POLI212 Final

Rationalism

School of thought that focuses on individuals as the driving force and believes that all actors are rational maximizers

Culturalism

School of thought that holds communities as the main unit of analysis and believe that ideas, beliefs, and norms are formative to political outcomes

Structuralism

School of thought that downplays the importance of individuals and ideas and try to create very large theories

The State

A human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory

Sovereignty

An internal authority and autonomy vis-a-vis the outside

Private Goods

Excludable and rivalrous goods

Common Goods

Non-excludable but rivalrous

Club Goods

Excludable but non-rivalrous

Public Goods

Non-excludable and non-rivalrous

State Size

The extent of the state’s role in the economy and society; how many public goods does the state seek to provide?

State Capacity

State’s ability to fulfill tasks and to implement policies independently of internal rivals

State Building

Increasing state capacity and may involve increasing state size; creating good institutions/regulations; deeping and strengthening norms/conventions to reduce free-riding

State Capture

Private interests seize the state for their private gain; Public officials and politicians privately sell underprovided public goods and rent-generating advantages à la carte to individual firms

State Failure

Extreme state weakness; rivals of the state taking over

Regime

A set of formal and informal rules, norms, and institutions that determine how political power is acquired, exercised, and transferred

Dictatorship

Regime involving: low contestation and high concentration of power, low accountability, and reduced individual freedom

Totalitarianism

Regime without political, economic, and social pluralism; elimination of pluralism is the goal, not the means to stay in power; rulers have unified, articulate, utopian ideology which they impose; rulers aim to inculcate ideology into every individual in the polity and mobilize society around it

Authoritarianism

Regime where the priority is maintaining power, not erasing pluralism; management of authoritarian elites’ loyalty through charisma, patronage, one-party structure, and/or repression; management of the public through combination of coercion and co-optation; low mobilization

Military Regimes

Assume power through a coup, especially after weak, unstable government or civil war; political and civil liberties restricted in the name of stability; coercion through repression/extrajudicial killing; co-optation thorugh technocratic leadership; bureaucratic authoritarianism

Personalist Regimes

Personality cult or tight personal control; weak institutionalization; coercion through arbitrary repression; co-optation throug hcharisma or respect/obedience-stressing ideology; regime ends when they die

One-Party Rule

Rule that excludes other groups from power, penetrates society, and stifles opposition; institutionalized authoritarian regime; not always totalitarian

Democracy (Thin)

System in which parties lose elections and a system of processing conflicts in which outcomes depend on what participants do but no single force controls what occurs

Democracy (Thick)

Regime type characterized by high participation and high contestation

Participation

Public input in policy making through parties and elections; vertical accountability

Contestation

Political competition and horizontal accountability

Democratic Election

Fair; clean; competitive; universal suffrage; no boycott or exclusion of major political actors; freedom of assembly and freedom of speech during campaign; everyone accepts the results

Hybrid Regime

Regime that combine elements of democracy and dictatorship

Competitive Authoritarianism

Regimes where elections exist and are competitive, but the playing field is heavily skewed in favor of incumbents

Arenas of Contestation

Include: Electoral, legislative, judicial, the media

Delegative Democracy

When incumbents see themselves as delegates of the people, not as constrained representatives; Mandate understood as a carte blanch until the next election

Representative Democracy

When incumbents negotiate and compromise and institutional checks are central

Patrimonialism

Regimes where state institutions are treated as personal extensions of the leader

Form of Government

How the executive branch is organized and how power is divided between the executive and legislative branches

Head of State

Symbolic, ceremonial functions

Head of Government

Everyday tasks of running the state; power and accountability

Superpresidentialism

An informal, constitutionalized system that occurs if a president usurps a lot of power and parliament is weak and can’t constrain them at all

Electoral System

Collection of rules that determine: the method of electing executives, the number of candidates that are elected and the number of districts in legislative elections, the way in which voters express their choices on the ballot, the way in which votes are counted and the way in which votes translate into victory, regulations on campaign finance, political advertisement, registration, etc

Proportional Representation

Legislative seats are allocated based on percent of votes each party receives; parties gain roughly the same share of seats as their share of the vote

Duverger’s Law

Law that says that there will be only 2 parties under plurality and more than 2 under proportional representation

Party

A group of people who seek to win control of government by presenting candidates in elections using a common platform

Cleavage

Social divisions

Clientelist Linkages

Distributing targeted benefits via brokers and networks

Programmatic Linkages

Building platforms, manifestos, policy competence

Charismatic Parties

Parties where voters like the leader, but not the party per se

Clientelist Parties

Parties that utilize target, reciprocal exchange of material benefits for votes

Programmatic Parties

Parties that focus on developing a platform

Catch-all Party

Parties with programs designed to apeal to a wide section of society

Niche Party

Parties that focus on just one issue that some voters care deeply about

Cartel Parties

Parties with close links to the state, focused more on governing than on representing; collude to protect themselves from newcomers

Business-firm Party

Parties that adapt and use organization models in business to politics

Social Movement Party

Parties that emerge out of social movements protesting against political decisions

Realignment

New party divides

Dealignment

When voters detach from long-term loyalties, choose strategically

Rule of Law

When all actors, including the state, are bound by the law; opposite of arbitrariness; equal responsibility and protection under the law

Constitutional Assembly

A gathering of people - usually elected by citizens and often representative of society in some way - to write or re-write a constitution

Ordinary Judiciary

Apply the laws to concrete cases and adjudicate disputes by hearing evidence and applying the law to it to reach a decision

Abstract Review

Review of a law before it enters into force

Concrete Review

Review of laws in the context of specific cases

Centralized Review

Only constitutional courts can strike down legislation

Decentralized Review

All courts may engage in constitutional interpretation

Institution

A rule/set of rules that is self-perpetuating and structures individuals’ expectations about their and others’ behavior; the rules of the game in society

Formal Institution

Institutiosn created, communicated, and enforced through officially sanctioned rules that are relatively clear

Informal Institutions/Norms

Socially share rules, usually unwritten, that are created, communicated, and enforced outside officially sanctioned channels

Mutual Toleration

Viewing rivals as legitimate

Institutional Forbearance

Exercising restraint even when one can legally act aggressively

Historical Institutionalism

The view that institutions are path dependent and tightly linked to temporal and spatial context

Rational Choice Institutionalism

View that institutions are equilibria that are sustained only as long as they produce more benefits than costs for all actors involved

Sociological Institutionalism

View that institutions come from cultural norms that are usually very stable

Political Culture

The broad, underlying pattern of orientations toward politics within a society; what people collectively believe about authority, legitimacy, participation, and the role of citizens

Participant

Assumed to be aware and informed about the political system in both its governmental and political aspects; involved, makes demands, grants support to political leaders based on performance

Subject

Tends to be cognitively oriented primarily to the output side of government: the executive, bureaucracy, and judiciary; passively obeys laws, doesn’t vote or actively engage in politics

Parochial

Tends to be unaware or only dimly aware of the political system in all its aspects; ignores politics and its impact on one’s life; traditional societies, autocracies

Classic Modernization Theory

Economic development leads to social and political transformation; industrialization, urbanization, education produce secular-rational values which produce democracy

Identity

A social category that an individual identifies with, and that others recognize as such; socially constructed, recognized, and meaning-laden category that shapes how individuals and groups understand themselves and act politically

Values

General principles about what is desirable

Norms

Shared expectations about appropriate behavior; the building blocks of political culture; aggregated, they define a society’s political culture

Ideology

A belief system; a set of ideas about how society should be organized; mobilize or reinterpret cultural values for political purposes

Rural Consciousness

Identity whose content is based on a feelign of resentment towards urban fellow citizens, not just views on the size of the government

Civil Society

A realm of organized citizen activity that is autonomous of hte state, voluntary, self-generating, largely self-supporting, and bound by a legal order

Rights Revolution

Expanded litigation by civil society groups, expanded rights protection by the courts, and/or the constitutionalization of rights

Personal Rights

Right to life and dignity; freedom of religion; right to privacy; right to habeas corpus; AKA fundamental freedoms or legal rights

Civil Rights

Freedom of movement; freedom of association, assembly; freedom of expression, press, conscience; AKA democratic rights

Political Rights

Citizenship rights; voting rights

Social Movements

A collective actor engaged in sustained, contentious interaction with elites, opponents, or authorities and aiming to bring about social or political change

Collective Action Problem

Occurs when a group would benefit from acting together, but individuals avoid participating because the costs to each person outweigh perceived individual benefits

Political Opportunity Structure

The set of formal institutional arrangements and informal configurations of power that shape the political incentives faced by social movements; determines how accessible the political system is, how responsive elites are, and what strategies movements choose as a result

Passive Leverage

the greater the attractiveness of the role model, the greater the desire to emulate it

Democratic Backsliding

The deterioration of qualities associated with democratic governance, within any regime

Institutional Backsliding

The state-led deterioriation in 2 of 3 democratic domains: competition, participation, and accountability

Executive Aggrandizement

The expansion of executive authority

Promissory Coup

Coups where leaders justify power grabs as temporary and democracy-restoring

Weaponization of Law

Strategic manipulation of the legal or legislative process

Attitudinal Democratic Backsliding

the gradual erosion of democratic values, norms, and beliefs within a society, as reflected in the attitudes and preferences of its citizens

Populism

Parties and movements taht argue that the elites are untrustworthy, the people are unrepresented, and the political system is corrupt; doesn’t imply a particular set of economic or policy positions and that’s why populism spans the left-right spectrum

Left-Leaning Populism

Populism that calls for redistribution and state control of resources (nationalization), proescution of corrupt officials, reducing FDI, and privileging local investors

Right-Leaning Populism

Populism that emphasizes law and order, nativism, immigration threat, globalized threats to nation

Technocratic Populism

Populism that claims “the people” will benefit if the state is run as a firm, without politics, only through business competence

The Far Right

The ideological position that’s on the bottom of the GAL-TAN ideology matrix

Nomothetic Approach

Approach where theories are generalizable across time, context, and space

Idiographic Approach

Approach where theories are context-specific