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:
“Every man’s task is his life-preserver. The conviction that his work is dear to God and cannot be spared, defends him.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)