Week 4 Comparative Politics Flashcards
Why comparative politics? (3 reasons)
- We cannot understand our own country without knowledge of other countries.
2.We cannot understand other countries without knowledge of their background, institutions, and history. - We cannot arrive at valid generalizations without a comparative method.
The public sphere of politics
Deals with collective decisions that extend beyond the individual and private life, typically involving government action.
Authoritative political decisions
authority means the formal power to make decision that are expected to be carried out and respected. Governments are organizations that have that power to make binding political decisions in the name of the members of that community.
Politics refers to what activities
activities associated with the control of public decisions among a given people and in a given territory.
Sovereignty
Right to self-determination
Nation
Refers to a group of people with a common identity.
External Sovereignty
the right to make binding decisions with other states.
Internal Sovereignty
the right to make decisions internal to the community.
Ethnic groups
Defined by common ancestry, physical traits, languages, cultures, or history.
Challenges of community building
- Building a national community with a shared identity.
- Ethnic diversity, because ethnic groups often want to form their own separate state.
- Language differences
- Religious differences
Processes of economic development
- Transformation of the labor force from an agrarian to an industrial and then an advanced industrial economy.
- Urbanization
Challenges of economic development
- Health, income and opportunity are rarely evenly distributed. This can stimulate political conflict.
- Rapid population growth, this can pose new policy challenges.
- Climate change costs
Characteristics of representative democracies
- A democracy is a political system in which citizens enjoy a number of basic civil and political rights, and their leaders are chosen in fair and free elections.
- A representative democracy is done through political representation: through elections, competitive political parties, and representative assemblies.
Connections between economic development and democratization
- Economic development encourages democratization by creating autonomous political groups that demand political influence, by expanding the political skills of the citizenry and creating economic complexity that encourages self-governance.
- It changes political values and cultures, through social modernization that comes with the economic development.
Positive effects globalization
- It lowers the prices of many products
- It expands choices of the consumer
- The states where production takes place benefit from FDI’s and increased employment opportunity.
- A states participation in the global economy is positively related to its economic and democratic development.
Negative effects globalization
- Loss of jobs in richer states, due to outsourcing.
- Widening of social inequalities in advanced industrial states.
- Creation of job insecurity for working-class families.
- Global economy puts downward pressure on salaries in parts of the economy that are subject to international competition.
How can a government help its citizens
- Creating a safe community
- Creating a shared political culture
- Providing security and order
- Protecting the social and political rights of citizens.
How can a government harm its citizens
- Governments making decisions that only benefits themselves
- Violation of basic human rights
Components of a political system
- The institutions of the government
- Important parts of the society
- Independent states
Functions of the political process
- Interest articulations
- Interest aggregation
- Policy making
- Policy implementation
Functions of the political system
- Political socialization
- Political recruitment
- Political communication
The sources of power
- Resources: the status of a group, its assets, its number of members, the ideology and interests of a group.
- Priority: refers to cost-benefit analysis
- Strategy: this relates to the goal of the actor.
The barriers in the barrier model
- Acceptance and definition
- Political debate
- Decision
- Implementation
Policy functions
- Extraction (taxes)
- Regulation of behavior
- Distribution of values
Easton’s input-output model
Inputs are citizens demands (votes, ideas interests and identities.
Outputs refers to the decisions and actions of governments
The idea is that political systems takes inputs from the environment and then translates them into outputs.
Things that prohibit you from making decisions to change policy (barrier model)
- Community values
- Procedure and institutions
- Defeat and modification
- Administrative
Steps between the barriers
- Preferences
- Demands
- Political issues
- Decisions
- Result
Mobilization of bias
smaller group that wants change needs to mobilize to change and convince
