47 politics & society ideas, each one credited to the book, paper or primary source it comes from. Free to read and swipe on Savvy.
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Duncan Black proved that when voters' preferences fall along a single left-right spectrum, the option preferred by the voter exactly in the middle beats every other option under ma…
— Duncan Black, On the Rationale of Group Decision-Making
James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock argued that politicians and bureaucrats aren't selfless public servants — they respond to incentives just like consumers and firms do, favoring po…
— James M. Buchanan & Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent
In 1971, economist George Stigler argued that regulatory agencies, over time, tend to be 'captured' by the very industries they're supposed to oversee, since a concentrated industr…
— George Stigler, The Theory of Economic Regulation
Kenneth Arrow proved that no ranked-voting rule can simultaneously satisfy a short list of reasonable fairness conditions once there are three or more options. Every electoral or c…
— Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values
On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Local Black leaders, including a young Martin Luther King …
— Wikipedia contributors, Montgomery bus boycott
Economist Bruce Yandle noticed that Sunday alcohol-sales bans survived because two very different groups backed them: Baptists who wanted alcohol restricted on moral grounds, and b…
— Bruce Yandle, Bootleggers and Baptists – The Education of a Regulatory Economist
In June 1972, burglars linked to Nixon's re-election campaign were caught planting bugs in the Democratic Party's offices at the Watergate complex. Washington Post reporters Woodwa…
— Wikipedia contributors, Watergate scandal
From the 1860s, suffragists petitioned peacefully for decades with little result. In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union under the motto 'deeds, …
— Diane Atkinson, Rise Up, Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes
In October 1936, tens of thousands of Jewish, Irish, and socialist East Enders built barricades and fought police to stop Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists marching through…
— David Rosenberg, Battle for the East End: Jewish Responses to Fascism in the 1930s
In 930 AD, Iceland's farmer-chieftains gathered at a rift valley called Thingvellir and founded the Althing, an assembly that met once a year to make law and settle feuds -- with n…
— Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland
Sixty thousand people gathered peacefully in Manchester in 1819 to demand parliamentary representation. Local magistrates sent armed cavalry into the packed crowd to arrest a speak…
— Robert Poole, Peterloo: The English Uprising
Learning enough to cast a genuinely informed vote takes real effort, but a single vote almost never changes a national election's outcome. Anthony Downs argued that weighing those …
— Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy
In the early hours of June 28, 1969, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar, as they had done many times before. This time patrons fought back, and t…
— David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution
In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu argued that liberty survives only when legislative, executive, and judicial power sit in separate hands that can check one another, si…
— Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who had helped write a classified Pentagon history of the Vietnam War, secretly photocopied the entire study and leaked it to the New Y…
— Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
French political scientist Maurice Duverger argued in 1951 that single-member, winner-takes-all elections push voters away from small parties, since a vote for a third-place candid…
— Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State
In 1812, Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry signed a law redrawing state senate districts to favour his own party. One district was so contorted that a Boston Gazette cartoon dr…
— Wikipedia contributors, Gerrymandering
Before the secret ballot, voters in Britain declared their vote openly at the hustings, leaving them exposed to bribery and pressure from landlords and employers. The Australian co…
— Wikipedia contributors, Secret ballot
Worried by turnout of under 60% at the 1922 federal election, Australia's parliament made voting compulsory in 1924. At the next election turnout leapt to around 91%, and it has st…
— Wikipedia contributors, Electoral system of Australia
For the 2014 independence referendum, the Scottish Parliament extended the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds, and an estimated three-quarters of them turned out. The Scottish Elections …
— Scottish Parliament, Scottish Elections (Reduction of Voting Age) Act 2015
Athenian citizens slotted bronze name tokens into a stone machine called a kleroterion, and coloured dice dropped down a tube decided whose row served on juries and councils that d…
— Aristotle, Politics
In 2016 Ireland gathered 99 citizens picked at random from the electoral register, plus a chair, retired Supreme Court judge Mary Laffoy, to hear experts and deliberate over severa…
— Wikipedia contributors, Citizens' Assembly (Ireland)
When the new Scottish Parliament first met on 12 May 1999, its oldest member, Winnie Ewing, opened proceedings by declaring that the Scottish Parliament, adjourned on 25 March 1707…
— Scottish Parliament, Official Report of the Scottish Parliament
Sociologist Robert Michels studied Germany's Social Democratic Party, a movement committed to equality, and found it was steered by a small, entrenched leadership. Large organisati…
— Robert Michels, Political Parties
On 28–29 August 1957, Senator Strom Thurmond held the Senate floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes, reading out state election laws and the Declaration of Independence, to delay the Ci…
— United States Senate Historical Office, Filibuster
The Literary Digest mailed about 10 million ballots, got 2.4 million back, and confidently predicted Alf Landon would beat Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt won 46 of 48 states. Its li…
— Wikipedia contributors, The Literary Digest
On election night in 1948, the Chicago Tribune went to press early because of a printers' strike, trusting polls and early returns that showed Thomas Dewey beating President Harry …
— Wikipedia contributors, Dewey Defeats Truman
During the 1968 US election, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw asked undecided voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina which issues mattered most, then measured how much coverage local…
— Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media
German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann proposed in 1974 that people constantly sense which opinions are gaining or losing ground, and those who feel in the minority sp…
— Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion
Joseph Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy described a 'window' of policies voters see as acceptable at a given time. Ideas outside it are politically unthinkable howe…
— Mackinac Center for Public Policy, The Overton Window
Studying how voters in Erie County, Ohio made up their minds during the 1940 US election, Paul Lazarsfeld and colleagues expected radio and newspapers to sway people directly. Inst…
— Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice
William Marbury had been appointed a justice of the peace, but his paperwork was never delivered before the new administration took over. When he sued, Chief Justice John Marshall …
— Supreme Court of the United States, Marbury v. Madison
Ernesto Miranda confessed to police in Arizona without being told he could stay silent or have a lawyer. In 1966 the US Supreme Court overturned his conviction, ruling that suspect…
— Supreme Court of the United States, Miranda v. Arizona
English judge William Blackstone wrote this line in his Commentaries on the Laws of England in the 1760s, and it became a founding principle of criminal justice in the common-law w…
— William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England
In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Hirst v UK that automatically barring every convicted prisoner from voting breached the right to free elections. It did not say…
— European Court of Human Rights, Hirst v United Kingdom (No 2)
Robert Peel founded London's Metropolitan Police in 1829, which is why officers became 'bobbies' and 'peelers'. The nine 'Peelian principles', including the idea that the police ar…
— Charles Reith, A Short History of the British Police
On 10 December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by 48 votes to none, with eight countries abstaining. The drafting committee was chai…
— United Nations General Assembly, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
In 1942, civil servant William Beveridge published a report naming five 'giant evils' to defeat after the war: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Despite its dry title…
— William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services
In 1899 Seebohm Rowntree, of the York chocolate family, surveyed working-class households across the city and set a poverty line based on the bare cost of food, rent and essentials…
— B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life
A 2008 World Health Organization report on health inequality found that a boy born in Calton, in Glasgow's East End, could expect to live 54 years, while one born in Lenzie, a few …
— WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, Closing the Gap in a Generation
Researchers found Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester had almost identical levels of deprivation, yet premature deaths in Glasgow were over 30% higher. A 2016 Glasgow Centre for Popu…
— David Walsh and colleagues, Glasgow Centre for Population Health, History, politics and vulnerability: explaining excess mortality in Scotland and Glasgow
Economist Miles Corak compared countries and found that where income inequality is higher, a child's earnings are more closely tied to their parents', meaning less social mobility.…
— Miles Corak, Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility
In 1980 a working group led by Sir Douglas Black found that, three decades into the NHS, death rates for men in the lowest social class were twice those in the highest, and the gap…
— Department of Health and Social Security Working Group, chaired by Sir Douglas Black, Inequalities in Health (The Black Report)
When the UN was founded in 1945, the wartime victors, the US, Soviet Union (now Russia), UK, France and China, became permanent Security Council members with the power to veto any …
— Wikipedia contributors, United Nations Security Council veto power
Woodrow Wilson made a league of nations the last of his Fourteen Points in 1918 and won the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for championing it. But the US Senate refused to ratify the Treat…
— Wikipedia contributors, League of Nations
Immanuel Kant argued in 1795 that republics would be slow to fight, since citizens bear the costs of war. In the 1980s political scientist Michael Doyle and others found that estab…
— Michael Doyle, Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty opened for signature in 1968 and came into force in 1970. Countries without nuclear weapons promised not to acquire them; the five recognised n…
— United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons