Intro to Political Science Questions and Answers (Certified Solutions)

Intro to Political Science Questions and Answers (Certified Solutions) Politics the process by which a community selects rulers and empowers them to make decisions, takes action to attain common goals, and reconciles conflicts within the community Power the capacity to influence or control the behavior of persons and institutions, whether by persuasion or coercion Authority command of the obedience of society's members by a government Legitimacy the exercise of political power in a community in a way that is voluntarily accepted by the members of that community Legitimate Authority the legal and moral right of a government to rule over a specific population and control a specific territory Order in a political context, refers to an existing or desired arrangement of institutions based on certain principles such as liberty, equality, prosperity, and security Society an aggregation of individuals who share a common identity Social Contract a concept in political theory most often associated with Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke, the social contract is an implicit agreement among individuals to form a civil society and accept certain moral and political obligations essential to its preservation Government the persons and institutions that make and enforce laws and rules for the larger community Republic a form of government in which sovereignty resides in the people of that country, rather than with the rulers; vast majority of republics today are democratic or representative republics, meaning that sovereign power is exercised by elected representatives who are responsible to the citizenry State in its sovereign form, an independent political-administrative unit that successfully claims the allegiance of a given population, exercises a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force, and controls the territory inhabited by its citizens or subjects; in its other common form, a state is the major political-administrative subdivision of a federal system Sovereignty a government's capacity to assert supreme power successfully in a political state Country as a political term, it refers loosely to a sovereign state and is roughly equivalent to "nation" or "nation-state" Nation often interchangeable with state or country; in common usage, this term actually denotes a specific people with a distinct language and culture or a major ethnic group Nation-State a geographically defined community administered by a government Stateless Nation people (or nations) who are scattered over the territory of several states or dispersed widely and who have no autonomous, independent, or sovereign governing body of their own; examples include the Kurds, Palestinians, and Tibetans Justice fairness; the distribution of rewards and burdens in society in accordance with what is deserved Nation-Building the process of forming a common identity based on the notion of belonging to a political community separate and distinct from all others; often the concept of "nation" is based on common ethnolinguistic roots Political Literacy the ability to think and speak intelligently about politics Methodology the way scientists and scholars set about exploring, explaining, proving, or disproving propositions in different academic disciplines; the precise methods vary according to the discipline and the object, event, process, or phenomenon under investigation Positivism a philosophy of science that stresses observable