Politics & Civics, the Governmental Mechanics Lexicon: Part 1 of 2

Effective definitions clarify thinking, and clear thinking produces effective politics

Terms defined at the end of the post: politics, civics, civitas, city, government, hierarchy of authorities, “doing civics,” citizen, civic society, politician.

I’ve previously written about how most people don’t have a stable concept in their head when they say the word “politics.” The same is true of the word “civics.”

For politics, many people think “meetings, cutting deals, corruption, government, shaking hands, elections, having a bad time, Machiavelli, fighting, [insert a few famous politicians here], polarization.”

For civics, many people think, “boring, meetings in church basements, volunteering, duty, getting up early in the morning, neighbors.”

In either case, there is nothing concrete. Politics and civics are close to being floating signifiers—words that have a highly variable, non-shared definition. And a floating signifier isn’t just inconsistent between people, but between the one person and their past and future selves.

It’s harder to help make New York amazing if politics and civics themselves are unclear words. Imagine trying to build a bridge if “pylon” and “rivet” were ambiguous at best. Maybe you get some spanning structure to stand up for a second, but it would fail quickly.

What are politics and civics?

Different fields (like political science, political philosophy, sociology, etc) give different definitions of these two words. I’m going to tell you the definitions that I give them, and that I use in class:

Politics: the process of social rule-making for a defined social group (2+ people).

Civics: the interconnected, emergent sum of all politics in a given area.

Let’s unpack those.

Politics

Politics is social rule-making, and it happens in any group with two or more people.

There is politics for each friend group, and the rules that friend group makes are called norms. You socially negotiate these norms in a continuous way over time. Each friend group develops norm production with different levels of competence. Some of them fight all the time; some have patterns of dialogue, charity, and deference; and others break down completely.

There is politics for your job/office, and the rules your office makes are probably split between norms and a written code of employee conduct, with the code technically being the supreme set of rules. The norms and the code interact in interesting ways to produce the emergent, effective rules, and they can exist in a contradictory stand-off. Maybe the code says no jeans, but common practice is to wear jeans on Fridays. This allows for interesting interactions: a spoilsport could raise a fuss, hold up the code, and demand compliance with it. Either they would win and everyone would unhappily comply, or the norm of jeans Friday, once challenged, would make people change the code to allow it, thus harmonizing code with norm. The office reveals an important lesson: in any politics with multiple sets of rules, the multiple sets of rules compete for primacy. Or they can persist in a contradictory fashion if no one chooses to pick a primacy fight.

There is politics for the government (the government being the institution that makes and enforces rules in a given area). The rules that the government makes are special, because: (1) they are called laws, and (2) they apply to everyone inside and outside of government (nominally, anyway) at all times. When people use the word “politics,” they often mean some approximation of “government politics.” Further: government politics are split into two: internal government politics (the actual lawmaking process, and the social and codified rules that guide it), and external government politics (elections, law enforcement, and general relations with the governed).

Of course, there are politics for every social group, institution, corporation, and more. And they’re not isolated from each other! Humans can belong to many social groups, and social groups that share humans inherently share political (social rule-making) links. If you and your best friends all work at the same company, the norms that your friend group makes could come to challenge the norms of the office, and vice versa. The laws of the government will punish a lot of behavior, but could change with sufficient pushback from non-governmental politics.

Even the laws of the government are subject to an explicit hierarchy of authorities. The laws of a city, state, and the nation all overlap in a Venn triagram, are often in conflict, and regularly need to resolve.

Civics

The emergent, sum total of all interconnected politics (rule-making social groups) in a given area is called civics. The important idea here is that social rule-making does not occur in a vacuum. Whatever one social group does affects the other social groups it shares members with.

You could imagine a friend group politics and an office politics as a Venn diagram. But the politics of a civitas (the citizens of a given area united by law), otherwise called civics, would look like a Venn omnigram:

Earlier I gave the example of how different sets of rules could exist together, even in a contradictory fashion, in an office. This is also true of a city of 9 million, or a nation of 330 million. There are many norms and codified rules emanating from many actors and groups, and they all make overlapping claims on the same people. Sometimes they move into active conflict, and the contradiction must be resolved.

The point: what you do in one social group can influence what happens in another social group. By default, this happens implicitly and on accident. But you can do this explicitly and on purpose—that’s what “doing civics” is. An example: getting your friend group together to go pick up trash, plant flowers in your local park, go to church, or write model statutes to send to the City Council. All of these activities put the norms of your friend group in contact with other social groups.

A true civic society is one where many people acknowledge the interrelated nature of their social groups, and actively works to make that interrelation good and successful for everyone—in other words, a civic society is one where people try to guide the final form of the emergent social rules that result from the interaction of all the politics in their city.

The people who participate in civic society are called citizens.

The people who participate in deliberately constructing the rules of any social group are called politicians, although that term most often applies to those who participate in constructing the rules of the government.

What do you do with these definitions?

You use them to clarify your own thinking so you can act more effectively in the world. Political theory (the theory of how social rules are made and enforced) doesn’t have to be a useless, armchair branch of thinking.

But see what you think of the definitions listed below, and let me know if you prefer others. My definitions draw from academia and common usage, but I also deliberately arrange the words into a lexicon.¹ The words are interrelated and nested—the definition of civics relies on the definition of politics. If you changed my definition of politics, you’d change my definition of civics.

You might disagree with my definitions—that’s OK. But you do know what I mean when I use the words, and that’s key. Each individual hammering out what they mean by words, and why they mean that, helps everyone avoid talking past each other.

Ten defined terms, and the beginning of the Maximum New York (or governmental mechanics) lexicon

• Politics: the process of social rule-making for a defined social group (2+ people).

• Civics: the interconnected, emergent sum of all politics in a given area. The rules in civics are the result of all subsidiary politics colliding and resolving into general rules (recall the conflict between office jeans norms vs code).

• Civitas: the citizens of a given area united by law. This is a Latin term that’s useful to know insofar as it helps you understand the idea of “civics.” I use the modern word “city” as a synonym.

• City: see civitas.

• Government: the institution that makes and enforces legal rules in a given area.

• Hierarchy of authorities: an ordinal ranking of rule (usually legal) supremacy.

• “doing civics”: influencing the the rules of a city, as opposed to one of its subsidiary politics.

• Citizen: one who does civics for the public benefit of the city. One who produces net positive externalities within the city.

• Civic society: the portion of society composed of citizens.

• Politician: one who deliberately influences the rules that emerge in a social group. Unlike the word “citizen,” politician is a neutral term that is not inherently good or bad, effective or ineffective. If you want to imbue “politician” with more meaning, you’ll need to adjectivally modify it as needed, or find a value-laden term like “Machiavel.”

1. A lexicon is a list of all words in a language, or all relevant words in a subject. A lexicon is often a dictionary (which also track a word’s origin, common usage, and more), but they are distinct concepts.

In my personal view, a subject-based lexicon should define its terms in a logically nested fashion whenever possible, the same way you’d find logically nested definitions in coding.