Comparative Politics Final (Quiz Questions)

What do political parties do?

link rulers to the population, help structure the political world, mobilize masses, recruit and socialize political elite

Electoral formula determines how:

Votes are translated into seats

If the legislature removes the government from office, it is called:

A vote of no confidence

Voters mark their preferences by rank ordering the candidates, and the candidate who receives an absolute majority is elected. If no candidate wins an absolute majority, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and his votes are reallocated until one candidate has an absolute majority of the valid votes remaining. What is this system called?

Alternative vote

Three necessary conditions to classify a party system:

At least 2 parties, continuity in the main parties, regularity in the distribution of electoral support

Which country uses the Alternative Vote electoral system?

Australia

Selectorate Theory

Basic assumption is that all political leaders are motivated by the desire to gain or stay in office

How is the leader selected in a monarchy?

By family or kin networks

46. Federal countries ________

Disperse power across different levels of government

What is exintrara systemic volatility?

Intra systemic is the transfer of votes from one party to another

What is extra systemic volatility?

Extra systemic is the transfer of votes from one party to an outside/third party

26. Electoral thresholds do not influence proportionality

False

A government is given a vote of no confidence and it loses, then elections must be held

False

A small W forces leader to provide coalition members with public goods.

False

All democracies must have political parties

False

Immobilism emphasizes power sharing by different religious communities through guaranteed group representation

False

In general, the more ethnic groups a given country has, the more political parties emerge

False

Nonpermissive electoral laws introduce a small amount of distortion in how social heterogeneity is translated into parties at the electoral and legislative levels.

False

Political representation can be understood via traditionalistic representation

False

The US uses the majority-runoff two-round electoral system

False

Unicameralism does not fit onto a majoritarian-consensus dimension

False

_______ addresses the extent to which representatives resemble and staff to their constituents

Formalistic representation

According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, how does democracy die?

Gradually, subtly, legally

One Latin American country with a Party Non-System

Guatemala

In terms of clarity of responsibility and accountability, which of the following three types of systems have high levels of both accountability and clarity of responsibility?

Majoritarian democracies

Electoral systems:

Majoritarian, proportional, mixed

Which type of dictatorship has large electorates?

Military

Three types of dictatorships

Monarchy, military, civilian

A multiparty system is

One in which more than two parties have a realistic chance of holding power

Two party, unitary systems more likely to characterize majoritarian types of democracies

True

Most democracies today are:

Parliamentary

Democracy classifications

Parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential

Two types of civilian dictatorships

Personalist and dominant party

Name one of the three projects discussed in class to measure democracies

Polity IV, DD, Freedom House

If the government is not responsible to the legislature, then the system is:

Presidential

Duverger's hypothesis states that:

Proportional representation electoral rules favor multiparty systems

The bottom-up perspective of party formation suggests the parties come from:

Social cleavages

Dictator's Dilemma

The dictator relies on repression to remain in power, so people falsify their public preferences, and the leader never knows how much support he has.

Which of these challenges Lipset and Rokkan's freezing hypothesis?

The emergence of populist extreme right parties

What side of the political spectrum is populism located on? (Ostiguy and Roberts)

The low

_____ is based on the idea that power should be concentrated in the hands of the majority?

The majoritarian vision of democracy

The effective number of parties is a measure of:

The number of political parties in a given political system adjusted by vote share

Essential to determining the proportionality of an electoral system is the district magnitude. The greater the district magnitude, the greater the proportionality. What is meant by "district magnitude?"

The number of representatives in an elected district

Which of these is not a social cleavage identified by Lipset and Rokkan?

The post material cleavage

One key difference between open and closed list systems is that in open list systems:

Voters can indicate not just their preferred party but also their favored candidate within that party

Using selectorate theory, we can identify three classes of states. Those with large winning coalitions and large selectorates; those with small winning coalitions and large selectorates, and those with small winning coalitions and small selectorates. Which of the three types have the strongest incentives to produce public goods?

Those with small winning coalitions and large electorates

A government that depends only on a legislative majority to exist is a parliamentary democracy

True

Dictatorships display more variation in terms of economic performance than democracies.

True

Flawed and contested elections can produce social instability, undermine democratic consolidation, reduce trust in the political system, and exacerbate ethnic and religious grievances

True

In a parliamentary democracy, the executive branch and the government are the same thing

True

It is relatively rare to see the prime minister or party leaders veto a nomination by another party leader

True

Leaders will limit their predation when the size of the winning coalition is large relative to the size of the selectorate

True

Minority government can exist only as long as the opposition chooses not to bring it down

True

Parties play an important role in recruiting and socializing the political elite

True

Party system size is shaped by the interaction between social heterogeneity and the permissiveness of electoral institutions

True

Perhaps the main strength of PR systems is that they tend to produce a more accurate translation of votes into seats

True

Retrospective voting occurs when voters look at the past performance of incumbent parties to decide how to vote in the current election

True

The central idea of the consensus vision of democracy is that policy should be determined by as many citizens (and their representatives) as possible.

True

The most common form of dictatorship is a civilian dictatorship

True

An "investiture vote" is a formal vote in the legislature to determine:

Whether a proposed government can take office