Portal:Politics

Politics Portal

Politics is the process and method of gaining or maintaining support for public or common action: the conduct of decision-making for groups. This notion predates human society. Although it is usually applied to governments, political behaviour is also observed in corporate, academic, religious, and other institutions. Political science is the field devoted to studying political behaviour and examining the acquisition and application of power, or the ability to impose one's will on another. Its practitioners are known as political scientists. Political scientists look at elections, public opinion, institutional activities (how legislatures act, the relative importance of various sources of political power), the ideologies behind various politicians and interest groups, how politicians achieve and wield their influence, and so on.

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Religious democracy means that the values of religion play a role in the public arena in a society populated by religious people. Religious democracy is an example of how democratic values can exist in a different cultural elaboration than what is usually known before. But, in a secular society, some other characteristic is deemed important and focused on, and that becomes the basis for democracy.

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Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States (1981–1989) and the 33rd Governor of California (1967–1975). Born in Illinois, Reagan moved to Los Angeles, California in the 1930s, where he was an actor, president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and a spokesman for General Electric (GE). His start in politics occurred during his work for GE; originally a member of the Democratic Party, he switched to the Republican Party in 1962. After delivering a rousing speech in support of Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy in 1964, he was persuaded to seek the California governorship, winning two years later and again in 1970. He was defeated in his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 as well as 1976, but won both the election and nomination in 1980.

As president, Reagan implemented new political initiatives as well as economic policies, advocating a limited government and economic laissez-faire philosophy that helped some of the American society and often hindered the poorer members, thus the extent to which the implementation of these ideas was successful is debated. The supply side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics", included substantial tax cuts implemented in 1981. After surviving an assassination attempt and ordering controversial military actions in Grenada, he was re-elected in a landslide victory in 1984.

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John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy circa 1960.