Comparative Politic

Comparative Politic: Key terms
Chapter 9: Political Attitude and Behavior
Political Culture
: the pattern of attitudes, values and beliefs about politics, whether they are conscious or unconscious, explicit or implicit. Pp. 171
Values

: basic ethical priorities that constrain and give shape to individual attitudes and beliefs. Pp. 171

Political Identity
: the way that people label themselves as belonging to particular group.
For example: national-state, class or caste, ethnic group, religious group. Pp. 173
Political Socialization : the process by which individuals acquire their political values, attitudes and habits. Pp. 174
Subjective or Internal Efficacy: the extent to which ordinary citizens feel that they can make their views and actions count in the political system. Pp. 175
System or External Efficacy: the extent to which ordinary citizens feel that political leaders and institutions are responsive to their wishes. Pp. 175
Civic Culture
: the term used by Almond and Verba to signify the balance of subject and participant political cultures that best supports democracy. Pp. 176
Political Alienation : a feeling of detachment, estrangement, or critical distance from politics, often because the alienated feel there is something basically wrong with the political system. Pp. 176
Cognitive Mobilization: the process by which increasing knowledge and understanding of the world helps to activate people to play a part in it. Pp. 178
Political Elite
: the relatively small number of people at the top of a political system who exercise disproportionate influence or power over political decisions. If powerful enough, it is a “ruling elite” (see pp. 194). Pp. 179
Ideologues
: those with an informed, broad, sophisticated and more or less consistent (systematic) view of politics. Pp. 179
Authoritarian Attitude : a system or syndrome of attitudes based upon prejudice, dogmatism, superstition, low tolerance for ambiguity, hostility to out-groups (anti-Semitism and racism) and obedience to authority. Pp. 180
Cross-cutting Cleavage: cleavages that are laid one on top of the other, making them potentially more important. Pp. 181
Center-periphery Cleavage: the political cleavage between the social and political forces responsible for creating centralized and modern nation-states, and other interests,

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usually on the periphery of the state, which resisted this process. Center-periphery cleavages are often, but not always, geographical. Pp. 181
Political Behavior
: all political activities of citizens as well as the attitudes and orientations relevant for these activities. Pp. 184
Political Marginality : the condition of being on the fringes of politics, and therefore of having little influence. Pp. 188
: something that is important, significant, or prominent in people’s

Salient mind. Pp. 188

Door-step Response : where those with no opinion or information respond to polls and surveys with the first thing that comes into their head (sometimes known as “NonOpinion). Pp. 189
Low Information Rationality: where citizens without great deal of factual political information have a broad enough grasp of the main issues to make up their mind about them, or else they take cues from sources they trust (sometimes known as “Gut
Rationality). Pp. 190
Issue Publics
: groups of people, who are particularly interested in one political issue or more, are well informed and likely to take action about it. Pp. 191
Hegemony
: is a class, political interest or country that is so powerful that it does not have to rely upon force or power to maintain its rule because its values and attitude have been accepted or because people dare not oppose it. 193
Ruling Elite
: a political elite (see pp. 179) that is so powerful that it can make all the important decision in government. Pp. 194
Sociotropic Voting : declining which party to vote for on the basis of general social or economic circumstances. The opposite is “pocket book voting” that is based on private interests or the voter. Pp. 195

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Chapter 10: Pressure Groups and Social Movements
Interest Groups
: known as “Sectional Groups”. They are the types of pressure group that represent occupational interests—business and professional associations and trade unions. Pp. 199
Cause Groups
: known as “Promotional or Attitude Group”. They are the type of pressure group that do not represent organized occupation interests, but promote causes, ideas, or issues. Pp. 200
Pressure Groups
: private and voluntary organizations that try to influence or control government policies but do not want to become the government. Pressure group is the general term to cover interest groups and cause groups. Pp. 200
Fire Brigade Groups : groups formed to fight a specific issue and dissolved when it is over.
Pp. 201
Aligned Groups
: pressure groups that ally themselves with a political party (the best examples being trade unions and left parties) and business organizations and right parties. Many groups try to maintain a non-aligned status if they can because they want to work with whichever party is in power. Pp. 203
New Social Movements: loosely knit organizations (“networks of networks”) that try to influence government policy on broad issues, including the environment, nuclear energy and nuclear power, economic development, peace, women and minorities. Pp. 204
Insider Groups
: pressure groups with access to senior government officials, often recognized as the only legitimate representative of particular interests and often formally incorporated into the official consultative bodies. Pp. 206
Outsider Group
Lobby

: groups with no acc44ess to government top officials. Pp. 206

: a popular term for pressure groups (based on the mistaken belief that pressure groups representatives spend lots of time in “lobbies” or ante-rooms of legislative chambers). Pp. 208

Umbrella or Peak Organizations: associations that coordinate the activity of their member organizations. Pp. 211
Corporatism
: a way of organizing public policy making involving the close cooperation of major economic interests within a formal government apparatus that is capable of concerting the main economic groups so that they can jointly formulate and implement binding policies. Pp. 213
Tri-paritism
: a looser and less centralized system of decision making than corporatism involving close government consultation—often with business and trade union organizations. Pp. 215

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Policy Communities : small, stable, and consensual groupings of government officials and pressure group representatives that form around particular issue areas. Pp. 215
Policy Networks
: compared with policy communities, policy networks are larger, looser and sometimes more conflictual networks that gather around a policy area. Pp. 215
Iron Triangles
: the close, three-sided working relationship developed between (1) government departments and ministries, (2) pressure groups, (3) politicians, that make public policy in a given area. Pp. 216
Pluralist Democracy : a democratic system where political decisions are the outcome of conflict and competition between many different groups. Pp. 216
Veto-groups
: groups with the power to prevent other groups of the government implementing a policy although they do not necessarily have the power to get their own policies implemented. Pp. 217
Hyper-pluralism
: a state of affairs in which too many powerful groups make too many demands on government, causing overload and ungovernability. Pp. 218
Military-industrial Complex: the close and powerful alliance of government, business and military interests that is said by some to run capitalist societies. Pp. 219
Social Capital
: the features of society such as trust, social norms and social networks that improve social and governmental efficiency by encouraging cooperation and collective action. Pp. 220
Civil Society
: the arena of social life outside the state, the commercial sector and the family (i.e. mainly voluntary organizations and civic associations) that permits individuals to associate freely and independently of state regulation. Pp. 221

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Chapter 12: Voters and Elections
Suffrage

: the right to vote. Pp. 246

Gerrymandering
Pp. 246

: drawing electoral boundaries to favor a particular party or interest.

Referendum

: the submission of a public matter to direct popular vote. Pp. 246

Voting System
: the arrangements by which votes are converted into seats on representative bodies. Pp.246
Human Development Index: a UN index of national development that combines measures of life expectancy, educational attainment and wealth into one measure. Pp. 247
Alford Index
: a measure of class voting that calculates the difference between the proportion of working-class people voting for a left party, and the proportion of middle-class people doing the same. The higher the index, the greater the class voting.
Pp. 247
Single-member District: one elected representative for each constituency. Pp. 248
Proportionality

: the ratio of seats to votes. The more proportional, the closer ratio. Pp. 248

Multi-member District (MMP): these have two or more elected representatives for each constituency. Pp. 248
Electoral Thresholds : a minimum percentage of the poll required to be elected to discourage small parties. Pp. 249
Voting Turnout
: the number of citizens casting a valid (i.e. not a spoiled ballot) vote expressed either as a percentage of those eligible to vote (adult citizens), or as a percentage of those on the electoral register. Pp. 250
Protest Vote
: voting for a party not to support it, but to show opposition to another party or parties, usually those in government. Pp. 250
Compulsory Voting : the legal obligation for citizens to appear at polling stations on election day. Pp. 251
Democratic Deficit : a term used to convey the idea that the institutions of the EU are not fully democratic, or as democratic as they should. Pp. 252
Social Stratification : the hierarchical layering of society into socially and economically unequal groups. Pp. 254
Party Identification : the stable and deep-rooted feeling of attachment to and support for a political party. Pp. 254

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Class : a form of social stratification that is determined by economic factors, notably occupational hierarchy, income, and wealth. Pp. 255
Status : a form of social stratification determined by social prestige rather than economic factors or occupation. Pp. 255
Class de-alignment : decline in the class-based strength of attachment to class-based political parties. Pp. 258
Partisan de-alignment : decline in the strength of attachment to political parties. Pp. 258
Volatility
: the opposite of stability, volatility involves change in voting patterns from one election to another. Some refer to it as “Churning”. Pp. 258
Partisan re-alignment : when social and economic groups change their old party identifications in favor of new ones. Pp. 260
Median Voter
: is the middle of the distribution with equal numbers of voters to the left and right, and is, therefore, typical, middle-of-the-road- voter. Pp. 263
Free Ride
: to extract the benefits of other people’s work without making any effort oneself. The free-rider problem is acute in collective action when individuals can benefit from public good without paying taxes or making any effort of their own.
Pp. 264
Issue Voting
: voters choosing one issue rather than a total party program as the basis of their voting decision. Pp. 264

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