← Back to the Introduction to Political Science outline The Course Maker
← Introduction to Political Science outline
Week 8 · Midterm study guide

Midterm Exam — Study Guide

Introduction to Political Science Free sample edition

Coverage — what the midterm covers

The midterm is cumulative over Weeks 1–7. It opens in the Week 8 module and closes at the due time your instructor sets. There is no time limit, and you get one attempt. The questions appear one at a time, and you cannot go back once you move on.

Format: 25 questions, and every question counts the same. Twenty ask you to pick one option, three ask you to pick every option that applies, and two ask you to judge a statement as true or false. Any fragment or scenario a question asks you to read is quoted or described in the question, and no question needs a chart, a table, or a calculator.

What is in scope, with the number of midterm questions on each course objective:

Midterm coverage by course objective: the weeks its questions come from, its main skills, and its number of questions out of 25
Course objective Weeks its questions come from Main skills Questions
The subfields, the toolkit, and the empirical/normative distinction 1, 2, and 4 The five subfields as lenses; the toolkit; empirical, empirical-leaning, and normative claims; smuggling and shrugging; taking an argument apart 7
Power, authority, legitimacy, and the state 2, 3, and 6 The three ideas kept apart; Weber's three types; the state's four criteria; state, nation, and government; sovereignty; Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau 6
The ideologies and normative theory 3, 4, and 5 Values, fears, argues; the liberal wings and the U.S.-usage trap; the socialist family; the smaller ideologies; justice, liberty, and equality; Rawls and Nozick; honest attribution 7
Regime types, constitutions, and the rule of law 5 and 7 Direct and representative; electoral and liberal; hybrid, authoritarian, and totalitarian; the third wave; fused and separate powers 3
Legislatures and executives 7 A legislature's jobs; head of state and head of government; the removal test; parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential designs 2

The toolkit objective and the ideologies objective carry the most questions, 7 each, so put the most review time on Weeks 1, 3, and 4. Power, authority, legitimacy, and the state come next with 6, mostly from Week 2. Weeks 5 to 7 carry fewer questions, and Week 6 has only one of its own, yet its ideas return inside the Week 7 design questions. Week 8's three-layer read is not scored on its own, and practicing it is still good review, because it runs on the Week 1 distinction the midterm checks directly.

Topic-by-topic review

Each topic gives the key idea in plain words, the course's own definitions, a course example, and the mistakes students make most often with their cures. The deeper review for every topic is that week's chapter, lecture page, and slide deck.

Week 1 — What is political science?

  • Key idea: politics happens wherever a group has to reach one binding decision despite scarcity and disagreement, and political science studies it with questions and evidence anyone can check.
  • Definitions: politics is collective, binding decision-making wherever scarcity and disagreement meet, whether in a nation, a city, a campus, or a workplace. Political science is the systematic study of politics, which starts from a question and checks its answers against rules of evidence that anyone can apply. Two shorthand accounts are credited by author, year, and title: Lasswell (1936), Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, and Easton (1953), The Political System, whose phrase is the "authoritative allocation of values". Aristotle's Politics calls the human being a political animal.
  • The five subfields, as lenses on one event: political theory and philosophy asks what ought to be; comparative politics studies systems inside countries and compares them; international relations studies politics between states; American government studies one country in depth as a single case; political methodology supplies the tools for weighing evidence.
  • The toolkit: concept application (use a defined idea to sort a case); argument analysis (take an argument apart into its claim, its premises, and the unstated premise it needs); evidence evaluation (what a source shows, what it does not, and whether a pattern is a correlation or a cause); and the comparative method (place cases side by side on defined dimensions).
  • The distinction that runs the course: an empirical claim is about what is, or why something happens; it can be checked against evidence and can turn out to be false. A normative claim is about what ought to be; it is defended from values and premises and can be argued well or badly. An empirical-leaning claim reads mainly as a statement about what is, though it sits inside a normative argument.
  • Two failure modes: smuggling slips an ought into a sentence presented as plain fact. Shrugging treats a value question as mere opinion, as if reasons made no difference.
  • Course example: the Declaration (1776), second paragraph. Its four sorted claims come out 3 normative and 1 empirical-leaning, so 3 + 1 = 4. "all men are created equal" is normative, and "Governments are instituted among Men" is empirical-leaning. The consent-of-the-governed standard is normative, and "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it" is the normative conclusion.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) "political science is having opinions about politics." Cure: it starts from a question and rules of evidence anyone can check. (2) "empirical means true, normative means opinion." Cure: empirical means checkable, and a checkable claim can be false; normative claims are argued well or badly. (3) sorting by topic. Cure: "the Senate has 100 members" and "the Senate ought to be proportional to population" share a topic and differ in kind. (4) the Declaration's trio written as "life, liberty, and property." Cure: that is Locke's trio; the pinned text reads "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

Week 2 — Power, authority, legitimacy, and the state

  • Key idea: power makes people comply; authority is power people recognize as rightful; legitimacy is the wider belief that the whole system deserves obedience.
  • Definitions: power is the capacity to make another actor comply, to do what it otherwise would not, with force included among the means. Authority is power that the people subject to it recognize as rightful, a right to command usually attached to an office or a rule. Legitimacy is the broad, widely shared belief that a ruler or a whole system has a right to rule and deserves obedience. In the armed-robber case the robber has power and neither of the other two, so 1 of the 3 ideas is present.
  • Weber's three types (1919), taught as ideal types that real systems blend: traditional authority rests on custom and long practice; charismatic authority rests on devotion to a leader seen as extraordinary, so it attaches to the person; legal-rational authority rests on rules and offices, so people obey the position and the procedure.
  • The state and its neighbors: a state is identified in this course by four criteria: territory, population, government, and sovereignty. A nation is a people who see themselves as sharing an identity, with or without a state. A government is the office-holders of the moment; it can fall while the state persists. Sovereignty is a claim to final authority, a claim about the right to decide and not a measure of strength. Internal sovereignty is supreme authority at home; external sovereignty is independence from outside control. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) is the discipline's conventional marker for the modern state system, and historians treat it as a simplification.
  • Three answers to "why obey?": Hobbes (1651), Leviathan, Chapter XIII, pictures life without a common power as "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short", in the pinned edition's 1651 spelling. Hobbes fears chaos, so he favors a strong sovereign. Locke (1689), Second Treatise of Government, §95, holds that no one can be "subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent". Locke fears tyranny, so he favors limited government held in trust for the people. Rousseau (1762), The Social Contract, opens with "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." He locates sovereignty in the people themselves.
  • Course example: the dates. 1689 − 1651 = 38 years from Leviathan to the Second Treatise, and 1762 − 1689 = 73 years from the Second Treatise to The Social Contract.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) power, authority, and legitimacy used as synonyms. Cure: ask who complies, who recognizes a right, and who believes the system deserves obedience. (2) "legitimate means elected." Cure: traditional and charismatic authority can be fully legitimate with no election. (3) state, nation, and government blurred. Cure: a government changes at an election; the state persists; a nation may lack a state. (4) sovereignty read as "being powerful." Cure: it is a claim to decide. (5) Hobbes and Locke swapped. Cure: Hobbes fears chaos, Locke fears tyranny.

Week 3 — Political ideologies

  • Key idea: an ideology is described, never ranked: you ask what it values, what it fears, and how it argues.
  • Definitions: an ideology is a coherent set of ideas about how society should work and who should hold power. It is normative at its core and rests on empirical claims about human nature and how economies behave. A strawman is a weakened version of a position; describing an ideology that way is a factual error, not a stance.
  • Liberalism: the broad tradition built on individual rights, holding that government is legitimate insofar as it protects them. Classical liberalism joins those rights to a limited government and a market economy. Modern liberalism keeps the core but holds that real freedom can require an active state. The U.S.-usage trap: "liberal" in everyday American speech means left-of-center, while in theory a free-market, limited-government view is often classical liberal.
  • Conservatism values established institutions and tradition and favors gradual, tested change, on the Burkean argument that institutions hold experience no single generation could work out alone.
  • The socialist family: socialism favors collective or social ownership or control of major economic resources. Communism is its revolutionary, Marxist branch, aiming at a classless society by abolishing private ownership of the means of production. Social democracy is its electoral branch, pursuing a welfare state within a market economy by winning elections. Totalitarianism is a regime type, not a member of this family.
  • The smaller families, by what adherents hold: anarchism (the state is unnecessary or harmful); fascism (an ultranationalist cult of the state and a single leader, hostile to parliamentary democracy and pluralism; distinct from conservatism); nationalism (a nation should shape political organization, ideally through a state of its own), kept apart from patriotism (attachment to one's country without that further claim); environmentalism (protecting the natural environment should shape decisions).
  • The left–right spectrum captures real, measurable correlations between views, and it flattens a separate economic dimension and social dimension and shifts meaning across countries and eras.
  • Course example: the paired excerpts. Marx and Engels (1848), Manifesto of the Communist Party, open Part I with "The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.", an empirical claim about history. (The pinned edition reads "societies" where others read "society".) Burke (1790), Reflections on the Revolution in France: "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation." The works are 1848 − 1790 = 58 years apart, and neither gets a verdict.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) conservatism conflated with fascism. Cure: distinct ideologies with distinct commitments. (2) socialism, communism, and totalitarianism treated as one. Cure: an economic commitment, a Marxist branch, and a regime type. (3) U.S. party talk read as theory. Cure: ask which sense of "liberal" is meant. (4) nationalism and patriotism as synonyms. Cure: only nationalism claims the nation should shape the state. (5) "defining an ideology is opinion." Cure: a definition can be factually wrong.

Week 4 — Political theory and philosophy

  • Key idea: normative theory argues about what each person is due, and its words have exact meanings.
  • Definitions: justice is giving each person their due; theories disagree about what each person is due and why. Berlin (1958), "Two Concepts of Liberty": negative liberty is freedom from interference; positive liberty is the real capacity to act on your own choices. Equality of opportunity is a fair start; equality of outcome is results ending up close together; moral equality, the premise that every person counts the same, underlies both. A negative right asks others to hold back; a positive right asks someone to provide. The common good is invoked by every tradition and filled in differently by each.
  • Mill's harm principle, On Liberty (1859), Chapter I, in the two pinned sentences: "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others" and "His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." It limits power, rules out paternalism, and says harm, not offense. A hard case is one the principle does not settle by itself.
  • Rawls and Nozick, in words: Rawls (1971), A Theory of Justice, has people choose principles in the original position behind a veil of ignorance; the difference principle allows inequalities only when they are attached to positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity and work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. Nozick (1974), Anarchy, State, and Utopia: entitlement theory holds a distribution fair if each holding came about through justice in acquisition or justice in transfer, with rectification of past injustice; the most extensive state he can defend is a minimal state.
  • Analyzing a normative argument: find the claim, label each premise empirical or normative, and name the unstated assumption. Naming an assumption does not refute the argument.
  • Course example: the four harm-principle cases. The helmet case is ruled out, drunk driving is permitted, the offensive book is ruled out, and the outbreak is a hard case: 1 permitted + 2 ruled out + 1 hard case = 4.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) the harm principle read as licensing the state to stop self-harm. Cure: it rules paternalism out. (2) "harm" widened to "offense." Cure: offense is not in either sentence. (3) negative and positive liberty blurred. Cure: interference removed versus capacity supplied. (4) Rawls and Nozick swapped. Cure: Rawls has the veil; Nozick has the minimal state. (5) opportunity and outcome used interchangeably. Cure: a fair start versus close results.

Week 5 — Forms of government and regime types

  • Key idea: ask several separate questions of a regime, and never let one answer the others.
  • Definitions: democracy is rule by the people, from the Greek dēmos (the people) and kratos (rule). Direct democracy has citizens vote on laws themselves; representative democracy has them elect those who do, and a referendum or initiative is a direct tool inside a representative system. Electoral democracy is the minimal definition: free, fair, competitive elections that incumbents can lose. Liberal democracy adds protected rights, a free press, an independent judiciary, and the rule of law. A hybrid regime holds real elections on a tilted field.
  • Authoritarian versus totalitarian, a difference of scope: authoritarianism concentrates political power and leaves non-political life largely alone, Linz's limited pluralism. Totalitarianism adds the attempt to remake society itself around an official ideology, with mass mobilization; Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is the classic reference.
  • Two more separate questions: a republic is a state whose head of state is not a hereditary monarch; whether a republic is democratic is a separate question. Huntington's third wave, from The Third Wave (1991), is his periodization beginning around 1974, not a law; 1991 − 1974 = 17 years. Democratic backsliding is gradual, cumulative, and done from inside, while a coup is sudden and openly illegal.
  • Course example: the attribution lesson. Churchill's sentence in the House of Commons in 1947, Hansard column 207, opens with "it has been said". Those four words mark the line as repeated, not coined. Pericles' line that Athens "favours the many instead of the few" (Crawley translation, 1874) is persuasion from a city whose citizen body excluded women, enslaved people, and resident foreigners.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) "democracy means elections." Cure: that is the minimal definition. (2) "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" as two words for "bad." Cure: ask about scope, not harshness. (3) direct and representative as rival regimes. Cure: they are mechanisms. (4) backsliding read as a coup. Cure: tempo and legality. (5) Churchill credited with coining the line. Cure: read his own four words.

Week 6 — Constitutions, constitutionalism, and the rule of law

  • Key idea: having a rulebook and the rulebook binding the rulers are two different facts.
  • Definitions: a constitution is the fundamental set of rules for how a political system is organized. Constitutionalism is the practice of those rules actually binding the people who rule. A written (codified) constitution gathers the rules in one supreme document, as the U.S. model does. An unwritten (uncodified) constitution spreads them across statutes, judicial decisions, and conventions, as the U.K. model does, under parliamentary sovereignty. Entrenchment makes some rules harder to change than ordinary law.
  • The rule of law has five elements: generality, publicity, stability, equal application, and independent enforcement. Rule by law is law used as a tool the rulers turn on everyone else.
  • Two divisions: separation of powers is horizontal, among branches; federalism is vertical, among levels. Checks and balances are the tools that let each branch resist the others.
  • The Federalist: 85 essays under the pen name Publius. No. 10 (1787) defines a faction, which can be a majority. No. 51 (1788): "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." and "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." The second is a normative design prescription resting on an empirical-leaning assumption that officeholders are ambitious. The editors of Madison's papers call the old authorship dispute over No. 51 settled in Madison's favor.
  • Course example: Article V's ratification threshold. The Senate's 100 members, two per State, give 100 ÷ 2 = 50 States. Three fourths of 50 is 50 × 3 ÷ 4 = 37.5, and a State cannot ratify by half, so an amendment needs 38 States. If 13 refuse, at most 50 − 13 = 37 can ratify, so 13 States can block.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) "having a constitution means limited government." Cure: ask whether the rules bind. (2) "unwritten means no real rules." Cure: unwritten does not mean unconstrained, and written does not mean self-enforcing. (3) separation of powers and federalism as one division. Cure: horizontal versus vertical. (4) "rule of law means there are laws." Cure: check all five elements. (5) the No. 51 header read as a live dispute. Cure: the editors call it settled for Madison.

Week 7 — Legislatures and executives

  • Key idea: you name an executive design by how a failing government is removed, not by the title of anyone in it.
  • Definitions: a legislature represents, legislates, and oversees. A unicameral legislature has one chamber; a bicameral one has two. The head of state represents the state as a whole; the head of government runs the government day to day.
  • The three designs: in a parliamentary system the prime minister and cabinet come out of the legislature, have no fixed term, and govern while they keep the legislature's confidence; Bagehot (1867), The English Constitution, calls this fusion of powers the "efficient secret". In a presidential system the chief executive is elected separately for a fixed term and removed only by impeachment, under Article II, Section 4, for "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors". In a semi-presidential system an elected president with real powers works beside a prime minister answerable to the legislature; when the two come from opposing camps, that is cohabitation.
  • The removal test: how would a failing government be removed: by a vote of no confidence, by impeachment, or by both?
  • More terms: a coalition government is a normal mode when no party holds a majority. Linz's worries about presidentialism (1990): the rigid fixed term, dual democratic legitimacy, and winner-take-all stakes; the replies point to identifiability and checks. No verdict.
  • Course example: the IPU count. Of 188 national parliaments, 81 are bicameral and 107 unicameral, as the Inter-Parliamentary Union counts them: 81 + 107 = 188. Each bicameral parliament has two chambers, so 81 × 2 = 162, and 162 + 107 = 269 chambers in all. The bicameral share is 81 ÷ 188 × 100 ≈ 43.1 percent, a large minority, not most.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) "a country with a president is presidential." Cure: Germany, India, Israel, and Italy have presidents and are parliamentary. (2) "parliamentary systems do not elect the executive." Cure: they do, one step removed. (3) a no-confidence vote treated as impeachment. Cure: lost support versus serious wrongdoing. (4) "semi-presidential means a 50/50 split." Cure: it pairs an elected president with real powers and a cabinet answerable to the legislature. (5) coalitions read as dysfunction. Cure: they are a normal way to govern.

Week 8's new habit (not scored on its own)

The three-layer read sorts every claim about an institution onto one of three layers. The design layer is what the rules say, checkable against the pinned text. The practice layer is what actually happens, checkable against evidence such as a case, a count, or an index. The verdict layer is what ought to happen, argued from values. Design and practice are empirical; the verdict is normative. Name the layer before you say anything else.

Representative practice

These are fresh variants, not the midterm's questions. Work each worked example yourself first, then compare your steps. Every scenario below is illustrative, invented for this guide, with no real country, person, or figure in it beyond the course's pinned values, and every number is computed and checked in advance.

Worked example — four claims about street trees, sorted by kind (Week 1)

A city council argues about planting street trees (an illustrative debate). Sort each sentence by kind, not by topic.

  1. "The city planted street trees along three avenues last year." Empirical: checkable against the city's records.
  2. "Summer afternoons on those avenues got cooler after the trees went in." Empirical: checkable, and it could be false. Even if it holds, it is a pattern in time, a correlation, not proof that the trees caused the change.
  3. "The city ought to plant trees in every neighborhood, not only the wealthier ones." Normative: a claim about what ought to be, argued from values.
  4. "The temperature readings prove the city has to plant more trees." Normative, smuggled: "has to plant" is an ought presented as something the readings showed.

Tally: 2 empirical + 2 normative = 4 claims, all on one topic.

Now run the same topic through the five subfields, as lenses rather than walls:

  • Political theory and philosophy: do residents of every neighborhood have an equal claim to shade, and what would make a planting plan fair?
  • Comparative politics: how do cities in two different countries decide where public trees go?
  • International relations: do agreements between states on climate goals push their cities toward planting?
  • American government: how does one U.S. state's legislature fund city parks and streets?
  • Political methodology: how would you measure afternoon heat the same way before and after, so the comparison is fair?

Why it matters: one topic held four claims of two kinds and five different questions, and the kind, not the topic, decides how you check a claim.

Worked example — a league, a founder, and a family farm (Week 2)

Authority without full legitimacy (illustrative). A youth soccer league appoints referees under its written rules, and players stop when the whistle blows because the rules give the referee's office the right to call fouls. That is authority: power recognized as rightful. Yet many families believe the league itself is run unfairly. So the referee holds authority within a system whose legitimacy is in doubt, and the two ideas come apart.

Weber's three types in three scenes (illustrative):

  • A startup's staff follow its founder because they see her as extraordinary, and no rule or office explains their loyalty: charismatic authority, attached to the person.
  • On a family farm, the eldest child takes over the work because it has always been done that way: traditional authority, resting on custom.
  • Drivers pull over for a highway patrol officer they have never met, because the law gives that uniform the right to stop them: legal-rational authority, attached to the office.
  • Tally: 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 scenes, one of each ideal type. Real systems blend them, so a real case may show more than one.

A nation without a state (illustrative). Speakers of one language, with shared traditions and memories, live on both sides of a border between two states, and many of them see themselves as one people. They are a nation; they have no state of their own.

Why it matters: each word names a different thing, and the case only sorts once you ask the right question of it.

Worked example — four platform statements, described without ranking (Week 3)

Four illustrative statements, written for this guide. Ask of each what it values, what it fears, and how it argues, then name the family.

  1. "Rivers and forests must come before short-term growth, because the economy depends on a living planet." Environmentalism. It values the natural world, fears damage that cannot be undone, and argues from an empirical premise (the economy depends on nature) to a normative conclusion.
  2. "Keep the town's century-old charter, and amend it piece by piece only after each change has proved itself." Conservatism. It values established institutions and fears losing the experience they carry, and it argues for gradual, tested change.
  3. "The state should guarantee job training and health care, since rights mean little without the means to use them." Modern liberalism. It keeps the rights core and argues that real freedom can need an active state.
  4. "Workers should take over the factories by revolution and end private ownership of them." Communism, the revolutionary branch of the socialist family.

Tally by family: 1 environmentalist + 1 conservative + 1 liberal + 1 socialist family = 4 statements. By kind: all 4 conclusions are normative, and each rests on at least one empirical claim.

Why it matters: describing a position in words its adherents would accept is a skill the midterm checks, and ranking it is not part of the job.

Worked example — four rules through the harm principle, and an argument taken apart (Week 4)

Four illustrative rules. Ask of each: is the reason to prevent harm to others, or is it the person's own good, or offense?

  • A ban on adults joining extreme fasting challenges, for no reason but their own health. The only reason is the person's own good. Ruled out.
  • A fine on a factory that dumps waste into a river people drink from. The waste harms others. Permitted.
  • A ban on a street mural that some neighbors find ugly. Disliking it is offense, not harm. Ruled out.
  • A limit on late-night amplified music in an apartment block. Lost sleep might count as harm, or the complaint might be offense; where one turns into the other, and who decides, is not settled by the two sentences. Hard case.
  • Tally: 1 permitted + 2 ruled out + 1 hard case = 4 rules.

Liberty and equality (illustrative): a town repeals its ban on street musicians, so negative liberty grows, because an interference is gone. The same town starts lending instruments for free, so positive liberty grows, because residents gain the real capacity to play. A workers' cooperative splits its yearly surplus equally among members, whatever hours each worked: equality of outcome.

An argument taken apart (illustrative). Thesis: a campus library should stay open all night.

  • Premise 1, empirical: many students work daytime jobs.
  • Premise 2, empirical and contested: students with overnight access study more. It needs evidence.
  • Premise 3, normative: students who work deserve the same study time as anyone else.
  • Tally: 2 empirical + 1 normative = 3 premises.
  • Unstated assumption: the cost of overnight staff is worth it. Naming it does not refute the argument; it tells you what a critic would press on.

Why it matters: the harm principle sorts reasons, not outcomes, and an argument is checked one labelled premise at a time.

Worked example — four illustrative regimes, four separate questions (Week 5)

Four invented, unnamed regimes:

  1. An island town where every adult citizen meets once a year to vote on the budget directly. Mechanism: direct democracy.
  2. A country whose elections are free and competitive, and whose governing party lost the last one, but whose government shuts down newspapers that criticize ministers and ignores court rulings. It meets the electoral floor and lacks the liberal protections: electoral democracy.
  3. A single-party state with no competitive elections, where churches, firms, and sports clubs are left alone as long as they stay out of politics. Power is concentrated and its reach is limited: authoritarian, with limited pluralism.
  4. A kingdom with a hereditary monarch, a freely elected parliament, protected rights, a free press, and independent courts. Liberal democracy, and not a republic.

Tally: 1 direct democracy + 1 electoral democracy + 1 authoritarian regime + 1 liberal democracy = 4 regimes, of which 3 are democracies.

Why it matters: the mechanism, the liberal protections, the scope of power, and the monarchy question are four different questions, and regime 4 shows that "not a republic" says nothing about "not a democracy".

Worked example — a rulebook that does not bind everyone (Week 6)

The rule-of-law check on an illustrative city's parking rules:

  • Generality: the rules are written for every driver. Met.
  • Publicity: each rule is posted online before it takes effect. Met.
  • Stability: the rules have not changed in years. Met.
  • Equal application: council members' cars are exempt. Failed.
  • Independent enforcement: the council can dismiss the parking judge at will. Failed.
  • Tally: 3 met + 2 failed = 5 elements. The rules bind residents and not the council, and that gap is where rule by law begins.

Entrenchment in an illustrative federation. A made-up federation has 30 provinces, and an amendment needs ratification by two thirds of them.

  • Two thirds of 30 is 30 × 2 ÷ 3 = 20 provinces.
  • If 11 provinces refuse, at most 30 − 11 = 19 can ratify, which falls short of 20. So 11 provinces can block an amendment.
  • If only 10 refuse, 30 − 10 = 20 can still ratify, which is enough.

Separation or federalism (illustrative)? A country divides power between a national government and regional governments, each with powers of its own. That is a vertical division: federalism.

Why it matters: a written rule tells you the design layer, and only the practice layer tells you whether it binds.

Worked example — the removal test on two made-up constitutions (Week 7)

  • Design 1 (illustrative): voters elect a chief executive in a separate election for a fixed six-year term, and the legislature can remove that person only by impeachment for serious crimes. Removal test: impeachment. Presidential.
  • Design 2 (illustrative): voters elect a president who leads foreign policy and appoints a premier. The premier's cabinet falls if a majority of the 150-member assembly votes no confidence: 150 ÷ 2 = 75, and 75 + 1 = 76 votes. The president does not fall to that vote. Semi-presidential.
  • A coalition (illustrative): in a third country, three parties share the cabinet because none holds a majority, and when the coalition loses a confidence vote a new cabinet forms without an election. Removal by lost confidence: parliamentary, and the coalition is a normal mode, not a breakdown.
  • A legislature at work (illustrative): a committee summons the transport minister to explain cost overruns. That is oversight, one of the three things a legislature does.

Why it matters: titles mislead, and the removal test does not.

Worked example — the three-layer read on a city council (Week 8)

Three illustrative claims about one city council:

  • "The city charter gives the council nine seats, one per district." Design layer, empirical, checked against the charter.
  • "Over the past year, most council votes passed with every member in favor." Practice layer, empirical, checked against the voting record.
  • "The council ought to add two citywide seats." Verdict layer, normative, argued from values.
  • Tally: 1 design + 1 practice + 1 verdict = 3 claims, and 1 + 1 = 2 of them are empirical.

Why it matters: naming the layer first tells you what kind of support a claim needs before you argue about it.

Self-check questions

Try each one, then read the check and the one-line why.

  1. A scholar compares ten countries to see why some have two-chamber legislatures and others one. Which subfield is this? Check: comparative politics. Why: it studies systems inside countries and compares them.
  2. "The new curfew ought to be repealed." What kind of claim is this? Check: normative. Why: it says what ought to happen, and values decide it.
  3. A movement's followers obey its leader because they see her as extraordinary, and when she retires the movement struggles to pick a successor. Which of Weber's types? Check: charismatic authority. Why: it attaches to the person, so it does not pass to an office-holder.
  4. How many years separate Leviathan from The Social Contract? Check: 1762 − 1651 = 111 years. Why: Hobbes wrote in 1651 and Rousseau in 1762.
  5. A movement holds that the state is unnecessary and that neighbors can run schools and clinics through voluntary cooperation. Which ideology? Check: anarchism. Why: it treats the state, as a coercive authority, as unnecessary or harmful.
  6. A theorist holds that a distribution is fair whenever every holding came from fair acquisition or fair transfer. Whose theory? Check: Nozick's entitlement theory. Why: the test is the history of each holding, not the pattern of the whole.
  7. An illustrative country has no single supreme document, yet its officials treat long-standing conventions as binding. Is it unconstrained? Check: no. Why: unwritten does not mean unconstrained; the rules bind in practice.
  8. A president and a prime minister from opposing camps share power. What is this called, and in which design? Check: cohabitation, in a semi-presidential system. Why: only that design pairs an elected president with real powers and a prime minister answerable to the legislature.
  9. "Our upper chamber ought to be abolished." Which layer? Check: the verdict layer. Why: it says what ought to happen, so it is normative.
  10. "Most national parliaments are unicameral." What kind of claim is it, and does it hold? Check: empirical, and it holds: 107 of 188 are unicameral, as the Inter-Parliamentary Union counts them. Why: a count can be checked, and 107 is more than half of 188.

Check yourself — choose one. Write two or three sentences to a friend.

  • (a) Explain why the title "president" does not tell you which executive design a country has.
  • (b) Explain why sorting a claim by its topic instead of its kind leads you astray.

Either one rehearses an explain-why skill the midterm checks.

Watch before the exam

These seven videos come from the course's vetted Week 8 pool, and every one has captions. Use them to review and to connect weeks, not to learn anything new.

Study plan

A short countdown. Count back from the day you plan to sit the midterm.

  • Two weeks out: as you finish Week 6, start a one-page list of the course's paired ideas: empirical and normative, power and authority, state and nation, Hobbes and Locke, socialism and social democracy, harm and offense, negative and positive liberty, Rawls and Nozick. Add fused and separate powers when Week 7 arrives.
  • One week out: as you finish Week 7, reread the topic reviews above for Weeks 1 to 3, the weeks furthest back.
  • At the start of Week 8: take the practice exam once, cold and closed-note. Note which objectives cost you the most. Remember that it leans less on Objectives 1 and 2 than the midterm does.
  • Three or four days before you sit it: reread the topic reviews for your two weakest objectives, and redo the matching worked examples from scratch without looking.
  • Two days before: run the paired exam-prep tutorial (the copy-and-paste chatbot tutor, or its no-AI route) for active recall. Tell it which areas the practice exam exposed.
  • The day before: retake the practice exam, explain every miss out loud, and work the self-check questions above.
  • Right before: skim the "predictable mistakes → cures" lines for all seven weeks. Then stop studying.

This guide is for review. The exam-prep tutorial and the practice exam are where you rehearse. Pulling ideas back out of memory, not rereading, is what makes them stick.

Exam format

Every one of the 25 questions counts the same, and the midterm checks your own understanding without AI. The questions come one at a time, and there is no going back, so settle each one before you move on.

Test-taking strategies for this material:

  • Name the pair before you choose. Most questions turn on two neighboring ideas, such as power and authority, harm and offense, or a constitution and constitutionalism. Say which pair is in play first.
  • Sort by kind, not topic. Before you label a claim, ask whether it says what is or what ought to be.
  • Check every quoted fragment and every credit. A fragment is either word for word or wrong, and every idea belongs to one thinker and one year.
  • Run the removal test before you name a design. A title tells you little; how a failing government falls tells you a lot.
  • On a contested question, find what the position claims. The course never keys a question on which side is right.
  • For a "pick every option that applies" question, judge each statement on its own, as if it were a true-or-false question.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com