Bernie Sanders Theory

The political rally presents a social situation that demonstrates several relations of authority. At the recent Bernie Sanders rally in Oakland, California, two authority relations of particular interest were that between rally leader/follower and parent/child. Interactions between these groups of individuals were recorded in the form of field notes. In these notes, I recorded details of interpersonal relations with respect to spatiality, authority figures, verbal and nonverbal communication, and larger societal forces. These notes, along with connections to the writings of sociologists Stanley Milgram, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, were used to substantiate claims pertaining to sociological authority and obedience. In a larger context,

To truly understand these authority relations, I need to contextualize some sociologists ' theories in relation to the Bernie Sanders rally. In "Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority," for example, Stanley Milgram explicates the strong tendency we have to obey authority figures via the famous Milgram experiment. The results of the experiment demonstrated that individuals "obey authority to a greater extent than we had supposed" and detailed "the importance of feedback from the victim in controlling the subject 's behavior." Milgram 's experiment also demonstrated the significance of "emphatic cues" and "proximity as a variable" in authority

No one sociological theory best explains the authority relations between rally leader/follower and parent/child. The theories of Milgram, Weber, and Durkheim all help us make sense of the Bernie Sanders rally. Nonetheless, Milgram and Weber 's theories are more applicable to this analysis than Durkheim 's theories. Milgram and Weber are able to account for different relations of obedience and authority, respectively. Milgram 's analysis of obedience with respect to emphatic cues and proximity/spatial relations elucidates many power-related aspects of the rally. Indeed, his work explains why the followers and children complied with their authority figures ' demands and how empathy and spatiality affected response solicitation. Meanwhile, Weber 's delineation of different types of authority explains why the authority of the rally leaders over their followers was different from that of the parents over their children. There are important differences between the two authority figure groups, and using Weber 's understanding of legitimacy and authority helped clarify their different roles. Durkheim 's theories simply do not provide as much insight into authority relations as