PSCI 1014 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Direct Democracy
26 Aug 2016
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Document Summary
A puzzle: americans prefer lower taxes and balanced budgets. Americans generally prefer cutting spending than raising taxes: americans want support programs that create deficits. Medicare, social security: how can this contradiction be explained. Framework for understanding: people and society face collective dilemmas and can have conflicting interests. Individuals and groups generally have different interests: political institutions matter. What is politics: the process of making collective decisions about resource allocation. How people get involved and how they influence it : involves creating and enforcing societal rules. A way to facilitate a decision: given competing interests, politics is often conflictual, reaching a collective decision is difficult. U. s. a has 320 million people, all with different interests. Forceful decision: the type of institution through which a collective dilemma is resolved affects the outcome. Vote vs. executive order: government can help us solve these dilemmas. Types of collective dilemma problems: collective action problems.
