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An attempt to define political stability must begin by clarifying the concepts of politics and political structure. Political behavior is any act by any member of a society that affects the distribution of the power to make decisions for that society. Political behavior is ubiquitous. Members of society behave politically insofar as, in obeying or disobeying the laws of the society, they support or undermine the power stratification system. Obedience to the law constitutes political behavior just as much as contesting elections does. For, whether intended or not, the effect of obedience to the law is to uphold the authority of those who make decisions about what the law should be, and how it is to be enforced. To uphold this authority is to aid in maintaining aspects of the distribution of power to make decisions for society. Similarly, all violations of the law constitute political behavior; every violation of law is ipso facto a defiance of constituted authority. It threatens the maintenance of the existing pattern of distribution of the power to make decisions for society. If the incidence of violations of law continues to increase, political authority eventually atrophies; that is axiomatic. We have clearly not defined the political in the usual sense of demarcating particular acts that are political from those that are not. Nor do we intend to offer such a definition, because it is misleading to delineate the political in that fashion. Strictly speaking, there is no human act, even so simple as wearing hair long, that is intrinsically nonpolitical. This is true because the politicalness of an act is not a quality inherent in that act but rather a characterization of it according to (1) the context in which we study it, and (2) the context in which it occurs. To illustrate, we would not ordinarily consider long hair a form of political behavior. Yet a puritanical despot might decide that this act corrupts and consequently command everyone to cut his hair short. Suppose that shortly after such a decree has been widely and intensively publicized, all the men invited by the despot
Claude Ake (Wed,) studied this question.