open-ended
interpretation is interpreted by the observer (a questioning
second hermeneutic level) - Focus on specific contexts, i.e. historical and
1. Idealism cultural settings
Postmodernists, interpretivism, some discourse analysts - Inductive development of theory
- Marxist critics: social sciences are enmeshed in a
bourgeois worldview that makes objectivity
impossible
2. Materialism
- Feminist critics: concepts and methods of the
Marxists (historical masterialists), rational choice
social sciences reflect an essential patriarchal-ism
theorists, realists and neo-realists
that discredits the objectivity of social science
knowledge
- Post-modernist writers: disdain the ideas of truth
and objectivity in the social sciences altogether;
preference for the slippery notions of multiple
discourses and knowledge/power
3. Constructivism
Constructivists, critical realists, some historical
institutionalists, some ‘critical’ discourse analysts
 Gender
can be understood as
- sex
- power relations
- relational
- system of social codes approximating masculinity
and femininity

Feminism
❖ Key claims of feminism
- Questioning the public/private divide
- Challenging what constitutes the “political”
- Critiquing the research paradigm and the
assumptions of political science
- Stereotyping women
❖ Waves
Wave 1 Wave 2 Wave 3
legal and equality in the intersectionality,
constitutional rights; workplace and the postmodernfeminis
women’s suffrage family, domestic m
violence,
reproductive rights

❖ Types of feminists
● Liberal Feminists – women are rational like men;
deserve the same legal, social, and political rights;
sexism and patriarchy as imperfect manifestations
of citizenship; state reform and education against
sexist stereotypes
● Marxist Feminists – (anti-capitalist) women are
oppressed because of the economic structure and
social system, gender oppression as a function of
capitalism; gender oppression as key interest of
ruling capitalist state
● Socialist Feminists – (agrees capitalism is bad, but
GENDER POLITICS
abolishing it won’t fix everything) women are
determined by their role in production and
 reproduction, reform the psychological and interlocking systems within which individuals are
ideological structure of the family located
● Radical Feminists – the state is inherently - There are many marginalizations
patriarchal and serves to sustain the patriarchy; Masculinities
neither legislative nor economic reform can - Takes a closer look at the social category of
transform the patriarchy; questions the very “manhood” and “masculinity”
nature of masculinity and femininity - Challenged the idea that the concept of a “man” is
❖ Examples of continuing concerns a monolithic idea, and argues for a differentiated
- Universal suffrage understanding of men and the construction of
- The patriarchy masculinities
- Gendered stereotypes LGB(T) Politics
- Women’s representation and access to power - Critiqued heteronormativity and advocated for the
- Reproductive oppression social acceptance and integration of lesbian, gay,
- Gendered division of labor and bisexual individuals
- Sexual harassment and violence - Advocated for same-sex marriage, but more
- Gendering the state liberationist approaches criticized LGBT politics for
- Women, peace, and security being assimilationist
- Theoretically parallels modernist approaches to
LGBTQIA+SOGIESC - lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, knowledge; modern: compartmentalized
queer, intersex, asexual/ally + sexual orientation, gender
identity and expression, sex characteristics Queer Politics
- Questioned the presumed stability between sex,
gender, and sexuality
❖ Gender politics today - Later questioned the stability of social identities as
1. Women in politics and gender a whole
2. Intersectionality - Critique of binarism and normalizing impulses in
3. Masculinities society, like homonormativity (there’s a certain
4. Lesbian and gay politics way to be gay, etc.)
5. Queer politics →but no one is inherently gay or straight
6. Transfeminism →heteronormativity is historically contingent
Intersectionality and not inherent
- Began within Black feminist movements, term // queers are not united by and unitary identity but only
coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 to their opposition to disciplinary, normalizing social
- Social systems of dominations like sex, gender, forces (Seidman, 1993) //
sexuality, race, class, global position, and ability are
not independently experienced—they are Foucault on the invention of homosexuality
 Sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their e.g. Bakla
perpetrator was nothing more than the judicial - Not gay, not trans
subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual - Contains sexual and gender signifiers
became a personage, a past, a case history, and a - Product of globalization
childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form,
and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and
possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went
into his total composition was unaffected by his
sexuality.

Gender is performative (Judith Butler)

- Not the same thing as saying “gender is a
performance”
- Performative, because it does something
- Series of genders that constructs and
approximates gestures/social signifiers what it POST-STRUCTURALISM
means to be a man or woman
- Butler: the biggest performative is when a kid is ❖ Context
born, “it’s a girl/boy” because just by one line - Refers to movements in French theory in the late
based on the anatomy of a person, it defines the 1960s
trajectory of that infant’s life - Culmination during the ‘May ‘68’ student protests
- Emphases on:
Transfeminism - Contingency and unpredictability
- Seeks the inclusion of trans* individuals, especially - Diversity that extends beyond class-based
transwomen in mainstream feminism and gender politics
equality movements - the French criticized Marxism
- Provides a critique of transphobia and - Soyez realists, demandez l’impossible: be realistic,
cisnormativity (your assigned sex is the only sex demand the impossible
you can have for the rest of your life) ❖ Caveats
❖ Specific concerns - Not a unified body of theory
- Cultural specificity of social concepts - Has no self-conscious avant-garde
- Women’s rights - Does not have a shared precise methodology
- Post-coloniality and globalization - Does not advocate a specific criteria for data
- Machismo politics (see Machismo politics in the collection
Philippines, from Marcos to Cory) ● post modernity – incredulity to metanarratives (e.g.
- Traditional family Marxism, pluralism)
- Catholicism ● post structuralist – hate one narrative, would not even
call themselves structuralists
● contingent – just so happened (through the
interaction of knowledge and power)

❖ Ontological and epistemological assumptions

- There can be no theory independent account of
what is really out there
- The ‘world’ is only ever manifested in the form of
relations and differences
- Post-foundationalism
- Recognition of the need for philosophical
foundations, with the acknowledgement
that such foundations are inherently
ambitious shifting, and essentially
contestable
→ceci n’est pas une pipe – this is not a
pipe, but a picture of one
→reflexivity is about how we speak
from our position but not from the
other (positionality)
→what makes a table a table? It’s
tableness. But is its tableness
constant?
- Truth claims are essentially stories we tell
ourselves about how the world is
- The disconnection between world and the stories
we tell ourselves about ‘it’ is constitutive
- Focus on analyzing the material ‘effects of truth’
generated by various historically contingent forms
of knowledge
- Rejection of the assumption that we can
1. Give a complete reconstruction of the
frameworks of significance behind a
particular action
2. Establish methodological criteria that
enable the political science community to
establish the relative veracity of one set of
interpretation over others