Comparative Politics Midterm Study Guide

Comparative Politics Midterm Study Guide

1 - What is Comparative Politics:

Authority: is power combined with legitimacy 

• People do what they say because they think they have the right to tell you want to do - their power is legitimate

• The government of Finland has the authority to tax its people highly, and that authority is given legitimacy by the social goods they get in return

Comparative Method: Comparing two or more cases to understand which variables lead to what.

• Comparing a country that has the death penalty and one that doesn't to see if the death penalty helps prevent crime.

Explanation: How does X happen?

• What factors influence voter turnout?

Causality: Why does X happen?

• What causes low voter turnout?

Legal Authority: power is legitimized through rules and procedures that offices create an enforce those rules

• Agree upon in a official way with rules and procedure to follow 

• Rulers come to power through formalized, legal procedure and rule through formalized, legal procedure

• Authority granted by legal means - Winning an election, VP taking over for president, etc.

• The supreme court

Prediction: If x happens, what will follow? Where will we see Y happen in the future?

• If the United States doesn't make it easier to vote, we will continue to see low turnout.

Charismatic Authority: Power is legitimized by personal traits, ideas, and abilities as leader

• Authority granted to a figure because they are seen by the public as a hero as if they are blessed by god/ god's choice 

• Have charisma or personal qualities that people love 

• Donald trump

Traditional Authority: Power is legitimized by long standing cultural pattern that state a person's power is valid because it always been that way 

• Authority granted to a figure through means of tradition - such as a monarch passing the crown to their child.

• Queen of England

Power: The ability to get somebody to do something you want them to despite what they may want

• The draft, as it requires people to go to war without signing up to. Abortion laws, as it requires people to not get abortions even if they want to. Gun control laws, as it requires people to give up guns even if they don't want to.

2 - Institutions:

Prisoner’s Dilemma: a situation in which actors behave rationally in pursuit of their individual self interest, choose a course of action that leads to an outcome bad for the group

• Two people commit a crime, brought to questioning. Both are told that they can stay silent and get a certain amount of time, or incriminate the other to get less time themselves. If the other rats them out, they get a max sentence.

Path Dependency: initial choices determine future decisions 

• The choice of an institution leads to future decisions that support the maintenances of that institution 

  • The longer you stick to it the harder it is to change it 

• Inability to leave a path once you’ve begun it – ie, sunk cost fallacy.

• Electoral college

• America’s pluralist election system

Tragedy of the Commons: the depletion or ruination of shared resources or goods as a result of rational self interested behavior of individuals

• Farmers let their sheep eat all the grass in a field so others can’t, and then there is no more grass.

Sticky Institutions: Institutions that are not able to be gotten rid of because they are so cemented in with other institutions

• College

  • You could never do away with colleges for another form of education, path dependency

Institutions: human devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interaction, consisting of both informal constraints (customs, norms, & traditions) and formal constraints (laws, constitution, property rights) 

• Douglas North

• A formal system or structure with goals

• The Republican party

• Herbst

3 - The State:

Autonomy: the informal, practical ability of states to carry out actions and policies within its territory independent of interference of other external/ internal actors

• The ability to perform its actions without assistance from other states.

• british colonies sought autonomy from Britain

Authority: legitimate power and the only ones with the authority to act violently towards people

“War made the state, and state made war”: states were created as a result of people trying to fight wars not wage peace 

• Charles Tilly

• Warmakers needed resources held by others in order to fight wars - in return for resources they would offer protection & eventually wanted more things like infrastructure, police, judges etc

• War forces states to expand their power to their borders and create efficient resource lines, and also gains legitimacy in the eyes of the populace, which in turn makes a stronger state.

• Africa did not have wars, so they did not do this.

Social Contract Theory of State Development: created social contracts in order to escape the state of nature - mutually agree to surrender some of their freedoms & submit to the state that will protect their rights and maintain peace/ order in society 

• Thomas Hobbes

Failing State:

• Rotberg: a failed state is no longer able or willing to perform the job of a nation state in the modern world

• O’Neil: a failed state is a state that is so weak that its political structures collapse, leading to anarchy (w/o functioning government) and violence 

  • Lack authority - the people living within borders don’t see state as legitimate and turn allegiance to power holders 

• Iraq is unable to provide security to its citizens and is therefore failing

Capacity: the ability of the state to wield power in order to carry out the basic tasks of providing security & stability for itself/ citizens 

• The measure of the ability of a state to perform its actions

• America may have a low capacity because it is difficult for bills to pass

Sovereignty: the formal and legal ability of states to carry out actions and policies within its territory independent of interference from external/ internal actors

The State: 

• Borders, governmental institutions

• America

• The nation in america is americans

Lack of Interstate war in Africa: African states are weak because they don’t have a history of external wars and therefore did not strengthen their governments in response to wars - don’t face significant external threats currently 

4 - Nationalism & Identity:

Patriotism: faith & pride in one's state actions regardless of whether it aligns with the  nation

Social Contract: don’t have independent, objective existence outside of the system of meaning that created them

• Nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, etc

Nationalism: the belief that a nation deserves its own state that it controls

• Focuses on creating & maintaining the nation state

Nation: Benedict Anderson: an imagined political community and imagined as inherently limited and sovereign 

• “Imagined”: the nation is a social construct that exist in our minds 

  • Imagined but still real

  • States create & maintain “evidence” of the state through things like symbols (flags), landmarks, territory, language, etc - established legitimacy 

• “Inherently limited”: all nations have other/ outsiders - that don’t and can’t belong to a nation 

  • Primarily look out for their own people & themselves before looking out for other nations

  • Those outside of the nation are viewed are different of deserving of different of lesser treatment

• “A political community that imagines itself as being sovereign”: nations seek self rule & don’t want to be ruled by member of other nations - only members of their own nation

  • Don’t trust other nations to know how and/ or want them to rule them properly 

Identity: collective aspects of the set of characteristics by which a person is recognizable or known

Replacement Theory:

Nation-State: a state whose boundaries align with those of a single nation where all residents regard themselves as members of that same nation and see the state represent that nation 

Identity Politics: Politics involving identities that have been socially constructed as politically important or politicized 

State Racism:

5 - Governing Plural Societies:

Homogeneous Societies: states with little cultural diversity, or on nation dominates the state and no other significant groups make nationalism claims 

Asymmetrical Federalism: some of the subunits (provinces, regions, territories) of the state have special cultural and historical rights that aren’t given to other subunits

Assimilation:

Consociationalism: granting different identity groups (usually constitutionally guaranteed) share power in the central government

Symmetrical Federalism:

State-Nation: people put their cultural identity before the identity of their nation but are unified under that nation 

• Respect & protect multiple but complementary sociopolitical identities 

• Find way to accommodate competing claims without privileging any on claims over the others

• Create sense of “we-feeling” or an attachment to common symbols of the state and some from of “constitutional patriotism” 

• State comes before nation bc attachment to the state ia what binds together the people living in the country - attachment to state is the basis for their shared nation 

Individual Rights: rights that belong to an individual

• Ex: right to practice your religion 

Multinational: states have cultural diversity that isn't territorially based or organized into groups with nationalist demands for independence 

Multicultural Integration:

Robustly Multinational: state with strong cultural diversity, some of which is territorially based and articulated by leaders who make claims of independence

• Parts of the country where many people of the same identity group live and want to break off and form their own state

Collective Rights: rights that belong to a group of people

• Ex: state protects a religious groups holy site/ right to practice their religion 

Affirmative Action: policies meant to address past and current systemic injustices against a marginalized groups by favoring them in government, employment, and education 

• Address historical mistreatment of minority groups often done by the state 

• Affirmative action controversy:

  • The special privileges that it gives to come group can be seen as/ or is actually a disadvantage other groups

    • Zero sum:

  • Seen as unfairly restricting the rights of historically privileged groups to self determination in both politics and their lives

  • Argue getting state involved in areas where is shouldn’t be meddling like education or employment

  • Might encourage negative stereotypes or lowered expectation of what people achieve 

  • Might reduce people to just their identity groups and entrench divisions between identity groups by institutionalizing their difference

6 - Non Democratic Regimes:

Authoritarianism:

• Pluralism: extensive social and economic pluralism, but limited political pluralism with some space for semi opposition

  • Other political identities are a lot weaker than the main one

• Ideology: no elaborate or guiding utopian ideology but possibility of distinctive authoritative mentalilies

• Leadership: one leader or small group of leaders exercises power within formally ill defined but actually quite predictable norms

  • No constitutions

• Mobilization: there isn't extensive mobilization of subjects 

  • Can live your life, not with much freedom but as long as you aren't a threat to the major power you will be fine 

Example: Zimbabwe under Mugabe, South Korea under 

Ideology: the presence and type of belief system to which rulers subscribe to

Pluralism: the degree to which there are multiple different organized interest groups and the degree to which they are tolerated by the government

• Includes political, economic, and social pluralism

• How many/ the existence of political parties, religion, etc

Sultanism:

Dictator's Dilemma:

Leadership: who has the power to rule, how do they attain it, how do they exercise their rule, and what limits are placed on them

Regime: the set of rules, principles, and norms that define and determine power and structure the operation of the state and its government

• Not who is ruling but how - the type of political system in a state

• Key dimensions of regime:

  • Pluralism, ideology, leadership, and mobilization

Totalitarianism:

Mobilization: the degree to which ordinary people are expected and/or forced to participate in supporting the regime and what their participation entails. 

Residual Category:

Benefits of Elections:

7 - Electoral systems:

District magnitude: number of seats assigned to a district 

Duverger’s law: the plurality electoral system favors the two party system 

• Is the result of elimination of third parties through of mechanical & psychological factors

  • Mechanical: third parties are eliminated when they don't win or would be third parties join one of the two competitive parties

  • Psychological: voters don't want to waste their votes on parties that don’t stand a good chance of winning and so these parties die because so few people vote for their candidates 

Electoral system: the method used to calculate the number of elected positions in government that individuals and parties are awarded after elections - the method of translating votes into seats

• Other aspects of elections - who votes, when they are held, how people vote, how districts are drawn, etc

Majoritarian elections: who ever receives the majority of votes (50% +1) in the elections 

Plurality elections (FPTP): whoever receive the most votes in the elections compared to the other candidates

• Doesn’t need the majority of votes, first one to receive the most wins, usually one seat assigned to a district 

Multimember districts: elect multiple representative instead

Proportional representation: attempts to make the percentage of the seats awarded to parties reflect the percentage of votes they got 

• District magnitude must be more than one

• larger district magnitude the greater the proportionality

• Voters are always casting a ballot for a party even when they pick specific candidates - political parties are important in this system

• Have different mathematical models and methods that determine how they allocate votes 

Ranked-choice elections: voters weight in on each candidate, ranking them from most to least preferable 

Single-member districts: elect one representative to the legislature instead on multiple 

Open-list elections: candidates with the most party votes in a party get the seats the party wins

• Party still makes list but you can pick candidate

• People vote for the specific candidate but their vote also counts for the candidates party

Closed-list elections: voters only get to vote for the party & the party determines which candidates will fill the seats allocated to them based on their ranked list of candidates

• Voters don’t get a say in whos on the list or the order of the list

Voter turnout:

Insincere (strategic) voting:

Wasted votes:

Vote thresholds: require a political parties to get certain percentage of the vote before be allowed to fill seats 

• Depending on how high the threshold is, some smaller parties can be shut out of government 

8 - Executive systems:

Dual democratic legitimacy:

Executive branch:

Head of government: elected officials with political power who are involved in the legislative/ executive branch

Head of state: is a political figure who doesn’t really have any power - is more there for ceremonies or events

• The royal family

Parliamentary system:there is no separation between the executive and legislative branch; the executive- the premier and the ministers - come directly from the parliament. The executive depends on the confidence of parliament to retain their position 

• Is also a member of the legislative body

  • Are members of parliament & prime minister at the same time

  • They get to be prime minister because they are members of parliament 

• Easy to remove from office when they lose popularity 

Presidential system:executive with considerable constitutional power including full control over the composition of the cabinet, is directly elected by the people for a fixed term & in independent of parliamentary votes of confidence. This executive, the president, is not only the head of government but also head of state

• Is both the head of state and head of government

• Is directly (more or less) elected by all voters

• Serves fixed terms in office 

Semi-presidential system:

Confidence Vote: vote held by parliament when prime minister isn’t supporting their party or allies

• Can be held at anytime and if they don't get the majority vote for support then their term is over

• Can lose votes and stay member of parliament

Cabinet: