Political Behavior Exam 1 Review PDF

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Political Behavior Exam 1 review (anything in red needs defining, also if you see any mistakes, feel free to correct)

Part I Politics: Set of activities that defines and maintains a community's framework of order, allowing for arrangement into stability of change; Community development, core values, stability, preservation of the good Science: Latin-Scientia: Knowledge 

Science o Process: procedure for gathering knowledge, through observation, and leading to detection of truth or “laws”  Laws in science: irrefutable fact o Outcome: Laws in science: irrefutable fact  It is the truth or the “law”

**take away is that process and outcome are related to one another Scientific law - consistently proven, irrefutable statements about some aspect of the real world Political science: political inquiry that involves the use of theory and the collection of data (process) to address interesting and important questions and generate knowledge (outcome) about citizenship, governance, and politics Theory: a set of logically related generalizations, about causal relationships between concepts 

Good scientific theory characteristics: o Must be important, as in nontrivial. You can determine if something is trivial or not by finding it to be researchable, and relevant [it attempts to improve the quality of life] o Must have broad coverage; widely applicable, not currently found in Political Science field o Must be simple – Must be able to explain as much as possible using few variables or concepts o Predictive capacity - theory must do more than just guess

Data: bits/bytes of information. The word data is latin, it is the plural form datum. Datum/data: a bit or piece/s of information. Data types  

Qualitative: phenomenon that is not innumerable; very difficult to innumerate Quantitative: information we can assign numbers to

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The more qualitative the data, the less cases we have. The more quantitative data we have, the more cases we have. Quantitative data usually appears in the form of Political Behavior surveys/polls.

Theory-data relationship: Degree of fit what theory is saying on one hand what the data says on the other. Theory-data relationship types:    

Induction: Data to Theory, to identify patterns to construct a theory (Specific to general) Deduction: Theory to Data Non-linear, circular process Demarcation criterion: how strict this must be

Part II Policy approach: older, newer (including “fundamental problem”): the question of how can we design institutions that make the pursuit of self-interest compatible with the achievement of the common good and social wellbeing. involves use of explanatory models and alternative data, qualitative/quantitative, to find an optimal solution (ideally positive positive, never negative negative) from a set of possible solutions to a current public policy problem Policy approach considerations: benefits-costs, ethics/morality, political feasibility Policy approach considerations benefits-cost: Policy analysis is through cost benefit calculations plus policy analyst present these to policy deciders often a government official that choosees to assert list of options or not. Policy approach considerations ethics/morality:  

Ethical and moral life considerations. Value of human life is one of the most ethical and moral considerations in the U.S

Political approach considerations feasibility:  

PS=f(C,C BC, + political feasibility PSSet :

a) C>B cost are calculated are more than benefits b) C=B cost are calculated are equal to benefits c) C...