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Actors and structures in politics

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  • Stefano Bartolini
Stefano Bartolini
European University Institute
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/qoe-16765

Published 2024-11-11

Keywords

  • Structures,
  • Actors,
  • Micro,
  • Macro,
  • Politics

How to Cite

Bartolini, S. (2024). Actors and structures in politics. Italian Journal of Electoral Studies (IJES). https://doi.org/10.36253/qoe-16765

Copyright (c) 2024 Stefano Bartolini

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This manuscript reports, with minor variations, the opening Key Lecture of the Italian Political Science Association Conference held in Trieste on September 12, 2024.

This text consists of tentative but hopefully not random thoughts on the topic of the relationship between ‘actors’ and ‘structures’ in politics. It defends some lines of research that the author regards as definitely needed in the current state of the discipline. It covers a great number of complex topics that is compelled to treat succinctly and for this owes apologies to the audience. The title includes three terms; actors, structures and politics. The first two terms do not require special clarification, except for two points. First, they are used as synonymous of the terms ‘micro’ (referring to actors) and ‘macro’ (referring to structures). Second, the text avoids to enter in the extensive theoretical literature that discuss the terms ‘structure’ and ‘structuralism’. The term ‘structure’ is used for the ‘constellation of political actors’, as discussed later in the text. In this context, the term ‘politics’ means simply that the relationship between actors and structures will be seen from the specific point of view of political science. This is a vantage point of view with respect to how the problem is usually framed in sociology and economics.

 

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