Misc.
The making of authoritative public choices from private preferences.
What are politics?
An argument linking cause to effect.
What is a hypothesis?
A measure of observed association between two variables.
What is correlation?
A political-legal unit with sovereignty over a particular geographic territory and the population that resides in that territory.
What is a state?
Term coined by Thomas Hobbes to describe an imaginary time before human beings organized into governments or states for the collective good.
What is the State of Nature?
The systematic search for answers to political questions about how people around the world make and contest authoritative public choices.
What are comparative politics?
The possibility that a hypothesized relationship can be shown to be incorrect.
What is falsifiable?
A process or event that produces an observable effect.
What is causation?
Ultimate responsibility for and legal authority over the conduct of internal affairs, including a claim to a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, within territory defined by geographic borders.
What is sovereignty?
A theoretical political agreement in which everyone agrees to limit their ability to do as they please in order to achieve some collective benefit.
What is social contract?
A subjective feeling of membership in a nation.
What is nationalism?
A way to examine patterns of facts or events to narrow down what is important in terms of building a convincing comparative politics argument.
What is the comparative method?
Relies on statistical data to assess relationships between attributes and outcomes, analyzing those data using computers. Emphasizes breadth over depth.
What is quantitative research?
A state where sovereignty over claimed territory has collapsed or was never effectively established at all.
What is a failed state?
The organization that has the authority to act on behalf of a state and the right to make decisions that affect everyone in a state.
what is a government?
All organized groups, social movements, interest groups, and individuals who attempt to remain autonomous from the influence and authority of the state.
What is society?
Compares and contrasts cases with different attributes but shared outcomes, seeking the one attribute these cases share in common to attribute causality.
What is the method of agreement?
focuses on an in-depth understanding of attributes and outcomes. Privileges depth over breadth.
What is qualitative research?
The degree to which citizens willingly accept the state’s sovereign authority to use power.
What is legitimacy?
A cultural grouping of individuals who associate with each other based on collectively held political identity.
What is a nation?
A form of political organization in which no single political entity or ruler held unambiguous territorial sovereignty and in which political rule involved multiple and often overlapping lines of authority.
What is feudalism?
Compares and contrasts cases with the same attributes but different outcomes, and determines causality by finding an attribute that is present when an outcome occurs but that is absent in similar cases when the outcome does not occur.
What is the method of difference?
Uses both quantitative and qualitative techniques in an effort to build convincing claims about the relationships between attributes and outcomes.
What is mixed methods research?
A situation wherein each individual has private incentives not to participate in an action that benefits all members of the group.
What is a collective action problem?
English philosopher alive from 1588-1679 who is best known for his book Leviathan, a masterpiece on political philosophy
Who was Thomas Hobbes?