Key Terms:
1. Affirmative action: the removal of artificial barriers to employment of women and minority groups; compensatory plans for previously disadvantaged groups, as in specific programs to recruit, hire, and promote qualified members of designated disadvantaged groups so as to eliminate the continuing effects of prior discrimination.
2. Captive agency: an agency whose personnel and decision makers are directly or indirectly influenced by outside interest groups from the very industry the agency is required to regulate or serve.
3. Clientele agency: a bureaucratic agency that serves, protects, or promotes the interests of those it was established to oversee, often at the expense of the general public rather than organized special interest groups.
4. Conscientious objection: state laws that allow doctors to refuse to perform a procedure to which they have fundamental moral objection.
5. Earmarked: funds or tax revenues from a given source that legally must be spent for a given program or service. For example, gasoline taxes must be spent on highway construction or maintenance.
6. Ecology: the study of relationship of living things to their natural environment.
7. Ecosystem: any collection of plants, animals, and nonliving things that interact with one another within their environment.
8. Externalities: positive or negative effects of one thing that entail costs to another.
9. Grassroots lobbying: a type or method of lobbying in which an interest group uses its own rank-and-file membership to send mass mailings, work phone banks, send mass e-mails, phone talk-radio shows, and walk the halls of the legislature to marshal public opinion and government policy toward its position on an issue.
10. Ideology: a comprehensive and logical set of beliefs about human nature and the role of government and how its institutions should be organized and managed.
11. Iron triangle: a type of sub government; refers to the three angles of the policy process for a particular policy area.
12. Issue networks: a temporary collection of lobbyists, lawmakers, staff members, bureaucrats, and experts who collaborate to shape a particular policy.
13. Linkage institutions: agencies, such as political parties, interest groups, and the media, that forge links between citizens and public policy makers.
14. Merit system: the selection, retention, and promotion of public employees based on competitive examinations or formal education qualifications.
15. Multiculturalism: the belief that the many cultures that make up American society ought to be maintained as distinct and that laws should be used to protect and even encourage them; the value of appreciating the richness of cultural diversity.
16. NIMBY: the acronym for not in my backyard; denotes opposition to certain government programs or facilities deemed undesirable but that are or could be located in one’s neighborhood or area; typical examples are sewage-treatment plants, solid-waste recycling plants, and prisons.
17. Partial-birth abortion: a medical procedure to terminate pregnancy during the last trimester in which doctors crush the cranium of the fetus and then induce delivery.
18. Party in government: all the people from a party who hold public office.
19. Party platform: a document drawn up by a political party at its state or national convention that establishes the party’s policies and positions on current public issues.
20. Patronage: the practice of awarding government jobs and contracts to faithful members of the political party in power.
21. Political culture: the cluster of attitudes, beliefs, ideology, and values that shape our thinking about society and government and the role of the individual within both of them, the part of the overall societal culture that determines societal attitudes toward the quality, style, and strength of its political and governmental process.
22. Political party: a group of politically active individuals who organize for the purpose of capturing government by controlling the nomination and election of officials and thereby control the operation of government and determine public policy.
23. Proposition 209: an initiative passed in California that ended affirmative action programs by banning the use of preferences in state hiring and contracting and in admissions to public colleges and universities.
24. Reverse discrimination: the perception that social programs to promote integration are racial preferences that promote the interests of minorities at the expense of members of the majority.
25. Set-aside programs: a type of affirmative action program that includes the use of quotas to award government contracts to minority business.
26. Spin-off party: a minor, or third, party that begins as a faction within a major party, such as the Bull Moose Republicans or the Dixiecrats.
27. Systems model: the concept that things are viewed as more than the sum of a collection of parts; an entity in which everything relates to everything else.
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