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56 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
Thomas Hobbes |
people will rationally prefer an all powerful king even if he is self interested |
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Public Good |
Clean air, trash-free streets ex: trashing the classroom |
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Public Goods- the supply problem |
Rational people, left to their own devices, will undersupply public goods. -prisoner dilemma incentives |
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Free Riding |
enjoying the benefits of some good while letting others bear the costs |
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Collective Action- Transaction Costs |
- Time, effort and resources required to make collective decisions - Transaction costs rise sharply as the number of people whose preferences need to be accounted for increases |
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Collective Action- Conformity Costs |
obligations to do something you prefer not to do |
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Conformity and transaction costs relationship |
inverse- efforts to reduce transaction costs serve to increase conformity costs |
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Democratic Governance How does anything get accomplished? |
Delegation and institutions |
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Delegation |
the transmission of authority to some other official or body for the latter's use |
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Institution |
routinized ways of solving recurring collective action problems |
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Agency loss |
the discrepancy between what principals ideally desire and what agents actually do |
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Rationality Principle |
all political behavior has a purpose |
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Political behavior is... |
goal oriented, means to an end, instrumental |
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Institutions Principle |
Institutions shape politics by providing incentives for political behavior |
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Electoral College is an example of what principle? |
Institutions- the electoral college rules create incentives for particular political strategies |
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Collective Action Principle |
Politics involves the use of power to make collective decisions for a group of people |
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Policy principle |
Political outcomes are the products of individual preferences and institutional procedures |
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History Principle |
Past events shape decisions made today ex: Keyboard- designed to make you type slower and inefficiently, goes back to typewriters when creators realized typewriters would jam up if you typed fast |
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Population (Measuring Public Opinion) |
the complete set of people with some characteristic of interest (ex: middle class stay at home moms) |
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Sample (Measuring Public Opinion) |
subset of population that you're hoping represents the most important part of population |
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Public Opinion |
aggregation of many citizens views and interests |
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Direction (Public Opinion) |
which side a majority of people are on |
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Variation (Public Opinion) |
range of attitudes in the public |
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Salience (Public Opinion) |
intensity: how important is the issue? |
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Arrow Impossibility Theorem |
no morally right way to do preference aggregation, impossible to design a decision making process that satisfies basic fairness conditions we desire. |
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Socialization |
a process through which individuals assimilate community preferences and perspectives through social interactions |
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Measurement Error |
How you pose a question affects results |
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Preferences (Public Opinion) |
reflect what people want (money), values (justice) --> basis for peoples preferences in political or public arena characterized by their intensity- how much people want a certain outcome or care about a given issue |
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Beliefs (Public Opinion) |
reflect what people know and how they understand the world and consequences of their actions |
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Political Ideology |
comprehensie way of understanding political or cultural situations. Set of assumptions about the way the world and society works that helps to organize our beliefs, info, and new situations |
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Liberal |
support for political and social reform, government intervention in the economy,, the expansion of federal social services, more vigorous efforts on behalf of the poor minorities and women, and greater concern for consumers and the environment. |
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Conservative |
generally support the social and economic status quo, favor markets as solutions to social problems, and are suspicious of government involvement in the economy. |
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Rational Ignorance as a collective action issue |
the bearing of burdens- such as the cost of being informed- is not likely to have much impact in a mass political setting |
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Condorcet's jury theorem |
expectation that errors will cancel each other out and so adding up the judgments of many will reduce the probability of a mistake - adding up judgements of many does a better job of getting truthful information |
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Agenda setting (Shaping opinion) |
power to bring attention to particular issues and problems get people to be passionate about an issue, new media does this |
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communication effects (Shaping Opinion) |
difficult to change what people think, easier to change what people think about |
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Priming (Shaping Opinion) |
process of preparing the public to take particular view of an event or political actor - psych |
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Framing (Shaping Opinion) |
power of media to influence how events and issues are interpreted ex: abortion→ -democrat- woman's right to choose, republican- child's right to live, immoral (killing) --> message matters |
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The ideal for elections |
elections work through competition, which motivates rational candidates to formulate policies that will please voters |
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adverse selection |
the problem of incomplete information- of choosing alternatives without fully knowing the details of available options |
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paradox of participation |
each voter has a very small probability of affecting an election outcome from a narrow economic value perspective it is surprising that rational citizens would vote costs>reward |
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Partisan voters |
voters with strong partisan tendencies an ideological affiliation to party tally of experience with party psychological attachment to a party |
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“Nature of the times” voters |
peace and prosperity “floaters”, care about what's going on at the time |
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Retrospective voting |
voting based on past performance of a candidate |
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Prospective voting |
voting based on the imagined future performance of a candidate |
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Median voter theorem |
a proposition predicting that when policy options can be arrayed along a single dimension, majority rule will pick he policy most preferred by the voter whose ideal policy is to the left or half of the voters and to the right of exactly gave the voters |
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Duvergers law |
two components- strategic behavior of politicians and the behavior of voters - plurality rule creates two party politics; proportional representation encourages more than two parties |
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Australian Ballot |
An electoral format that presents the names of all the candidates for any given office on the same ballot. replaced partisan ballot |
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single-member district |
an electorate that is allowed to elect only one representative form each district- typical method of representation in US |
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electoral college |
the presidential electors form each state who met in their respective state capitals after the popular election to cats ballots for president and vice president |
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Interest groups |
organized group of individuals or orgs that makes policy related appeals to government→ primary goal is to influence officials |
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pluralism |
the theory that all interests are and should be free to compete for influence and the government outcome is compromise and moderation |
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pluralism ideal |
through vigorous competition among interests we can produce policy of compromise and moderation |
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The Logic of Collective Action- Macuer Olsen |
common interests among people do not easily transform into group action if this was true, it undermines the basic premise of the pluralist ideal. |
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Prisoner's dilemma |
adherence to self interest in accordance with the rationality principle makes both individuals worse off |
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Ways Pluralist System is Unfair |
Some groups can more effectively address the collective action problem than yours upper-class bias the few are often able to take advantage of the many |