| 1) Making Sense of Government and Politics |
 |
A) What is Government? |
|
 |
Governments are the formal institutions through which a land and its people are ruled, and they must have both a means of coercion and a means of revenue |
|
|
Composed of institutions and processes that rulers establish to strengthen and perpetuate their control over a territory and its inhabitants |
|
|
U.S. government is frequently disjointed and often works at cross-purposes, attempting to foster cooperation and compromises. |
|
B) Forms of Government |
|
|
Who governs? Autocracies are governments ruled by a single individual. Oligarchies are ruled by a small group of people, and Democracies allow the populace to have more influence. |
|
|
How much control is permitted? Constitutional governments are severely limited, while Authoritarian governments are checked by other political and social institutions, and Totalitarian governments tend to eliminate any limiting influences |
|
|
Forms influence the politics. Politics is the struggle over "who gets what, when and how". People seek power, or influence over these decisions. |
|
C) Why is Government Necessary? |
|
|
Government is necessary to balance an individual's freedom with government's obligation to protect individuals from each other. |
|
|
Government is necessary to maintain order, to protect property, and to provide public goods to solve problems. |
|
| 2) Five Principles of Politics |
|
A) All political behavior has a purpose |
|
|
People tend to be strategic, and people's goals are achieved through political actions. |
|
B) Cooperation through bargaining or collective action is difficult, and difficulty mounts as the number of participants grows. All politics is collective action. |
|
|
Incentives are necessary to induce cooperation through informal and formal bargaining. |
|
|
Informal bargaining is determined by personal preferences and is referred to as horse-trading, logrolling, or wheeling and dealing. |
|
|
Formal bargaining is governed by rules. |
|
|
Collective action problem: in large groups there is a tendency for individuals to "free-ride" or receive benefits without working. |
|
|
Selective benefits help alleviate the free-rider problem. |
|
C) Rules matter: procedures shape politics. |
|
|
Institutions are routines, or standard ways of doing things designed to aid collective action through providing incentives. |
|
|
Jurisdiction determines who has the authority to apply rules by law or subject matter. |
|
|
Decisiveness determines what the rules are for making decisions. |
|
|
Agenda power determines what will be considered, and Veto power overrules decisions. |
|
|
Delegation allows agents to act on one's behalf, as in representative democracy. |
|
|
Transaction costs arise because self-interested agents must be monitored and might march to their own drummer. |
|
D) Political outcomes are the products of individual preferences and institutional procedures. |
|
|
Individual goals and institutional procedures both affect policy outcomes. |
|
E) History matters. How did we get to where we are? |
|
|
Path dependency means that certain outcomes are more likely because of the prior choices made. |
|
| 3) Principles of Politics in Action |
|
|
Political scientists examine events and use principles to explain them. The authors use the five principles of politics as an analytical framework for discussing the U.S. political climate since January 2003. |
|
A) The Rationality Principle: All political behavior has a purpose. |
|
|
Actions taken by the president during this time displayed an unwavering focus on re-election and his political future. |
|
B) The Collective-Action Principle: All politics is collective action |
|
|
In order for the war on terrorism to succeed, many different departments of the federal government had to coordinate their efforts. |
|
|
The result of coordination in this case meant that some participants gained political strength from their actions while other were marginalized. |
|
|
Pooling resources for a common cause can also sideline formerly important programs (in this case, the No Child Left Behind education policy suffered from a lack of funding.) |
|
C) The Institution Principle: Institutions are created to solve collective-action problems. |
|
|
To better carry out war policies, President Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, an institution that oversees and coordinates the efforts of other government agencies crucial to the war effort. |
|
D) The Policy Principle: Policies are the result of political ambitions played out in a context of institutional processes. |
|
|
Following September 11th, Bush combined his own political ambitions with the powers of a chief executive faced with a security threat to produce desired policies. |
|
|
By mobilizing support from other government institutions President Bush was granted permission to use force in Afghanistan and Iraq, the budgetary means to fight those wars and legislation to assist with the War on Terror (the Patriot Act). |
|
E) The History Principle: History matters. |
|
|
The history of politics and one's own role in the history of this country is an important consideration for any president and it is particularly so for President Bush |
|
|
The experience of his father's failure to be re-elected has certainly shaped President Bush's views and actions. |
|
|
The attacks of September 11 and the ensuing invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have naturally drawn associations between President Bush and other wartime presidents. Aligning the president historically with other chief executives in times of war opens the door for both favorable and unfavorable comparisons. |
|
|
