What is politics?

Politics is a process of making decisions that will govern
the actions of groups of people.  We usually apply the term to the decision making
process of governments, but all sorts of other institutions have politics as well (for
example, schools have all sorts of politics going on between teachers and between the
teachers and the administration).

Another way to look at
politics is to say that it is the process of deciding who will have power in a given
group of people (whether that will be a family, a school, a business, a country, or even
the whole world) and what those in power will do once they have
power.