| authoritarian governments | Political systems that allow
little or no participation in decision making by individuals
and groups outside the upper reaches of the government.
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| biopolitics | This theory examines the relationship between
the physical nature and political behavior of humans.
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| bureaucracy | The bulk of the state’s administrative structure
that continues even when leaders change.
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| cognitive decision making | Making choices within the
limits of what you consciously know.
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| crisis situation | A circumstance or event that is a surprise to
decision makers, that evokes a sense of threat (particularly
physical peril), and that must be responded to within a limited
amount of time.
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| decision-making process | The manner by which humans
choose which policy to pursue and which actions to take in
support of policy goals. The study of decision making seeks
to identify patterns in the way that humans make decisions.
This includes gathering information, analyzing information,
and making choices. Decision making is a complex process
that relates to personality and other human traits, to the sociopolitical setting in which decision makers function, and
to the organizational structures involved.
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| democratic governments | The most basic concept describes the ideology of a body governed by and or the people; also the type of governmental system a country
has, in terms of free and fair elections and levels of participation.
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| ethology | The comparison of animal and human behavior.
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| foreign policy process | A concept that includes the influences
and activities within a country that cause its government
to decide to adopt one or another foreign policy.
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| foreign policy–making actors | The political actors within a
state--including political executives, bureaucracies, legislatures,
political opponents, interest groups, and the people--who
influence the foreign policy process.
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| formal powers | Authority to act or to exert influence that
is granted by statutory law or by the constitution to a political
executive or to another element of government.
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| frustration-aggression theory | A psychologically based
theory that frustrated societies sometimes become collectively
aggressive.
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| gender opinion gap | The difference between males and females
along any one of a number of dimensions, including
foreign policy preferences.
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| groupthink | How an individual’s membership in an organization/
decision-making group influences his or her thinking
and actions. In particular there are tendencies within a
group to think alike, to avoid discordancy, and to ignore ideas
or information that threaten to disrupt the consensus.
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| head of government | The ranking official in the executive
branch who is politically and constitutionally invested with
the preponderance of authority to administer the government
and execute its laws and policies.
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| hegemonic power | A single country or alliance that is so
dominant in the international system that it plays the key role
in determining the rules and norms by which the system operates.
It dominates the system and has a central position in
both making and enforcing the norms and modes of behavior. Hegemon is a synonym for a hegemonic power.
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| heuristic devices | A range of psychological strategies that
allow individuals to simplify complex decisions. Such devices
include evaluating people and events in terms of how
well they coincide with your own belief system (“I am anticommunist;
therefore all communists are dangerous”),
stereotypes (“all Muslims are fanatics”), or analogies (“appeasing
Hitler was wrong; therefore all compromise with
aggressors is wrong”).
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| horizontal authority structure | A system in which authority
is fragmented. The international system has a mostly horizontal
authority structure.
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| idiosyncratic analysis | An individual-level analysis approach
to decision making that assumes that individuals make foreign
policy decisions and that different individuals are likely
to make different decisions.
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| individual-level analysis | An analytical approach that emphasizes
the role of individuals as either distinct personalities
or biological/psychological beings.
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| informal powers | Authority to act or to exert influence that
is derived from custom or from the prestige within a political
system of either an individual leader or an institution.
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| interest group | A private (nongovernmental) association of
people who have similar policy views and who pressure the
government to adopt those views as policy.
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| intermestic policy | The merger of international and domestic concerns
and decisions.
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| issue area | Substantive categories of policy that must be
considered when evaluating national interest.
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| leader-citizen opinion gap | Differences of opinion between
leaders and public, which may have an impact on foreign policy in a democratic country.
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| levels of analysis | Different perspectives (system, state, individual)
from which international politics can be analyzed.
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| mirror-image perception | The tendency of two countries
or individuals to see each other in similar ways, whether
positive or negative.
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| Munich analogy | A belief among post–World War II leaders,
particularly Americans, that aggression must always be met
firmly and that appeasement will only encourage an aggressor.
Named for the concessions made to Hitler by Great
Britain and France at Munich during the 1938 Czechoslovakian
crisis.
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| operational code | A perceptual phenomenon that describes
how an individual acts and responds when faced with specific
types of situations.
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| operational reality | The process by which what is perceived,
whether that perception is accurate or not, assumes a
level of reality in the mind of the beholder and becomes the
basis for making an operational decision (a decision about
what to do).
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| political culture | A concept that refers to a society’s general,
long-held, and fundamental practices and attitudes. These
are based on a country’s historical experience and on the
values (norms) of its citizens. These attitudes are often an
important part of the internal setting in which national leaders make foreign policy.
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| political executives | Those officials, usually but not always
in the executive branch of a government, who are at the
center of foreign policy–making and whose tenures are variable and dependent on the political contest for power.
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| power pole | An actor in the international system that has
enough military, economic, and/or diplomatic strength to
often have an important role in determining the rules and
operation of the system. Power poles, or simply poles, have
generally been either (1) a single country or empire or (2) a
group of countries that constitute an alliance or bloc.
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| rally effect | The tendency during a crisis of political and
other leaders, legislators, and the public to give strong support
to a chief executive and the policy that leader has
adopted in response to the crisis.
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| roles | How an individual’s position influences his or her
thinking and actions.
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| state-centric system | A system describing the current world
system wherein states are the principal actors.
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| state-level analysis | An analytical approach that emphasizes
the actions of states and the internal (domestic) causes of
their policies.
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| system-level analysis | An analytical approach that emphasizes
the importance of the impact of world conditions (economics,
technology, power relationships, and so forth) on
the actions of states and other international actors.
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| two-level game | The concept that in order to arrive
at satisfactory international agreements, a country’s diplomats
actually have to deal with (at one level) the other country’s
negotiators and (at the second level) legislators, interest
groups, and other domestic forces at home.
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| unipolar system | A type of international system that describes
a single country with complete global hegemony.
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| vertical authority structure | A system in which subordinate
units answer to higher levels of authority.
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