Introduction to Political Science Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering core political science concepts, theories, ideologies, key thinkers, and terminology from the lecture notes.

Politics (H&L Definition)

The activity through which people make, preserve and amend the general rules under which they live.

Essentially Contested Concept

A term that has many legitimate meanings and no neutral, settled definition (Gallie).

Schattschneider's View on Politics

The idea that some things are organized into politics while others are organized out, making politics fundamentally about setting priorities and the agenda.

Lasswell's Definition of Politics

'Who gets what, when, how?' (1936); views politics through power and the distribution of scarce resources (process view).

Easton's Definition of Politics

'The authoritative allocation of values': how government responds to society's pressures by allocating benefits, rewards, and penalties (arena view).

Wallace Sayre's Observation

Political intensity is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.

Arena View vs. Process View

Arena view defines behavior as political because of WHERE it happens (government, public life); process view defines behavior as political because of HOW it works (compromise, power), so it can occur anywhere.

Politics as Art of Government

An arena view defining politics as what concerns the polity or state (cabinets, parliaments, ministries), associated with Bismarck and Easton.

Politics as Public Affairs

An arena view defining politics as belonging to public life (state vs. civil society, or political vs. personal), associated with Aristotle, Arendt, Rousseau, and Mill.

Politics as Compromise and Consensus

A process view defining politics as conflict settled by negotiation rather than force ('art of the possible'), associated with Bernard Crick (In Defence of Politics, 1962).

Politics as Power

A process view defining politics as a struggle over scarce resources where power decides who gets what, associated with Lasswell, Leftwich, Millett, Marx, and Lenin.

Machiavellian Politics

A cynical, pragmatic account of power (The Prince, 1532) associating politics with cunning, lying, and manipulation as valuable political skills.

Aristotle's View of Politics

The view that 'Man is by nature a political animal', that the polis (city-state) creates politics, and that people can only live 'the good life' within a political community.

Hannah Arendt's View of Politics

Politics defined as interaction among free and equal citizens 'acting in concert' (The Human Condition, 1958) to pursue a public good through plurality, deliberation, and freedom.

General Will (Rousseau)

The idea that only through direct, continuous participation of all citizens can the state be bound to the common good.

The Personal is Political

A radical feminist concept (Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, 1970) asserting that politics consists of power-structured relationships extending into family and private life.

Anti-politics

Disillusionment with formal or established political processes, manifested through non-participation, support for anti-system parties, or direct action.

Power vs. Authority

Power is the ability to achieve a desired outcome or influence others' behavior ('power to', 'power over'); Authority is legitimate power, the accepted right to use power based on a felt duty to obey.

Traditional Authority (Weber)

Authority that is legitimate because it has 'always existed', grounded in fixed, unquestioned customs and rules (e.g., hereditary monarchy).

Charismatic Authority (Weber)

Authority resting on the individual magnetism or personality of a leader.

Legal-Rational Authority (Weber)

Authority grounded in a set of impersonal rules, laws, and official positions rather than the person holding office.

First Face of Power

Decision-making power where actor A gets actor B to do what B would not otherwise do (Dahl, Who Governs?, 1961).

Second Face of Power

Agenda-setting power: controlling which issues get decided, how they are framed, and which options appear (Bachrach and Baratz, 1962).

Third Face of Power

Thought control: shaping what others think, want, or need through propaganda and ideology (Lukes, 1974 'radical view').

Normative vs. Empirical Approach

Normative/philosophical approaches focus prescriptively on what SHOULD be (Plato, Aristotle); Empirical/descriptive approaches focus impartially on what IS (Locke, Hume, Comte).

Empiricism

The philosophical belief that experience and observation are the only basis of knowledge.

Positivism (Comte)

The doctrine that social science must strictly follow the methods of natural science and that only verifiable knowledge is genuine.

Popper on Science

The principle that science advances only by attempting to disprove (falsify) hypotheses, rather than proving absolute truths.

Behaviouralism

A political science movement (peak 1950s-60s) claiming theory must come only from observable, quantifiable behavior such as voting habits (Easton, Lipset, V. O. Key).

Rational-Choice Theory

An approach modeling political actors as rational, self-interested individual utility-maximizers (Arrow, Downs, Riker).

Prisoners' Dilemma

A game theory model demonstrating that individual rational self-interest (confessing) can produce a worse joint outcome than mutual cooperation (remaining silent).

New Institutionalism

A theoretical approach (March and Olsen, 1989) categorized into sociological (norms of appropriate behavior), rational-choice ('rules of the game'), and historical (path dependency, Pierson) variants.

Post-positivism / Constructivism

The perspective that there is no objective reality independent of human understanding, and that actors' identities and interests are socially constructed.

Postcolonialism (H&L)

A critical approach stressing the cultural dimension of colonial rule, arguing Western cultural and political hegemony survived formal political independence.

Concept

A general idea expressed in a word or phrase (such as power or presidency) that serves as the building block of knowledge.

Ideal Type (Weber)

A conceptual model formed by accentuating central features of a phenomenon while downplaying others (e.g., 'revolution') to analyze real-world examples.

Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty

Negative liberty (freedom from external interference) and Positive liberty (having the power and resources to live freely and fulfill potential).

Model vs. Theory

A model is a simplified analytical tool evaluated as more or less USEFUL; a theory is a systematic explanation of empirical data evaluated as more or less TRUE.

Easton's Political System Model

A theoretical model where inputs (demands and supports) enter the political system, which processes them into outputs (decisions and policies), creating feedback loops.

Paradigm (Kuhn)

The overarching framework of assumptions within which scientific research takes place, replaced through scientific revolutions.

Situated Knowledge

The concept that knowledge is never produced from a 'view from nowhere', but is always shaped by the author's time, societal context, position, and cultural assumptions.

Ideology (H&L Definition)

A coherent set of ideas that provides a basis for organized political action, whether to preserve, modify or overthrow the existing system of power relationships.

Destutt de Tracy

The French philosopher who coined the term 'ideology' in 1796, defining it as a 'science of ideas'.

Marx's Concept of Ideology

Ideas of the ruling class that uphold the class system by producing 'false consciousness' among the oppressed proletariat.

Liberal View of Ideology

A perspective (Popper, Talmon, Arendt) viewing ideology as a closed system claiming a monopoly of truth used for total social control (e.g., fascism, communism).

Conservative View of Ideology

A perspective (Oakeshott) distrustful of abstract, rationalist systems claiming to explain a complex world; views conservatism as a disposition rather than an ideology.

Thick vs. Thin Ideology

Thick ideologies (liberalism, socialism) offer comprehensive worldviews; Thin ideologies (populism) offer only a partial framework and fuse with other ideologies (Freeden).

End of Ideology Debate

The thesis put forward by Daniel Bell (1960) and later Francis Fukuyama ('end of history') asserting that major ideological conflicts have ended in favor of liberal democracy.

Liberalism as a Meta-ideology

The position of liberalism as a higher, second-order framework that sets the rules and grounds upon which other ideological debates occur in the global North.

Core Principles of Liberalism

Individualism, freedom, reason, equality (of opportunity), toleration, consent, and constitutionalism.

Liberal View of Equality

Belief in foundational equality (equal moral worth) and legal/political equality ('one person, one vote'), emphasizing equality of OPPORTUNITY over outcome.

Classical Liberalism

A tradition emphasizing egoistic atomism, negative freedom, a minimal state ('necessary evil', Paine), and laissez-faire free-market economics (Smith, Ricardo).

Modern Liberalism

A tradition emphasizing positive freedom (self-realization), state intervention in welfare, education, and redistribution, and managed capitalism (Keynes, Rawls).

Rawls's Concept of Justice

'Justice as fairness' (A Theory of Justice, 1971): maximum equal liberty where social and economic inequalities are justified only if they benefit the least advantaged.

Neoliberalism

An updated form of classical liberalism (Hayek, Friedman, Nozick, Thatcher) promoting minimal state intervention, free markets, private enterprise, and opposition to the 'nanny state'.

Core Ideas of Conservatism

Tradition, pragmatism, human imperfection, organicism, hierarchy, authority, and property.

Organicism

The conservative view that society is a living, complex whole rather than an artificial, individualistic construct.

Edmund Burke

The father of Anglo-American conservatism (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790) who advocated 'change in order to conserve' based on historical experience and tradition.

Paternalistic / One Nation Conservatism

A conservative strand associated with Disraeli emphasizing noblesse oblige (privilege entails social duty) and top-down reform to prevent revolution between 'the Rich and the Poor'.

Christian Democracy

A European conservative strand (e.g., German CDU) combining Catholic social theory, social partnership, and a social market economy.

Neoconservatism vs. Paleoconservatism

Neocon advocates 'peace through strength' and assertive foreign intervention; Paleocon seeks to restore traditional authority, family, and religion while remaining skeptical of intervention and multiculturalism.

Core Ideas of Socialism

Community, fraternity, social equality (equality of outcome), distribution according to need, social class analysis, and communal ownership.

Historical Materialism

Marx's theory that economic structures (the base) condition and shape the political, legal, and cultural structures (the superstructure) of society.

Base and Superstructure

In Marxism, the Base is the economic system/mode of production; the Superstructure consists of law, politics, and culture shaped by that base.

Lenin's Vanguard Party

The concept that a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries is required to lead the working class, who left on their own achieve only 'trade-union consciousness'.

Stalinism

A state model characterized by rapid collectivization (1929), Five-Year Plans (1928), central planning, totalitarian one-party rule, and political purges.

Gramsci's Concept of Hegemony

The theory that capitalism maintains control not just through coercion, but through cultural and ideological dominance across civil society.

Revisionism (Bernstein)

Eduard Bernstein's argument (Evolutionary Socialism, 1898) for a peaceful, democratic transition to socialism, laying the groundwork for modern social democracy.

Social Democracy

A political tradition that accepts market capitalism but uses state intervention, Keynesian demand management, and welfare programs to achieve moral redistribution.

Third Way

A modern social democratic reform accepting globalization, free markets, and the 'knowledge economy' while focusing on equality of opportunity and workfare ('a hand up, not a hand out').

Anarchism

An ideology holding political authority and especially the state to be intrinsically evil and unnecessary, divided into liberal-individualist and socialist-communitarian traditions.

Fascism

An interwar totalitarian ideology opposing Enlightenment principles, exalting the organic national community, endorsing political violence, and submitting to a supreme leader.

Feminism

An ideology asserting that gender inequality is socially constructed, opposing patriarchy, and distinguishing biological sex from cultural gender.

Liberal vs. Socialist vs. Radical Feminism

Liberal feminism demands equal rights in public life; Socialist feminism links women's subordination to capitalism; Radical feminism seeks to dismantle patriarchy across both public and personal life.

Shallow vs. Deep Ecology

Shallow ecology embraces sustainability to serve human needs (anthropocentric); Deep ecology rejects human-centredness and recognizes nature's intrinsic value (biocentric equality).

Religious Fundamentalism

An ideology holding that religion cannot be restricted to private life and must dictate politics, law, and economics ('politics is religion').

Populism (Mudde)

A thin ideology viewing society as divided between the 'pure people' and the 'corrupt elite', holding the people's will as the only legitimate guide.

Left vs. Right Populism

Left populism defines 'the people' by class and socio-economic concerns; Right populism defines 'the people' narrowly or ethnically around socio-cultural concerns.