Lesson 35 of 1524
American Government and Civic Engagement
Government allocates authority. Politics is the contest over how that authority is used.
Practice this chapterA public good, such as national defense, is hard to keep from people who do not pay. A common good, such as clean water or fish in a shared lake, can be used up. A toll good is available only to those who pay, and a private good is both excludable and rival.
In a representative democracy, ordinary people do not pass every law themselves. They choose officials, and those officials are supposed to answer to the public. Engagement is the set of acts that make that answer real: learning an issue, voting, speaking, organizing, or serving.
Two theories of influence
Elite theory or pluralism, then a tradeoff
Ask who is in the room, then ask what each side gave up.
Worked example
A city bans parking near a hospital after nurses and patients complain, but the ban leaves nearby shop owners with less business. Which theory of influence fits, and what is the tradeoff?
- 1Name the groups that showed up: hospital workers and patients on one side, shop owners on the other. More than one organized interest reached the city.
- 2That pattern fits pluralism: groups compete for the attention of officials, rather than one closed elite deciding alone.
- 3The city did not give either side everything. Patients gained safer access. Shop owners lost convenient parking.
- 4The resulting rule is a tradeoff. The official choice balances competing demands instead of satisfying all of them.
Result: Pluralism, with a tradeoff between access to the hospital and access to the shops.
Why. Pluralism expects policy to come from competition among groups. A tradeoff is the visible mark of that competition: each side gets some of what it asked for, and neither gets all of it.
A republic is a kind of representative democracy. It is not the same claim as “only elites matter,” and it is not direct democracy.
Practice margin
This chapter
A fresh set from this chapter only. Choose 10 or 20. Multiple choice and fill-in, with no repeat inside the set.