Midterm Exam Guide

This is a list of concepts and frameworks with which you should be familiar for the midterm exam. You might be asked to define and/or apply any of these during the examination. You might not be directly asked about these terms, but they can help you answer some of the questions.

  1. Collective Action
    • Why and when is it needed?
    • Problems of collective action
    • Solutions to collective action problems
  2. What is politics?
  3. Characteristics of democracy
  4. Levitsky and Zibblat’s take on American democracy
    • Norms for democratic stability
    • The banality of democracy
    • Strategies of authoritarian governments (Chapter 2)
    • In a democracy, what are parties supposed to do when they lose an election?
    • Counter-majoritarian institutions (Chapter 5)
  5. Collective Action among the 13 colonies
  6. What collective action problems did the states face under the Articles of Confederation?
  7. The U.S. Constitution
    • Influences
    • American constitutional system as a product of compromise
  8. Federalism
    • How does it compare to a unitary system and a confederation?
    • Dual vs. Shared federalism in the U.S.
    • Evolution of American federalism
  9. Civil Liberties
    • Be familiar with a few of them
    • Incorporation
  10. Civil Rights
    • Reconstruction Amendments
    • Civil Rights Movement and the role of the Black Church
  11. Congress
    • Apportionment of seats to the states
    • Electoral system
    • Behavior of legislators
    • The committee system
    • Mechanisms of party control
    • The median legislator