Comparative Politics POL3512 L, Niyazbekov Nurseit

What are the causes of social revolution; which factors contribute to them?

I believe that revolution is a natural process and a reaction of society to the current regime. Not only people who are forced to go for the revolution burdened with poverty, inability to power, class differences, economic problems, but the people in power itself works for the revolution in this way.

For example, France and the Russian Empire. The difference was that that revolution in France was bourgeois, and the Russian Empire was socialist.

In France, tensions were clearly visible between the nobles (the second estate), the bourgeois (the third estate, but paid taxes) and the peasants. Injustice reigned in the country, high taxes, low wages, low harvest, it became expensive to live not only for the peasants, but for the bourgeois, who blamed the aristocracy for the crisis. About 35% of the land belonged to peasants, whose number was about 80% of the total population. Hatred and revolutionary ideas inspired by the American War of Independence pushed the petty bourgeoisie and peasants into a bloody revolution.

The Russian Empire, in turn, was also in decline, and the monarchy also reigned in it. The country also reigned powerlessness in the labor sphere of workers and, in general, high taxes, low wages, hunger, war. Basically, it was most of these reasons that caused discontent among the peasants, and the war caused fatigue among the soldiers, many of whom sided with the revolutionary forces, namely, they refused to attack the protesters. the situation was heating up between the Soviets and the Provisional Government, as a result of which the conflict ended in the defeat of the Provisional Government.

I did not add the ideological component of these revolutionary cases.

Despite many of the same reasons, the very ideas of the revolution were different, in particular, with the fact that in one country the bourgeoisie came to power (freedom, equality and brotherhood), in another, socialism aimed at building communism.

Question # 4: How the type of ideology of governing party /-ies can affect for pol. (e.g. if a leftist government)…?
The type of ideology of governing party definitely influences both domestic and foreign policies, since governing party must act according to expectations of its electors. Otherwise, in case when country has multi-party government system, the government would not win next elections, or in case of single-party authoritarian regime, the government would face opposition way too unsatisfied than they usually do.
In this regards, I would like to compare foreign policy of countries with various opposite ideologies. In this case, foreign policy of Soviet Union and Third Reich would be a subject of comparison. Both of these countries have similar political systems, which is authoritarian single-party, however their approaches to politics is different.
Soviet Union is country which has leftist party in control of government. The ideology of country is socialist, communist, and Leninist which was established during confrontation with, and in the end overthrown of, previous monarchical system based on rule of Russian Tsar and Emperor. Since the Communist party of Russia came to rule by using violent revolution, such method became an essential part of identity and ideology of government. Overall, Soviet Union sought ways to establish new friendly socialist regimes by promoting international revolutions which means that it encourage other countries, such as China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and ,many others, to start a violent confrontation with against ruling regime, since they believed that revolution is the only way to promote international communist governments.
Third Reich was ,on the other hand, country which put importance to its national identity only. Unlike Soviet Union with their promotion of international communism, Germany was a country which had fascist ideology with national-socialist party in charge of government that was aimed to unify all German speaking counties in the first place, and secondly to enlarge the “living space” of Germany at the cost of other countries. Nazi Germany preferred to invade countires that in their opinion, shown less resistance, and to ally with countries that also promote ideologies either fascist or nationalist one.
As it could be observed, both countries had violent approaches to world politics, with the difference that Soviet Union promoted revolutions and sparked civil wars, with careful avoidance of direct confrontation ,while Nazi Germany aimed to attack and threaten, especially with the use of brute force.

The question that I want to address is “Can political institutions change political culture, or rather: Does political culture shapes political institutions”. Even though there are a lot of studies made to observe which way is more accurate and suitable for this question, nowadays scholars don’t have clear notion of which one has stronger influence towards the other. I would like to say that these both terminologies/concepts (political culture and political institutions) are inter-connected and it is hard to mark perceptible borderlines between them. In this short essay, I want to compare and contrast two claims and state my point of view.
Political culture is the set of shared views, beliefs, norms and attitudes (maybe feelings) held by particular society or population, that is the behavior of the group of people in the political system (). The concept of government initially was created for people to make and enforce laws to achieve better and efficient results by providing leadership, order and security. It means, government as an institution is responsible to monitor the changes in political culture/behavior to make desirable and rational (by majority or unsatisfied group) decisions, that won’t make misunderstandings and conflicts. Government itself of course listens for the citizens, however, the impact of political culture is quiet low than majority may think, because actual decision-making is under the control of the people or the person on top who makes ‘rational’ decision. If political culture could make an enormous changes to the decisions of government, it could become a lot of mess, because it is hard to consider every opinion, every norm that decision should not cross the lines, every belief that it won’t discriminate. I would like to prove why institutions mostly shape people’s behavior – political culture: everything we watched, learnt, studied at school was distantly controlled by our government (even if it’s not authoritarian government). We (not saying for everyone) living in this cage of our small societies could think according to our beliefs and norms shaped by a long period of studying our cultural traditions/features at school, growing at the same streets, hearing similar stories from our parents, talking to similar topics with our colleagues, consequently, this set of behavior - political culture was initially shaped by our environment and other institutions. Moreover, we mostly are depended to these institutions.
Furthermore, I would like to say that the claim ‘political culture shapes political instantons’ isn’t in fact effective. To prove that we need to look at the types of political culture and its contributions. According to Almond and Verba (as cited in Britannica, n.d.), there are three type of political culture: parochial, subject and participant. In participant type of political culture, citizens are mostly prone to participate in the political system – take their part as active citizens in the elections, etc. (i.g. we can notice this phenomenon in the countries such as US, EU countries and so forth). In my opinion, this type of pol. culture works best for the stability of the government and its citizens. On the other hand, in parochial (getting stuck in regional/local values, that are mostly destructive values) political culture, citizens tend to have strong beliefs in their values and norms, that have very destructive influence for people themselves, and does not frequently accept the presence of central government (i.g. in some regions of African continent there are the practices of female genitalia mutilation, which is prohibited by government, but there are strong attachment to their beliefs). There is also subject type of political culture, in which citizens claim themselves just as the subject in political games of the government.
Summing up, the claim that says political institutions shape political culture is quite more accurate than vice versa, because almost everything we have and know were received through our environment and institutions that created this environment; and depending on only political culture is not pretty effective as in the cases of parochial traps and subject type of pol. culture.