Politics as a social institution
The article is devoted to the important logical and cognitive task of political science. The relevance of its solution is determined by the fact that today, when proving the causes of political phenomena, researchers rely on the opinion of scientific, political authority, or on the opinion of the population, drawn up as the result of a mass survey. In all cases, the argumentation is based on a subjective opinion, for which reason different, diametrically opposite conclusions are legitimized for the same political phenomenon in the circle of political scientists and politicians. The author offers a new approach to verification of the objectivity and reliability of the causes of political behavior using a three-level model of cognition: civilizational - construction of a categorical model by historical retrospection; institutional, based on the assertion that politics is a social institution, the content of which are distribution relations; empirical, aimed at the formation of social statistics, including methods of applied sociology.