Molly McShane

AP Government Review
Chapter 1
Government – The institutions through which public policies are made for a society Congress, the President, the courts, and federal administrative agencies (the bureaucracy)

Functions National Governments worldwide perform: Maintain a national defense, provide public goods and services, preserve order, socialize the young, and collect taxes
1. Protects national sovereignty usually through an armed forces
2. Highways, schools, hospitals, libraries…. Collective goods- goods and services, such as air and clean water that by their nature cannot be denied to anyone
3. Some means of maintain order (National Guard)
4. Teach children about national pride and politics
5. Money that pays for the goods and services the government provides

Politics – the process determining the leaders we select and the policies they pursue. Politics produces authoritative decisions about public issues

Political Participation – all the activities by which citizens attempt to influence the selection of political leaders and the policies they pursue. Voting is the most common form of political participation in a democracy. Other means include contracting public officials, protest, and civil disobedience. -political participation is typically judged on voter turnout -America has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the world affecting who holds the political power -most individuals and groups get involved in politics because they know that public policy choices the government makes affects them in significant ways

Single-issue groups – groups that have a narrow interest on which their members tend to take an uncompromising stance (people who vote solely based on a party’s stance on abortion)

Policymaking system – the process by which policy comes into being and evolves. People’s interests, problems, and concerns create political issues for government policymakers. These issues shape policy, which in turn impacts the people, generating more interests, problems, and concerns

People Shape Policy: people’s concerns enter the linkage
Institutions of the policy making system. -interest groups – organized groups of people with common interest

Linkage institutions – the political channels
Through which people’s concerns become political issues on the policy agenda. In the
US, linkage institutions include elections, political parties, interest groups and the media.

Parties and interest groups strive to ensure that their members’ concerns receive political attention. Media investigate social problems and inform people about them. Elections provide citizens to make their opinions heard.

Policy agenda – the issues that attract the serious attention of public officials and other people involved in politics at a point in time. -a government’s policy agenda changes regularly -bad news typically draws the attention

Political issue – an issue that arises when people disagree about a problem and how to fix it

Policymaking institutions – the branches of government charged with taking action on political issues. The US Constitution established three policymaking institutions-Congress, the presidency, and the courts. Today, the power of the bureaucracy is so great that most political scientists consider it a fourth policymaking institution. -very few policies are made by a single policy making system

Public policy – a choice that a government makes in response to a political issue. A policy is a course of action taken with regard to some problem. -public policies are of various types, depending in part on which policymaking institution they originated with -Types: statute, presidential action, court decision, budgetary choice, and regulation

Policy impacts – the effects a policy has on people and problems. Impacts are analyzed to see how well a policy has met its goal and at what cost.

Democracy in America
Democracy – a system of selecting policymakers and