Voting
Voting based on your assessment of a candidate's past performance
What is retrospective voting?
When every person has a roughly equal chance of being contacted by a poll.
What agency was created to enforce campaign laws and financial disclosure laws?
Federal Election Commission
The media and interest groups both connect people to the government so they are examples of this.
The main impact of the Electoral College on presidential campaigns
What is swing states are the focus of $ and time?
A person's confidence that they can make a difference in politics.
What is political efficacy?
This indicates the interval or range of confidence a polling organization has in it's survey.
What is sampling error?
Two things done by the McCain-Feingold/BiPartisan Campaign reform Act of 2002.
It eliminated soft money (money given to parties for "party building"). Restricted the timing of ads from outside groups before an election. The stand by your ad provision. Doubled hard money limit.
This is the stable, cooperative relationship that often develops among a congressional committee, an administrative agency, and one more supportive interest groups.
What is the iron triangle?
The name for a meeting conducted to select delegates to the national party convention and one impact of selecting this method.
What is caucus and a) low turnout OR b) more extreme/ideological voters?
Voting based on what a person perceives to be in their individual interest.
What is rational choice voting?
The process by which family, media, peers, etc. influence the development of our political attitudes.
What is political socialization?
The ruling in Citizens United V FEC and its reasoning.
Corporations and Unions are free to spend as much money on elections as long as they do so INDEPENDENTLY of the campaign itself. Corporation have 1st Amendment rights equal to that of individuals.
The difficulty interest groups have with non-members benefiting from their activities.
What is the free rider problem?
The main reason the U.S. has a two-party system.
What is the winner-take-all system of elections (single-member districts) OR our lack of proportional representation?
Amendments 15, 19, 24, and 26 have this in common.
They all expanded suffrage.
What is generational effects?
What were two types of fundraising organizations that expanded after the Citizens United ruling?
What were SuperPACs and 501 (c) groups?
The term for the media's focus on polling results rather than substance in campaign reporting.
What is horse-race coverage?
This caused party leaders to grow weaker in the nomination process over the years.
What is primaries (also McGovern-Fraser commission)?
Three ways federalism (state-by-state variations) impacts voting.
Voter ID laws, absentee ballot access, voter registration rules, felony restrictions on voting, recount rules, voting methods/machines, early voting (times, locations)
Three factors that influence the validity of public opinion polls.
What are: sample selection, contact methods (how voters are interviewed) and question wording?
The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 did 5 things. Name three.
Legislation created to LIMIT money in elections. (A) limited hard money to $1000 per individual (B) Limited how much money someone could spend on their own campaign (C) created disclosure requirement (D) Limited PAC's to $5000 in hard money (F) created the FEC
This is how interest groups can influence rulings in the courts.
What is amicus curiae brief?
This is when new issues emerge and new party coalitions replace old ones.
What is a party realignment (or critical election)?