Midterm Examples

Part I. Multiple-Choice Question

  1. When we talk about dictatorships and democracies, we are categorizing ______.

    A. governments

    B. regimes

    C. states

  2. In the 1960s, a new group of scholars began studying the link between culture and democracy. Specifically, Almond and Verba used surveys to get information about how individuals in different countries felt about political institutions, actors, and processes. They claimed that the type of culture that is most compatible with democracy is

    A. parochial culture.

    B. subject culture.

    C. participant culture.

    D. American culture.

  3. According to the variant of modernization theory presented in Chapter 6, why did England develop a limited form of government in early modern Europe, whereas France developed an absolutist and autocratic form of government?

    A. England did not have a revolution, whereas France did.

    B. The English king relied on his citizens more for revenue than the French king did.

    C. The French king was involved in more wars than the English king.

    D. The English king had to negotiate with a new type of economic elite (who possessed mobile assets), and the French king did not.

Part II. True/False Questions

  1. Natural resources tend to help dictators stay in power because oil revenue increases demands for accountability and representation.

    A. True

    B. False

  2. Modernization theory predicts that the likelihood of a transition to democracy decreases with income, whereas the survival story predicts that transitions to dictatorship become more likely with income.

    A. True

    B. False

Part III. Fill-In-The-Blank Questions

  1. ______ is the process by which abstract theoretical concepts are translated into concrete and observable measures or indicators.

  2. A ______ allows the analyst to use observation to distinguish between two or more competing explanations of the same phenomenon.

Part IV. Short-Answer Question

Describe the sub-types of political regimes that Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (2010) present and explain how to classify them in a very simplified manner.