Politics is both game and warfare: game when it seeks to keep uncertain the outcome of a competition and to keep the opponent not only alive but eager to play; warfare when it seeks to destroy or permanently weaken the enemy. Depending upon the issues over which it is fought, politics will be more or less game, more or less warfare. A given society may keep its politics in a state of game unless certain issues, social status or religious freedom for example, be at stake. Conversely, a society may be unable to remove its politics from a state of warfare unless some game-like issues, such as the election of a leader, be introduced.In order to measure the power of specific political issues to modify the game-warfare content of a political system, we should first be able to determine the tendency of that system when it operates in a political near-vacuum. In the absence of publicly known issues over which to divide themselves, we should ask, would members of a given group or society tend to fight or to play, assuming that they had only this choice?A state of total political vacuum is, of course, no more than an ideal which cannot and need not be obtained empirically. We cannot prevent subjects from smuggling into a laboratory experiment their personal political concerns, for example the perception of a hierarchy of status and authority within which they will react. But if we cannot control for private political issues, we can, at least, ensure that they do not become public, that they not be shared.
The studies of non-voting made in the United States and Europe have firmly established that failure to vote is associated with conflicting political preferences, with lack of interest in politics, with low position on the social stratification scale, with a feeling of political powerlessness and, to a lesser extent, with sex (women voting usually less than men) and with age (the very young and the very old voting less than the average). But while identifying the causes of non-voting these studies have been unable to determine with any precision the true level of voluntary non-voting and the relative size of the various groups of non-voters. The reason for this failure is in the non-coincidence of four types of electoral universes used and often confused during the research and the analysis: (a) the universe of the cases studied; (b) the universe of the sample (when the research is done by sampling, as is normally the case); (c) the electors registered on the rolls and thus able to vote; and (d) the potential electors. Unless there is a close coincidence between these four universes, determining the true level of electoral participation and the relative importance of the various types of non-voters becomes an open confrontation between hard data and guess work.
The world language system is profoundly affected by the increase in the frequency and density of communication on a world scale. Most of the languages spoken today are not expected to survive the century and most of those surviving will lose or fail to get control of some higher functions of communication, notably in the fields of commerce and science. The minority languages best able to resist the pressure of more powerful competitors are those having a government as their champion, and their best overall protective strategy remains territorialization, either within the boundaries of a unilingual state or, in the case of multilingual societies, on the territorial model of Switzerland and Belgium that juxtaposes rather than mixes languages at the regional level.
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