Episode 18 - Gary Marks. The Sociology of Politics and the Work of Seymour Martin Lipset

In this episode, I talk to Gary Marks who is Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. We discuss the work of Seymour Martin Lipset and focus on three main themes in Lipset’s body of work.

We first discuss Lipset’s 1960 book Political Man, which includes a number of essays that have become classics of political sociology and political science more generally. Central themes of the book are the social requisites for democracy and the group bases of politics. Our second focus is on Lipset and Rokkan’s cleavage theory and the formation and transformation of party systems. In line with the main ideas of Political Man, we discuss cleavage theory as a sociological and group based approach to political competition and contrast it with the Downsian perspective. The third part of the conversation covers Gary’s joined work with Lipset that addresses the question of why there has never been a successful socialist party in the United States.

The conversation goes beyond the work of Lipset alone and focuses on several main themes of political sociology as well as many political transformations of the last 100 years.

If you want to know more about Gary and his work, you can visit his website. http://garymarks.web.unc.edu/

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Political science reading recommendation:

Achen, Christopher/Bartels, Larry, 2016, Democracy for Realists, Princeton University Press