AMERICAN GOVERNMENT POWER & PURPOSE

AMERICAN GOVERNMENT POWER & PURPOSE
Chapter 1 Five Principles of Politics Theodore J. Lowi Benjamin Ginsberg Kenneth A. Shepsle Stephen Ansolabhere

Why are you here? Let’s make a deal…
Will you take a one question test? With VERY high stakes??

Who is this person?

Making Sense of Government and Politics
Two fundamental questions about government and politics: What do we observe? An empirical question Why? A fundamental concern of science. Requires building a theory around principles A third question could be normative Two objectives: What is government and politics? Introduce our five principles of politics

What is Government? The institutions and procedures through which a land and its people are ruled Governments may be simple, like a tribal council that makes all decisions, or they may be complex, like our own system of separate branches and levels of government

Discussion: Government in a Farming Society
Imagine that everyone in this room is a farmer in our own self-contained society We’re all equal in every respect One of us proposes to build an irrigation system How do we make decisions? Discussion: Imagine that everyone in the room is a farmer in our own self-contained society. We’re all equal in every respect. We all have farms that produce enough for our families to consume. Nobody is rich or poor. We’re all the same linguistically, racially, ethnically, and we all worship the same God. But one of us has come up with the idea of building an irrigation system so that our farms can be more productive in the future to generate surpluses that we may use to hedge against future drought or to sell to a neighboring society. The problem is that this construction project will require sacrifice in the short term. We’ll all have to give up some of our time and labor and some of our land to build the irrigation system and this means we will be a little hungry and overworked in the short term. How will we make a decision on this proposal? Will it require a majority, a consensus, or some number in between? How will we organize and enforce our agreements? What will we do about those who do not support the proposal if the majority of us decide to move forward with the project? Will they share in the benefits? How we decide to decide is establishing “the institutions and procedures through which a land and its people are ruled.” Getting students to work through the different kinds of arrangements that might be established and the implications of the institutions they establish allows them the chance to begin to imagine the different forms government may take.

Forms of Government: Inclusiveness
Autocracy – A single individual rules Oligarchy – A small group of landowners, military officers, or wealthy merchants rules Democracy – A system of rule that permits citizens to play a significant part in the governmental process

Forms of Government: Recognition of Limits
Constitutional – Formal and effective limits are placed on the powers of government Authoritarian – No formal limits are placed on government but government may be effectively limited by other social institutions Totalitarian – No formal or effective limits on government’s power of any kind Discussion: Students should be able to quickly identify where the United States falls within these forms of government but it is useful to get them to try to categorize other contemporary or historical examples of governments. Some useful examples for discussion might include North Korea, Nazi Germany, Feudal Europe, Ancient Athens, and contemporary Iran.

Clicker Question Imagine a hypothetical society in which a king has almost total power but is constrained in his coercive power by the church. This government would best be described as a(n): authoritarian democracy. constitutional autocracy. totalitarian oligarchy. authoritarian autocracy. Answer: D

What is Politics? The conflicts and struggles over the leadership, structure, and policies of government Politics takes many forms – voting, running for office, joining groups and parties, lobbying, and even speaking to friends and neighbors The 5 principles of politics can be used to explain political action

Introducing the 5 Principles of Politics
All political behavior has a purpose Institutions structure politics All politics is collective action Political outcomes are the products of individual preferences, institutional procedures, and collective action How we got here matters

Rationality Principle
All political behavior has a purpose Political behavior is instrumental Not random Done with forethought Calculation Political actors pursue policy preferences, reelection, power, and to maximize their agency budgets

Institution Principle
Institutions structure politics Institutions are the rules and procedures that provide incentives for political behavior Remember that institutions themselves are not necessarily permanently fixed. Rules may change; they just don’t change easily

Institutions Provide Authority in Four Ways
Jurisdiction – The domain over which decisions may be made Agenda and Veto Power – Control over what a group will consider for discussion and the ability to defeat something Decisiveness – Rules for decision making Delegation – Transmission of authority

Principal-Agent Relationship
May be affected by the fact that each is motivated by self-interest, yet their interests may not be well-aligned As a result, the principal needs to have some way to monitor and validate what the agent is doing This leads to transaction costs – the cost of clarifying the relationship and making sure arrangements are complied with

Collective Action Principle
All politics is collective action Collective action is difficult and the difficulty mounts as the number of people and interests involved grows Sometimes there are collective action dilemmas – situations in which individually rational incentives do not align with shared, collective interests

A Collective Dilemma Discussion:
This figure is from a story in the book about two neighbors who share a fence that will cost $1,000 to mend. If the fence is mended they each would get $700 of positive value. As the text explains, it is actually individually rational for Smith and Jones NOT to mend the fence even though their combined benefit would be $1,400 ($700 each) and the combined cost would only be $1,000. The figure shows Jones’s possible outcomes in the lower left side of each box and Smith’s outcomes in the upper right of each box. Notice that each person has a binary choice to contribute to mending the fence or not. Smith’s outcomes are $200 or -$300 if he chooses to mend the fence; his outcomes are $700 and $0 if he chooses not to mend the fence. In other words, no matter what Jones chooses to do, Smith is better off not mending the fence. This is true of Jones as well. What is most striking about this story is that the collective outcome (adding both their individual outcomes) is worst if they both don’t mend the fence. In all other outcomes, the collective outcome is +$400 though this benefit is most equitably distributed in a scenario where they both mend the fence. So, individually rational behavior leads to the worst collective outcome. This dilemma is known as the prisoner’s dilemma and will be re-visited in the chapter on interest groups. For students, it is useful to get them into groups to act as either Smith or Jones and to be paired up with another group acting as their neighbor. Have them discuss what to do (mend or don’t mend) and then share their answer at the same time. The point of the exercise is for students to understand the ways in which collective action may not happen even when there is a shared collective interest.

Collective Action and Public Goods
Collective action is the pooling of resources and the coordination of effort and activity to achieve common goals Public goods are those that may be enjoyed by anyone and may not be denied to anyone

Collective Action is Difficult
Collective action and provision of public goods becomes even more difficult as the number of parties involved increases or as the ability to bargain face-to-face is hampered. Examples: Free Riding Tragedy of the Commons Institutions are the solutions to these problems Discussion: Traffic patterns are another interesting way to introduce students to collective action problems. Ask students to imagine they are in a traffic jam caused by an accident a couple of miles ahead. Imagine the cars in the accident have been moved off to the shoulder of the road but traffic is still moving very slowly. Why? “Rubber-necking” is a good example of a collective action problem students have experienced. The person at the front of the traffic jam has an individual incentive to go slow and look at the accident while all others pay most of the cost. It is also a good example to use to show students how institutions are the solution to this collective action problem.

Clicker Question Which of the following is NOT an example of a collective dilemma? free-riding. tragedy of the commons. formal bargaining. prisoner’s dilemma. Answer: C

Policy Principle Political outcomes are the products of individual preferences and institutional procedures The policy principle is the logical combination of the first three principles Policy outcomes are frequently “lacking in neatness” because we have a system where personal ambition mixes with a decentralized political system

History Principle How we got here matters
Path dependency – certain possibilities are made more or less likely because of the historical path taken Three reasons why history matters: Rules and procedures Loyalties and alliances Historically-conditioned points of view

Clicker Question A member of Congress seeks to bring additional dollars home to his districts for construction of roads and bridges. This is an example of the: Institution Principle. Rationality Principle. History Principle. Collective Action Principle. Answer: B

The Five Principles of Politics Applied to a Case
Take the example of immigration reform and think about how each of the principles of politics might inform the debate Rationality Principle Institution Principle Collective Action Principle Policy Principle History Principle Free Response: Almost any current policy debate will work just as well here but this exercise can be carried out as a writing exercise or as an in-class exercise in small groups. Ask students to consider how each of the these principles of politics impacts the debate over immigration reform (or some other current policy debate).

Consider one of the most basic questions about voting: Why do people vote the way they do? In elections, Americans face two main alternatives in the form of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. These parties have distinctive policy priorities, notably in the important area of economic policy. Since at least the 1930s, the Democratic Party has favored economic policies that redistribute income to poorer segments of society; Republicans, on the other hand, favor lower taxes and little or no redistribu-tion. It is often argued that people vote according to their economic self-interest: people choose the candi-date from the party that maximizes their income. On reflection, however, we can see that other factors may also affect voting decisions, including the candidates’ personal qualities, important noneconomic issues, and even candidates’ appearance or habits. Which factor best explains vote choice? What Are Data? Data are systematic meas-urements or observations that are collected as a source of information about a theoretically defined concept or idea. In our example there is a political behavior that we want to explain, vote choice. Vote choice is a general concept, and we can define it before we ever observe an election. The first step in collecting data is to represent the concept that we are interested in as a variable. A variable defines all possible outcomes of a concept that could occur and assigns them a unique label or value. Vote choice, for instance, may take four possible values or outcomes: vote for the Democratic Party candidate, vote for the Republican Party candidate, vote for another party or candidate, or don’t vote. The second step in collecting data is to measure the behavior of interest. This requires the collection of information. Observation of a small set of events can be quite enlightening. We might, for instance, conduct in-depth interviews with a dozen or so people about how they decided to vote. However, we often require more evidence to support a given claim; a small number of people might not be sufficiently representative. Censuses and random sample surveys allow social scientists to collect information systematically on a large number of cases. These means of collecting data are staples of social sciences. With a census we observe all individuals in the population at a given moment. Every 10 years, the United States conducts a comprehensive enumeration of all people living in the country, including information on families, education levels, income, race and ethnicity, commuting, housing, and employment. An election is a census, as it is a comprehensive count of all votes cast in a given election. So we can measure a variable such as vote choice by taking count of all electoral votes and nonvotes in the voting-eligible population (Table A). A survey, on the other hand, consists of a study of a relatively small subset of individuals. We call this subset a sample. We can measure a variable for those individuals in the sample, and extrapolate patterns from the sample to the entire population. One of the most important social science research projects of the second half of the twentieth century is the American National Election Study, or ANES. The ANES is a national survey that has been conducted during every presidential election and most midterm congres-sional elections since 1948 to gauge how people voted and to understand why. In recent years, the ANES has used a sample of 2,000 Americans to make inferences about the entire voting population of over 100 million. Today, most of the information used by public policy makers, businesses, and academic research-ers, including estimates of variables like unemployment and inflation, television and radio ratings, and most demographics of the population, are measured using surveys. Summarizing Data. Communicating the information in a census or survey requires tools for summa-rizing data. First, we compute the frequency with which each value of a variable occurs. Frequency may be either the number of times that a specific behavior or value of a variable occurs or the percent of the obser-vations in which it occurs. Second, we construct a graph or statistic that summarizes the frequencies of all values of the variable. The distribution of a variable expresses how often each of the values of the variable occurs. A bar chart displays all possible values of a variable on one axis, usually the horizontal axis; the heights of the bars equal the frequency or percent of cases observed for each value (Figure A).

28 30 41 1

The five principles introduced in this chapter provide a foundation for understanding and explaining political life. However, to make and test arguments about politics, we need more than just an analytical framework; we also need empirical evidence. Political scientists study facts about politics and analyze and interpret these facts to assess different arguments and claims. Typically, we study data, systematically collecting facts and information, and examining the structure of data to see whether they are consistent, or not, with a given line of thinking. Consider one of the most basic questions about voting: Why do people vote the way they do? In elections, Americans face two main alternatives in the form of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. These parties have distinctive policy priorities, notably in the important area of economic policy. Since at least the 1930s, the Democratic Party has favored economic policies that redistribute income to poorer segments of society; Republicans, on the other hand, favor lower taxes and little or no redistribu-tion. It is often argued that people vote according to their economic self-interest: people choose the candi-date from the party that maximizes their income. On reflection, however, we can see that other factors may also affect voting decisions, including the candidates’ personal qualities, important noneconomic issues, and even candidates’ appearance or habits. Which factor best explains vote choice? What Are Data? Data are systematic meas-urements or observations that are collected as a source of information about a theoretically defined concept or idea. In our example there is a political behavior that we want to explain, vote choice. Vote choice is a general concept, and we can define it before we ever observe an election. The first step in collecting data is to represent the concept that we are interested in as a variable. A variable defines all possible outcomes of a concept that could occur and assigns them a unique label or value. Vote choice, for instance, may take four possible values or outcomes: vote for the Democratic Party candidate, vote for the Republican Party candidate, vote for another party or candidate, or don’t vote. The second step in collecting data is to meas-ure the behavior of interest. This requires the collection of information. Observation of a small set of events can be quite enlightening. We might, for instance, conduct in-depth interviews with a dozen or so people about how they decided to vote. However, we often require more evidence to support a given claim; a small number of people might not be sufficiently representative. Censuses and random sample surveys allow social scientists to collect information systematically on a large number of cases. These means of collecting data are staples of social sciences. With a census we observe all individuals in the population at a given moment. Every 10 years, the United States conducts a comprehensive enumeration of all people living in the country, including information on families, education levels, income, race and ethnicity, commuting, housing, and employment. An election is a census, as it is a comprehensive count of all votes cast in a given election. So we can measure a variable such as vote choice by taking count of all electoral votes and nonvotes in the voting-eligible population (Table A). A survey, on the other hand, consists of a study of a relatively small subset of individuals. We call this subset a sample. We can measure a variable for those individuals in the sample, and extrapolate patterns from the sample to the entire population. One of the most important social science research projects of the second half of the twentieth century is the American National Election Study, or ANES. The ANES is a national survey that has been conducted during every presidential election and most midterm congres-sional elections since 1948 to gauge how people voted and to understand why. In recent years, the ANES has used a sample of 2,000 Americans to make inferences about the entire voting population of over 100 million. Today, most of the information used by public policy makers, businesses, and academic research-ers, including estimates of variables like unemployment and inflation, television and radio ratings, and most demographics of the population, are measured using surveys. Summarizing Data. Communicating the information in a census or survey requires tools for summa-rizing data. First, we compute the frequency with which each value of a variable occurs. Frequency may be either the number of times that a specific behavior or value of a variable occurs or the percent of the obser-vations in which it occurs. Second, we construct a graph or statistic that summarizes the frequencies of all values of the variable. The distribution of a variable expresses how often each of the values of the variable occurs. A bar chart displays all possible values of a variable on one axis, usually the horizontal axis; the heights of the bars equal the frequency or percent of cases observed for each value. (Figure B)

The distribution of income in the United States offers a somewhat different example. This variable takes a range of values, from the smallest household income to the largest household income. For ease of presentation, we can organize this variable into categories. In Figure D, the first category is “less than $10,000,” the second category is “$10,000 to $19,999,” and so forth up to the top category, “$200,000 or more.” All possible income levels are covered in this classification. Variables such as income can also be characterized with statistics, such as the median or mean. In this example, the median is the value of household income such that half of all households have incomes below the value and half have income above it. Fifty percent of all cases have income above the median value, and 50 percent have income below it; thus the median is also called the 50th percentile. The median household income in the United States in 2011 was $50,054, meaning that half of all households have income below that value and half have income above that amount. The mean is the average value for the variable. In the case of household income, the mean equals the sum of all households’ incomes divided by the number of households. Personal income received by households totaled approximately $8.4 trillion in 2011, and there were 121 million households. So the average household income was $69,677. Why do the median and mean differ? In calculating the median, every household is equal. We merely count the percent above and below a certain income level. The mean value weights households according to their incomes; consequently, a household with $200,000 income contributes 10 times as much to the calculation of the mean as a household with $20,000. If there were only a small difference in income among households, the mean would be very close to the median. The difference between the median income and the mean income thus provides a way to measure inequality. Only about one-third of households had income above the mean value of $69,677.

Testing Arguments Using Data
Testing Arguments Using Data. Let’s return to the idea discussed at the beginning of the section: that people vote their economic self-interest. Is this claim correct? To test this idea, we need to formulate a hypothesis. In the social sciences, hypotheses often take the form of stating a relationship between two variables, such as income and vote choice. To test the hypothesis that people vote their economic self-interest, we want to know to what extent voting decisions match up with individuals’ income levels. As stated earlier, in the United States today, the Republican Party generally favors lower income taxes and less income redistribution, and the Democratic Party favors higher income taxes and more income redistribution. We therefore want to know if people in high-income households vote Republican more often than people in low-income households. The difference we observe in vote choice between high- and low-income groups is considered to be the effect of income on vote choice. To see whether the effect of income on the vote is indeed large, we can use the data in Table B to examine the actual voting behavior of different sorts of individuals. The national exit polls in 2012 reveal that 63 percent of voters with income less than $30,000 chose the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. By comparison, 46 percent of those with income over $100,000 chose Barack Obama. This large difference (17 percentage points) reveals that income is associated with vote choice, but it is not absolutely determinative: not every person of high income voted Republican in this election, and not everyone in low-income groups voted Democrat. As we explore alternative arguments about what determines vote choice, we can make many different comparisons—men versus women, college graduates versus high school graduates, and so forth. Our goal is to find which, if any, of these potential explanations best accounts for the variation in vote choice. Throughout this book, we will consider other political outcomes besides voter behavior, such as the support by members of Congress for different types of legislation and how often the executive succeeds in passing legislation. Social scientists design experiments and carefully controlled comparisons in order to measure causal relationships. Observing simple associations and correlations, though, is not the final step in verifying our arguments, ideas, or theories about how politics works. Many times we will look for a relationship or association between two variables to see if the predictions from an argument hold true, and if they do, we take that as evidence supporting the argument. A relationship or association between two variables, sometimes called a correlation, should not be taken to mean that one of the variables caused the other to occur. Causation is more difficult to establish. A correlation between two variables X (say X is a measure of education) and Y (say Y is a measure of income) is consistent with a theory that education increases one’s earning power. From a simple correlation, however, one cannot tell whether many years of education caused high income or high income led to many years of education. It is also possible that some other variable, say high intelligence, caused both many years of education and high income.

Be a Savvy Consumer of Quantitative Data
Be a Savvy Consumer of Quantitative Data. Beyond the figures and tables in this book, which reflect data from sources that we consider reliable and accurate, you will undoubtedly encounter other data about politics in the news and elsewhere. Before you take such data—and whatever argument they seem to support—at face value, it is worth asking a few questions about how the data were gathered and presented. What is the source of the data? Is it a respected source like a government office or a major mainstream news organization, which may be relied upon to gather and report data accurately? Or are they from a source that is likely to have a goal other than accurate presentation of the data, like an interest group, a campaign, or an entertainment website? When were the data collected and how? What is the date (or date range) for the data? Are the data from a census or sample, and how large is the sample? What is being measured? For example, in a poll showing support for a candidate, is it the percent of all Americans? The percentage of likely voters? The percentage of Democrats or Republicans? Why are the data presented a certain way? Is this the best way to present these data? Does it distort the data in any way? What relationships and patterns do we observe in the data? Thinking through the questions above can help you better understand the information in the data figures and tables found throughout this book as well as in other academic writing and in the news. In each of the chapters to follow, you will find an Analyzing the Evidence unit, highlighting arguments and evidence on some of the subjects of that chapter. Many of these sections discuss how political scientists use the basic methodology discussed above to test arguments about American politics.

AMERICAN GOVERNMENT POWER & PURPOSE

Similar presentations

Presentation on theme: "AMERICAN GOVERNMENT POWER & PURPOSE"— Presentation transcript:

Similar presentations

About project

Feedback

Log in

Auth with social network:

AMERICAN GOVERNMENT POWER & PURPOSE

Similar presentations

Presentation on theme: "AMERICAN GOVERNMENT POWER & PURPOSE"— Presentation transcript:

Similar presentations

About project

Feedback