american gov 1234 Flashcards
values
Features or attributes of social science research. In particular, a variable might look at the relationship between race and voting, age and voting, or religious preference and voting.
Political Science
Branch of knowledge that deals with systems of government; the analysis of political activity and behavior.
Political Socialization
The process by which one’s attitudes and values are shaped.
Public Opinion Polls
Surveys that seek to determine how different groups of people perceive political issues.
Demographics
Classifications of different groups of people that usually refer to one’s race, class, ethnicity, gender, level of wealth, age, place of residence, employment status, level of education, and so on.
Social Contract
The voluntary agreement among individuals such as Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau. They suggested that an organized society is brought into being and invested with the right to secure mutual protection and welfare or to regulate the relations amongst all people and members.
Social Contract theorists
Thinkers beginning in the 17th century who sought to explain human nature by looking at the terms by which governments are set up in the first place.
Thomas Hobbes
- Authoritarian System
- In other words, in the Leviathan (1651)… Hobbes suggested that lives of individuals in the state of nature were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights in a democracy prevented the “social society.”
- “Life without government is life in a ‘state of nature’.”
John Locke
- Representative Democracy
- On the other hand, Locke believed that human nature allowed people to be selfish. For example, money, ina natural state all people were equal and independent, and everyone had a natural right to defend his “life, health, and liberty.”
- Liberalism - government protects order
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Believed in the innate goodness of a man and in basic human rights founded upon universal natural law; in addition, he believed that both rulers and the citizens have natural human rights as well as obligations to each other which should be bound in a social contract.
Political Power
The ability to get others to do what they would not do on their own.
Harold Dwight Lasswell
Political Scientist, PhD student at University of Chicago, professor of law at Yale University, served as president of the American Political Science Association (APSA), of the American Society of International Law and of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS). “Politics is who gets what, when and how.”
Social Science
any number of academic disciplines that seek to understand behavior. Classically they have been understood to include political science, anthropology, archaeology, economics, criminology, and psychology.
Traditionalism
The methodological tradition that seeks to understand if certain government or political institutions are behaving in accordance with how they “ought to be behave.”
Normative
A normative approach is any approach that seems to determine how one “ought to live.”
Quantitative analysis
An analysis that uses data to interpret political phenomena to better understand the political world. The data may come from survey research or established data sets.
Behavioralism
The school of thought that looks at the “actual” behavior of certain persons or institutions. It is largely data driven and without a strong commitment to values.
Correlation
The relationship between two items or variables.
Post Behavioralism
The school of thought that seeks to combine elements of the traditional approach (especially the idea of values) with those of behaviorism.
Theory
An idea that has been tested that aims to demonstrate a correlation between political phenomena.
Hypothesis
An educated guess about a particular experiment.
Subfields of political science
The different content approaches with in the overall discipline of political science. Subfields include political theory, American politics, comparative politics, and international relations.
