VARIETIES OF

POLITICAL
STRUCTURE
Differentiated Structures
 second category of structures are called differentiated
structures.
 These kinds of structures inform us of the different positions
occupied by individual members of the political system.
 identification of these specialized or differentiated positions is a
way of decomposing a political system into structural parts that
are different from those of the regime but that have proved central
to empirical research.
 political structures have evolved through increases in
specialization and differentiation of functions as revealed both in
institutions and roles.
 No system is totally homogeneous with respect to the positions
members occupy or the activities in which they engage.
 There must always be a division of labor.

 Structural inquiry in political science is based on this almost primal

idea of increasing specialization and differentiation of functions and
activities. It has provided the intuitive starting point for most research.
 The notion of differentiation refers to both an activity or process and
to a product or resultant.
 As an activity it represents the way in which a society or political
system produces specialized or distinctive patterns of behavior for the
performance of various characteristic tasks.
 this very process, when coupled with the specific conditions of
industrialization, has yielded differentiated products.
 When we speak about differentiation and specialization with
regard to structure we have usually been less concerned about
studying the processes of differentiation than the various resultant
specialized parts of a political system and their interrelationships.
 differentiated positions represent the structural outcomes of
historical processes
 We need to bear in mind that genuine structural analysis would
require us to look at the patterned relationships among parts for
their effect on behavior or system functioning
 the parts into which we decompose the political system will
give us a concrete feeling for the kinds of elements we may
typically have in mind when we refer to the structure of a
system.
 This will put us in a favorable position to contrast this general
idea of structure and its elements, the lower-order structure, with
an alternative conception, labelled as the higher-order structure.
 Categorical Aggregates or Groupings.

 On the basis of criteria we select, we may classify members of

a political system into various categories or types.
 We are accustomed to doing this, of course, for elements of the
social structure.
 Ethnicity, religion, region, language, socio-economic status, and the
like are just statistical categories that we create for analytic purposes.
 We expect that persons with the properties of the categories will be
associated with various kinds of predictable political actions or
processes, such as voting, partisanship, socialization. and other forms
of political involvement.
 We follow the same practice in creating structural elements for the
political system; construct categories and relate them to various
behavioral patterns.
  What is common to both the political and social analytic
parts of their respective structures is that the persons in them
need not cohere in any organized fashion.
 as Blau has pointed out, they are only analytic elements of
a system which differentiate persons in that system along the
specified dimensions.
 We choose to consider members as belonging to a common
type because we anticipate that the properties that induce us
to consider them a common subset are also predictably
associated with other phenomena of interest to us.
 political position of a person will be defined by a number of
dimensions based on his or her electoral grouping, party
identification, activity score, and the like, as well, of course, as
on the socio- economic groupings in which such a person is
placed.
 if we were to describe all the positions of all members of a
political system along all possible political dimensions, we
would have an exhaustive description of the political structure.
 At the moment let us draw attention to one kind of position in
political space; power.
 The central significance of power in political systems has led us
to differentiate.
 As social scientists we observe the political system and, according
to our particular definition of power, we classify members as higher
or lower by the influence we see them as exercising, by the method
of either objective or reputational ranking.
 the rank ordering by power groupings is constructed from criteria
adopted by the observer.
 Power categories or strata, when seen as part of a pattern of power
relationships, represent another way in which positions critical in
the operation of a political system can be differentiated.
There are, of course, ways of looking at a power
distribution such that members of a system can be
interpreted as organizing themselves around this
dimension, independently of the constructs used by the
observer.
In that event we would have self-defined, self-conscious,
organized power groups rather than mere power groupings.
They would play a distinctive, purposive part, as
organizations, in the functioning of a political system.
 Regardless whether we are considering differentiated positions
in the political system as observers, we take the initiative in
constructing this aspect of the political structure.
 We collect them together into our categories because thereby
we hope to be able to use variations in such structural elements,
and the way they combine, to explain variances in other parts of
the political system.
 differentiated positions in political space are objective and
independent of the investigator. collecting them together
conceptually is an artifact created by the research worker because
it is thought useful, for explanatory purposes, to do so.
 such structural elements in a political system are substantially
different from those-namely, groups-that can be thought of as givens,
just waiting to be identified.
 Groups.

 differentiated components of a political system may represent more

than a reflection of the way in which political scientists find it helpful
to sort out the members of a system for understanding their behavior.
 As political systems evolve, members may form into natural
membership groups. A group is natural if its members join together
initially through no special or deliberate effort of their own or of
others and yet they have a sense of belonging and acting together in
the pursuit of political goals.
 Such natural groups appear in all political systems.

 A group is formal if it has the same characteristics of natural

groups except that its existence depends upon the someone's
explicit initiative in bringing the group together and
organizing it.
 These specialized groups numbers are vast and do not
depend for their identification on criteria of classification.
 We know them as political parties, interest groups,
organized communal groups, organized elites, organized
representatives of social classes, the armed forces, and so on.
 these constitute major means for political participation, even in
nondemocratic societies.
 in Weber's sense, they are capable of acting purposively to
mobilize their membership and resources for the attainment of their
goals.
 In this sense they are a type of differentiated part of a political
system, that is, an element of its structure.
 Political Roles.

 In combination with the preceding aspects of political structure,

some political scientists have also chosen to focus on a further
element, one in which the basic analytic unit is the actor-role.
 roles constitute a basic unit of the lower­ order or observed
political structure, and role specialization represents a further
kind of differentiation.
 Normatively, they constitute the reciprocal expectations about
rights and obligations that members of the system have of how
persons ought to act when they occupy certain positions.
 These rights and obligations define the role and they are
usually enforced by normative sanctions in the system.
 When reciprocal expectations converge or diverge, there are
foreseeable consequences for the system.
 the role structure has been interpreted strictly as normative or
cultural.
 The expectations constitute norms which operate to
"structure" the behavior of the person occupying the role.
 Role behavior would here stand as the product or effect of the
structure interpreted as an institutionalized set of norms.
 There is an alternative conception of roles as structural units.
We may see them as regularized patterns of interaction.
 What defines the role is not the rules that members of the
system think ought to be followed but those that are practiced.
 There is an obvious way to handle this apparent dichotomy
between the normative (cultural) and behavioral interpretations of
role as a structural element.
 We may choose to combine the normative and behavioral
conceptions and see role as composed of two complementary
aspects, a normative and an observed one. In this way we might
avoid the apparent conflict in conception.
 In this unified view, the rules would represent the ideal role,
behavior, the realized role.
 Each would influence the other. In much the same way we have
interpreted formal as compared to actual regime structures.
 There are those who find roles useful as a focal point for the
analysis of political structures.
 In practice they define their task as one of identifying the major
roles in a political system.
 As the number of roles in any political system is more vast and
complex than the variety of political systems themselves, the mere
enumeration of roles would not prove helpful.
 those who do approach structure through role analysis lean on
explicit or intuitive theoretical criteria to help them sort out what
they consider the significant from the incidental roles.
 The structure of the system would then be definable
 As widespread as the commitment to role analysis as an important
way to understand central parts of the social structure has been in
sociology and anthropology.
 We associate certain behavior with members of the system who
occupy a position in one or another or any combination of these parts.
 Conventional research may also seek to show the effects of one or
another part, or any combination of them, on one or another aspect or
state of the political system.
 Efforts are also made to account for their variability.

 we have addressed here only typical elements which political

research has isolated as components of political structures.
 Even though it is structural parts such as these that include
under the concept of lower-order or observed structures, no
social phenomena such as these are, of course, directly
observable, in any real sense, in the way that we can "see" Kant's
dog.
 they may be described as observed only in the sense that they
represent kinds of political relationships that are accessible for
relatively immediate and direct description and analysis.
 What these kinds of observable structures are relative to, will
become apparent when we contrast them with the higher-order
or overall system structures.
 Unlike higher-order structures, lower-order ones seem to
be directly available to sensory experience.
they are no less a product of abstraction than higher-
order structures
It is nonetheless useful to continue- to refer to these
lower-order structures as observable, if only to remind
ourselves that they do constitute the regular intellectual
fare of political research into structure. We do need to bear
in mind that this will only be a convenient convention.