Week 13 — Quiz (auto-graded) · Comparative Politics

Course: Introduction to Political Science (POLS 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Halloran
Objectives tested: Objective 7 — the comparative method; state capacity vs. regime type; explanations of democratization; reading a governance index.
Points: 10 (1 each) · Assignment group: Quizzes (10% of grade) · Due: end of Module 13.

This is the human-readable quiz with its vetted answer key and feedback. The import-ready Classic QTI is in F-quiz-week-13-qti.xml (generated by the shared validated script — parses with 10 items, every single-answer item exactly one correct). Fact-and-source-accuracy gate — PASS: the Przeworski & Teune (1970) most-similar/most-different attribution, the Lijphart (1971, American Political Science Review 65: 682–93) "many variables, small N" attribution, Lipset's (1959) modernization-theory attribution, Acemoglu & Robinson's (2012, Why Nations Fail) institutionalist attribution, and the general methodology of Freedom House's Freedom in the World (25 indicators, 0–100 aggregate, Free/Partly Free/Not Free bands) were each verified against the record. No item on this quiz asserts a dated, changeable index figure — quiz items test durable concepts and confusions, not a number that updates annually (that live-verified figure appears, dated, in the Workshop instead). The Canvas placement block is at the bottom of this file.

Blueprint

No trick questions; distractors target the Week 13 misconceptions named in the lecture outline (most-similar vs. most-different swapped; correlation treated as proven causation; state capacity conflated with regime type; index scores treated as raw facts; the three-plus explanations of democratization confused with one another).

Questions, key, and feedback

Q1 (MC). A researcher compares Canada and Australia — both wealthy, Westminster-derived, English-speaking democracies — to isolate why their party systems differ. Which comparative design is this?
- A. Most-different systems design
- B. Most-similar systems design ✅
- C. A large-N statistical design
- D. A single-case study design
Feedback: Picking cases that resemble each other in most respects — history, region, wealth — so a difference in outcome can be traced to what actually differs is most-similar systems design (Przeworski & Teune, 1970).

Q2 (MC). A researcher instead compares several very different countries (different regions, religions, colonial histories) that all show the SAME outcome — a resource-dependent economy failing to democratize — looking for the one shared factor. Which design is this?
- A. Most-similar systems design
- B. Most-different systems design ✅
- C. An experimental design
- D. A longitudinal design only
Feedback: Picking cases that differ in almost everything but share one outcome, hunting for the shared factor, is most-different systems design. (A is the reverse logic — the classic swap to watch for.)

Q3 (MC). Political scientist Arend Lijphart (1971) named a core difficulty facing comparative politics: with only about 195 countries in the world but dozens of variables of interest, researchers face the problem of
- A. "many variables, small N" — too few cases to isolate which factor explains an outcome ✅
- B. too much data and not enough computing power
- C. an inability to define democracy at all
- D. the impossibility of studying any country quantitatively
Feedback: Lijphart's 1971 American Political Science Review article named the "many variables, small N" problem — with so few cases and so many candidate explanations, a compelling-looking pattern can still be one of several equally plausible stories.

Q4 (MC). Seymour Martin Lipset's 1959 modernization hypothesis claims that:
- A. Democracies always cause economic growth
- B. Wealthier, more economically developed countries are more likely to become and remain democratic ✅
- C. Only countries with a shared religion can democratize
- D. Economic development guarantees democratization within one generation
Feedback: Lipset documented a correlation: greater economic development is associated with a higher likelihood of democratization and democratic stability. (D overstates it as a guarantee — the theory claims a statistical tendency, not a certainty.)

Q5 (MC). Lipset's finding that wealth and democracy correlate across countries is, on its own, best described as:
- A. Proof that wealth causes democracy
- B. Proof that democracy causes wealth
- C. A documented correlation — which does not by itself establish which way (or whether) causation runs ✅
- D. An empirical claim later shown to have no data support at all
Feedback: This is the classic correlation-caution case in comparative politics: the finding is real and widely replicated, but correlation alone doesn't establish the direction of causation — the arrow could run the other way, or a third factor could drive both.

Q6 (Matching). Match each explanation of why some countries are democracies and others are not to its core claim.
| Explanation | Core claim |
|---|---|
| Modernization theory (Lipset) | Economic development (wealth, education, urbanization) correlates with, and is argued to support, democratization |
| Institutionalist theory (Acemoglu & Robinson) | Inclusive political and economic institutions — broad participation, secure property rights, rule of law — explain lasting prosperity and democracy; extractive institutions explain its absence |
| Cultural/civic-culture accounts | Shared values, trust, and associational habits passed through a society are argued to sustain democratic participation |
| The resource-curse thesis (Ross) | Governments funded by resource rents (e.g., oil) can tax citizens less and be accountable to them less, which is argued to make democratization less likely |
Feedback: Four real, competing explanations — each with proponents and critics; the discipline treats them as interacting factors, not a single winner.

Q7 (MC). A governance index like Freedom House's "Freedom in the World" assigns each country a numeric score. This score is best understood as:
- A. A raw, uncontestable physical measurement, like a country's land area
- B. The aggregated result of expert coders scoring dozens of indicators against a published methodology — a considered judgment, not a bare fact ✅
- C. A number generated automatically by satellite data with no human judgment involved
- D. A count of how many elections a country has held, and nothing else
Feedback: Index scores are transparent, methodology-driven expert judgments — useful and citable, and still judgment calls, which is why reading the published methodology matters as much as the number itself.

Q8 (True / False). "A governance index's country score can, by itself, definitively identify the CAUSE of a country's regime type (e.g., prove that poverty caused its low score)."
- True
- False ✅
Feedback: False. An index score describes documented conditions; identifying a cause requires bringing in a separate causal theory (modernization, institutions, culture, resource dependence) and its own evidence — and even then, causal claims remain genuinely debated.

Q9 (MC). A country's "state capacity" (its ability to collect taxes, deliver services, and enforce laws across its territory) is best understood as:
- A. The same concept as its regime type (democracy vs. authoritarianism) — the two always move together
- B. A distinct dimension from regime type — a state can be strong-capacity and authoritarian, weak-capacity and democratic, or any other combination ✅
- C. Simply another name for a country's GDP
- D. Irrelevant to comparative politics
Feedback: State capacity and regime type are two separate dimensions of political development — conflating "a weak state" with "an undemocratic state" is one of this week's classic confusions.

Q10 (Multiple answer — select all that apply). Which of the following are real, standard families of comparative-governance/democracy indices used in political science?
- A. Freedom House's "Freedom in the World" ✅
- B. V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) ✅
- C. The EIU Democracy Index ✅
- D. The Consumer Price Index
- E. The Dow Jones Industrial Average
Feedback: Freedom House, V-Dem, and the EIU Democracy Index are the discipline's three standard governance-index families (D and E are economic/financial indices, not political ones).

Answer key (quick reference)

Quality gate (self-checked): each single-answer item has exactly one correct option; the multiple-answer item lists the three real index families (A, B, C) and requires D and E to be left unselected; the matching item pairs each explanation with its real core claim. Fact-and-source-accuracy gate — PASS: Przeworski & Teune (1970), Lijphart (1971, APSR 65: 682–93), Lipset (1959), Acemoglu & Robinson (2012), and Michael Ross's resource-curse attribution (2001, 2015) were each verified against the record; Freedom House's general methodology (25 indicators, 0–100 aggregate, three-tier status) is stated without any dated figure that could go stale on this quiz. Evenhandedness check: no item asks which explanation of democratization is correct; Q4/Q5 test what modernization theory CLAIMS and the correlation-caution around it, never a verdict; Q6 states each explanation's claim neutrally.

Item-bank entries (for variants + the midterm/final)

All ten items are tagged course=POLS1 · week=13 · objective=7 · topic=comparative-method-and-democratization and deposited in Item Bank: Week 13 — Comparative Politics. The final (Week 16) and per-term variant updates draw fresh items from this bank. (Tags: q1 most-similar-design, q2 most-different-design, q3 lijphart-small-n, q4 modernization-claim, q5 correlation-not-causation, q6 explanations-matching, q7 index-is-judgment, q8 index-not-cause, q9 capacity-vs-regime, q10 index-families-multi.)

Canvas placement block

canvas_object    = Quizzes::Quiz
title            = "Week 13 Quiz — Comparative Politics"
assignment_group = "Quizzes"
points_possible  = 10
grading_type     = points
due_offset_days  = 6        # 6 days after module start (Sun Nov 29)
published        = true
shuffle_answers  = true
provenance       = "~ Prof. Halloran's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com"