The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (184 page)

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party convention
.

 
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Term for the anticolonial and anti-racist posture of those mainly Third World countries who have sought a collective identity separate from the rival capitalist and socialist blocks in the northern hemisphere. The Non-Aligned Movement, originally comprising chiefly African and Asian states, and becoming a majority of United Nations members, originated in the Bandung meeting of leaders in 1955 and a first summit conference in 1961. The subsequent and triennial summits debated both political and economic issues in South-South co-operation and North-South relations. The movement is in decline, due to regional conflicts and differences over how to respond to the changes in the global distribution of power brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union. See also
Nehru
.
PBI 

 
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Non-violence seeks to oppose the use of state violence by means such as peaceful demonstrations, sit-ins, civil disobedience, and so forth. It is a political strategy of opposition best known as adopted by
Gandhi
in the Indian national movement. Gandhi insisted on the absolute nature of non-violence—there is no half way house in a non-violent movement. This was because non-violence was regarded by Gandhi as a moral force, and hence could not be seen to be compromised in any way. His withdrawal from the first national non-co-operation movement in 1921 after the burning down of a police station at Chauri Chaura was on the grounds that there can be no exceptions to the rule of non-violence at any level. Many political leaders have been inspired by Gandhi in adopting non-violence as a form of political protest, the best known being the American civil rights movement of the 1960s under the leadership of Martin Luther
King
. See also
Quakerism
.
SR 

 
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See
zero-sum game
.

 
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(1) A standard which is statistically determined or is derived from a number of cases. The statistically normal means simply that which occurs most frequently. The confusing phrase
normal distribution
relates to this sense, not to sense 2, nor to the everyday meaning of ‘normal’.
(2) A standard embodying a judgement about what should be the case.

Hans Kelsen's theory of law portrayed it as a structure of such norms, containing statements about what ought to be done and what ought to be not done. Practical discourse about politics contains normative judgements which it is one of the purposes of political theory to examine. The two meanings may be confused with each other and with everyday usage, for example when normative weight is placed on behaving ‘normally’.
AR 

 
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The normal distribution is a mathematical model of the distribution of a random variate which is continuous, unimodal, and symmetrical, and in which frequencies fall away rapidly with increasing distance from the mean. The characteristics of the model are precisely known and, with reasonably large numbers, the sampling distributions of many statistics approximate to it regardless of any bias among the populations from which they are drawn. These properties allow the normal distribution to be used as the basis for estimating the magnitude of sampling errors, for example with political opinion polls. There is a serious danger of confusion with the normal meaning of ‘normal’, which is not meant here.
ST 

 
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