Political Science 101
A subfield of political science concerned with comparing political systems, institutions, and processes across cases, often linking domestic and international dimensions.
What is Comparative Politics?
These institutions are codified and legally enforced, while informal institutions are unwritten and maintained through social expectations.
What are formal institutions?
A political unit where a shared national identity aligns with state boundaries.
What is a nation-state?
A system of rules and relationships that determine how power is acquired, exercised, and contested within a state—and is broader than an administration or political leader.
What is a regime?
According to Peet and Hartwick (2015), this process should both meet basic human needs and enable people to shape their futures through democratic decision-making.
What is development?
The tool or strategy used to collect or analyze data in scientific research.
What is a method?
This approach explains political outcomes through the structure and operation of formal and informal rules, norms, and organizations.
What is institutionalism?
Strengthening state capacity and establishing legitimate governance are two primary goals of this.
What is state-building?
This approach to studying regimes examine how power, coercion, and the distribution of public goods shape relationships between rulers and the ruled, emphasizing how legitimacy is experienced by different groups.
What is the sociological approach?
This metric measures economic output but ignores inequality, environmental harm, and social well-being... making it a poor choice for measuring development when used on its own. Additionally, feminist critiques point out how this metric fails to capture structural violence and gendered inequalities that persist even in wealthy states.
What is GDP?
The process of turning an abstract concept like “democracy” into measurable indicators.
This theory of development is critiqued for focusing on how domestic cultural values shape development, while ignoring global inequalities and historical legacies of colonialism.
What is modernization theory?
According to Francis Fukuyama, this distinction captures the difference between what a state chooses or promises to do, and how well it does it. These are often viewed as the two components of state capacity.
What is scope and strength?
This theory of democracy focuses on the rules of the game (elections, laws, and institutions) asking primarily, “Are the rules followed?”
What is procedural democracy?
This development index attempts to measure human well-being through health, education, and living standards rather than income alone.
What is the Human Development Index?
Unlike positivism, (a research methodology that assumes reality is objective and can be observed and measured systematically), this research methodology sees reality as socially constructed and emphasizes understanding meanings and experiences.
What is interpretivism?
These two theories of development share the foundational belief that historical patterns of capitalist exchange create enduring hierarchies and global dependencies between core and periphery states.
What is dependency theory/world systems theory?
A gradual erosion of democratic institutions, norms, and accountability mechanisms, often from within the regime itself.
What is democratic backsliding?
This form of democracy looks beyond procedures to ask, “Do people truly benefit?” — emphasizing equality, justice, and the real outcomes of governance.
What is substantive democracy?
This form of industrialization, exemplified by the East Asian “Tigers,” uses a model that combines state planning and integration into global trade to move from simple manufacturing to high-tech exports
Export-Oriented Industrialization?
This discipline, as guest lecturer Paul Cappuzzo explained, often disregards power dynamics when analyzing state development.
What is economics?
A state that effectively enforces laws, provides public goods, and sustains legitimacy, forms stable democratic institutions, and has consistent service delivery is viewed as a "______" state according to contemporary framings of development.
What is a strong state?
This political phenomena that occurred as the world became increasingly interconnected (particularly in the 1990's) allows us to examine different questions, such as why some states integrate into global markets more successfully than others. It also gave way to the rise of rational choice and formal modeling.
What is globalization?
In comparative politics, this dilemma describes how autocrats depend on elites for support yet risk being overthrown by them, often responding through repression or co-optation to maintain loyalty.
What is the dictator's dilemma?
Pursued by many states in the Global South, this mid-20th-century strategy sought to replace foreign imports with domestic production, but often resulted in inefficient industries dependent on state protection and foreign technology.
What is Import Substitution Industrialization?