The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (105 page)

See
Islamic fundamentalism
.

 
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(1901–84)
Founder of the US, now multinational, opinion polling company which bears his name. One of the first people to realize that reliable prediction of public attitudes can be made from a small sample, so long as the sample is carefully chosen.

 
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Branch of mathematics that has been applied to politics with increasing frequency since
c.
1960. A game is any situation in which the outcomes (‘payoffs’) are the product of the interaction of more than one rational player. The term therefore includes not only games in the ordinary sense, such as chess and football, but an enormously wide range of human interactions. (And it has been applied to animal interactions, by assuming that over time animals become genetically programmed to behave as if they were rational economic men.) Any human interaction from ‘Should I drive on the left or the right side of the road?’ to ‘How should I behave in international negotiations?’ may be treated as a game.
There are many ways of classifying games. The two most useful are between games with perfect information and those without; and between
zero-sum
and non-zero-sum games. Chess is a game of perfect information. It is fully defined by the rules on what constitutes a legal move and what constitutes winning. In theory a computer could look at all the possible combinations of moves and responses to moves and specify a unique best strategy for both Black and White. When this happens, chess will cease to be an interesting game, but it is a long way off (in 1992 a human beat off a computer challenge in draughts, which has many times fewer available moves than chess). Bridge is a game of imperfect information, in which players must not only calculate what it is rational for the other side to do, but also calculate the probabilities on which player holds each card they cannot see. Most human encounters are not games of perfect information. A zero-sum game is one in which the aggregate pay-off—the sum of the payoffs for all the players put together—is the same in all outcomes (for instance if a player in a two-person game is paid £100 for winning, £50 for a tie, and nothing for a defeat). A non-zero-sum game is any other. If the pay-offs were £100 for winning, £60 for a draw, and nothing for a defeat, for instance, the players would have an incentive to agree to draw and to split the extra takings between them. This makes the game non-zero-sum, or one of partial co-operation. The games most often studied in politics, especially
chicken
and
prisoners' dilemma
, are non-zero-sum.
Though first formalized in the 1940s, game theory has a long prehistory. Elements of game-theoretic reasoning can be seen in the writings of many thinkers, including
Plato
,
Hobbes
,
Rousseau
, and
Dodgson
.

 
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(1869–1948)
Arguably the most influential figure of modern Indian politics, Gandhi became the symbol of Indian nationalism and was given the status of the Father of the Nation after India achieved independence in 1947. Gandhi's most significant contribution to Indian politics was perhaps his belief in the strength of ordinary people. Gandhi could do this primarily because the demands his politics made upon the individual were not extraordinary. His insistence on non-violence which underpinned his campaigns of civil disobedience allowed people to participate in national politics in many different ways—none of which necessarily required a break with people's daily existence. Gandhi was able to create a national mood which cut across castes, classes, religions, and regional loyalties by rejecting the boundaries that these created as irrelevant to the moral Truth that he made central to his discourse. This at times led him to limit the more radical aspects of nationalist aspirations of some within the
Congress
and outside it. Another distinguishing feature of Gandhi's philosophy, one that was less influential, was his opposition to Western modernization as a model for India's development. He looked much more to India's villages and self-sufficient rural communities for inspiration in the economic sphere. This led many to compare him with
Mao Zedong
, who also developed an agricultural-based economic strategy for China. Gandhi died on 30 January 1948, shot by a Hindu militant.
SR 

 
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One of the crusades which arose out of the horrified reaction to the growth of cities in Victorian Britain. Its aims were encapsulated in Ebenezer Howard's book
Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
, published in 1898. Howard assumed an environmental determinism which blamed poor surroundings for the moral and social failings of urban life. He proposed self-contained cities of about 30,000 people provided with extensive parks and surrounded by ‘home farms’ and in which every house would have its own garden.
In fact, only two true garden cities were ever built in England, Letchworth and Welwyn. After the first Town Planning Act was passed in 1909, the influence of the garden city idea was considerable, but compromised and diffused, in England as in the rest of the world. Its greatest influence was on the large number of garden suburbs built between 1918 and 1939. Many of the original ideas of the movement re-emerged in the planning of New Towns between the New Towns Act of 1946 and the abandonment of a New Towns policy in 1977.
LA 

 
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