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.
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Famous quotes containing the words conviction and/or politics:
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“In politics people throw themselves, as on a sickbed, from one side to the other in the belief they will lie more comfortably.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)