Learn: Political Strategy | Quizlet

Moment

What political environment are we operating in? Is there a window? What created it?

Frame

Loss or gain? What language and values activate the right response in this audience?

Coalition

Who needs to be assembled or activated? Why would they actually participate?

Ground game

How do you reach, persuade, pressure, or activate the decision-maker?

Theory of change

Why should these actions produce the desired change?

Constraint

What structural limit could derail the strategy, and how will you manage it?

Stable institution

Institutions are functioning normally and constraining actors.

Stressed Institutions

Institutions are under pressure but still holding.

Rupturing Institutions

Normal rules or structures are failing; strategy must adapt.

path dependence

Once a policy, institution, or organizational structure is established, it creates actors who benefit from it and resist change. The longer it has existed, the harder it becomes to change because switching costs and defending constituencies accumulate - not because the status quo is necessarily better.

Hard Block

The actor refuses agreement. The policy dies at that stage.

Soft Block

The actor agrees only after scope, funding, or enforceability is reduced. The policy survives but is weakened.

Implementation Block

The actor cannot stop formal adoption but can delay, opt out, underfund, or refuse implementation. The policy exists but has little effect.

Problem Stream

The issue becomes impossible to ignore because of a crisis, scandal, vivid event, or information that changes the frame.

Policy Stream

A credible solution is already developed and waiting. Successful advocates often prepare before the window opens.

Political Stream

Political conditions align: a new government, changed majority, shifted public mood, approaching election, or other favourable political circumstance.

Policy Window

A moment when change becomes possible because the relevant streams align strongly enough for action.

Focusing Event

sudden, rare, dramatic occurrence that captures public and political attention, exposes a vulnerability, and can make previous inaction politically costly. It can break a collective-action deadlock and help open a policy window.

System 1

Fast, intuitive, emotional, low effort. Political slogans, identity cues, visual impressions, and quick judgments often operate here.

System 2

Slow, deliberate, analytical, and effortful. Technical reports and specialist arguments are more likely to rely on this system.

Loss Aversion

People are more motivated to avoid losing something than to obtain an equivalent gain. The political implication is to identify what the audience already has, values, or believes it is losing and frame the issue around protecting or restoring it.

Social Proof

People use the behaviour of others as evidence of what they themselves should do, especially under uncertainty.

Motivated Reasoning

People often evaluate information based on whether it supports or threatens prior commitments to a party, identity, community, institution, or belief.

Selective Incentives

gives people a private benefit from participating that they cannot receive if they stay out. Examples in the course include representation, certification, networking, research, and lobbying support.

Natural coalition

Actors already share interests, values, and institutional culture. Coordination is comparatively easy.

Tactical coalition

Actors normally disagree but share one temporary interest. Useful but fragile; they may return to opposition after the issue.

Focusing-event coalition

Actors were not coordinating until a crisis or scandal made non-coordination politically costly.

principal agent theory

The principal sets a goal and delegates authority. The agent executes.

Information Asymmetry

The agent knows more about implementation than the principal, making monitoring difficult.

Multiple principals

The agent receives competing instructions and may satisfy nobody fully.

Misaligned interests

The agent's career incentives, institutional culture, or risk tolerance differs from the principal's goals.

Chain length

More delegation layers create more opportunities for slack and additional constraints.

Inside lobbying

Direct access to decision-makers, formal consultations, committee testimony, pre-budget submissions, ministerial briefings. Requires relationships, credibility, and capacity.

Outside lobbying

Public opinion, media pressure, grassroots campaigns, coalition-building, protests, public reports. Requires public legitimacy, audience size, and the ability to make inaction politically costly.