Conviction politics refers to the practice of campaigning based on a politician's own fundamental values or ideas, rather than attempting to represent an existing consensus or simply take positions that are popular in polls.
On the right, the term has been adopted by politicians like Margaret Thatcher, who declared "I am not a consensus politician. I am a conviction politician" upon assuming leadership of the Conservative Party in 1975. On the left, it was vocally supported by Paul Wellstone, whose Wellstone Action now trains future politicians in his theory of conviction politics.
Read more about Conviction Politics: Theory, History, Criticisms
Famous quotes containing the words conviction and/or politics:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)