Civics Final Test

The Four Political Thinking Concepts:

Political Significance: Looks at the importance of particular policies, civic actions, issues, events, or developments, based on their impact on the lives of citizens or their influence on government decision making.

In simple terms: Understanding why governments formulate laws and policies and why citizens take actions on certain issues.

What is most important? 

• How do we decide this

• How can citizens know when action is necessary

• How do governments decide which issues to address

Objective and Result: A political thinking concept that focuses on factors leading to events, policies, decisions, and/or plans of action and their intended and unintended consequences

In simple terms: A tool for understanding reasons and results of actions and how government and citizens can best get things done.

• Civil action, policies, and laws are driven by existing conditions

  • How does understanding these conditions help to explain why certain objectives are set and why particular actions are taken?

Conditions → Objectives → Actions → Results

• Conditions are the issues that need to be addressed

• Objectives can vary based on the condition presented

• Action plans designed to help achieve the desired objectives

• Results are tracked and evaluated to understand the consequences and if objectives were met

• Even the best planned and thought out actions can have united results with a range of effects on various groups of people

  • Active citizenship and good governance mean tracking and measuring the actual consequence of our actions to understand who is being affected, how, and why. 

Political Perspective: Looks at the way in which a person’s beliefs and values can affect his/her position on, or response to, issues of civic importance

• How groups see things differently

• Different views on the same issue, event, person, or policy

• Shaped by who you are as a person and the communities to which you belong 

• Beliefs can be personal or political

• Someone directly affected by an issue sees it differently/has a different POV from someone who is not directly affected

Stability and Change: Looks at how and why political institutions and government policies change, or remain the same over time

• Helps us understand how we can create laws and policies that will best protect and improve the well-being of our communities and the people who live in them

• Stability and change are neither good or bad

• Sometimes change is positive, sometimes negative, sometimes both at the same time (same is true for stability)

• More stability generally means less change

• More change generally means less stability

Stability:

• + Important political, social, and economic institutions are working well. People can withstand the destructive forces of change and negative events. 

• - New opportunities or injustices may not be addressed because institutions and people are resistant to change or unable to change. 

Change:

• + Problems are solved, injustices addressed, conditions improved, and new opportunities are made available.

• - Critical political, social, and economic institutions stop working effectively and people’s lives are negatively affected

Political Ideologies: Definition and examples

Ideologies: A set of beliefs and values about how society should be organized

• Everyone has beliefs about how society should be organized that influence how they think and act as leaders and as citizens

The Political Spectrum: A way of placing different beliefs on a horizontal scale with left, center, & right.

• Right is most opposed to change

• Left is most in favor of change

• Spectrum originated in France - most loyal to the king sat to his right, least loyal sat to his left

Socialism: A theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

• When the state owns capital, and land, and uses it to better the wealth of the people

Liberalism: A political or social philosophy advocating the freedom of the individual, parliamentary systems of government to assure unrestricted development in all spheres of human endeavor, and governmental guarantees of individual rights and civil liberties

• A government based on the idea that the individual should have rights and civil liberties that will not restrict their growth

Conservatism: A political philosophy advocating the preservation of the best of the established order in society and opposing radical change

• The idea that we keep traditions, and hold on to the past

• If change is needed, it is done slowly, to keep order in society

Canada and Ideologies:

• We are a pluralist society which means we allow different ideologies to exist within oru country

• Liberalism is the most dominant ideology within Canada