| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Americanism | A belief that Americans consider themselves bound by common values and common hopes. |
| civic competence | belief that one can affect government policies. |
| civic duty | The belief that citizens have an obligation to participate in civic and political affairs. |
| class consciousness | The tendency to think of oneself as a worker whose interests are in opposition to those of management and vice versa. |
| culture war | A split in the United States reflecting differences in people's beliefs about private and public morality, and regarding what standards ought to govern individual behavior and social arrangements. |
| Efficacy | Self esteem, competence or mastery. |
| equality of opportunity | An economic value in American culture which maintains that all people should have the same opportunity to get ahead but that people should be paid on the basis of ability rather than on the basis of need. |
| external efficacy | The belief that the political system will respond to citizens. This belief has declined in recent years because of public sentiment that the government has become too big to be responsive. |
| internal efficacy | Confidence in one's own ability to understand and to take part in political affairs. This confidence has remained stable over the past few decades. |
| orthodox (social) | One of two camps in the culture war that believes morality is as important (or even more so) than self-expression and that moral rules are derived from God. |
| political ideology | A comprehensive set of political, economic, and social views or ideas concerned with the form and role of government. |
| political culture | A distinctive and patterned way of thinking about how political and economic life ought to be carried out. |
| political efficacy | The sense that citizens have the capacity to understand and influence political events. |
| progressive (social) | One of two camps in the culture war that believes personal freedom is more important than traditional rules and that rules depend on the circumstances of modern life. |
| rights | A preoccupation of the American political culture that has imbued the daily conduct of politics with a kind of adversarial spirit. |
| secular humanism | The belief that moral standards do not require religious justification. |
| work ethic | A tradition of Protestant churches that required a life of personal achievement as well as religious conviction; a believer had an obligation to work, save money, obey the secular law, and do good works. Max Weber attributed the rise of capitalism, in part, to this ethic. |
Combine with other sets
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace