US Gov and Politics

1. Politics, Culture, and Civil Liberties
   1. Modern claims over violations of civil rights would have shocked the Founding Fathers, who thought that they had dictated what the federal gov’t could and couldn’t do, not what the state gov’t could and could not do.
      1. Even the added Bill of Rights was never intended to control state governments’ actions.

1. Economic Health
   1. During the 1980s, people who were supposed to hate deficits voted to create more, and those who wanted tax loopholes voted to close them, but in the 1990s, tax increased (like normal).
      1. Most of these actions, however strange, were caused by public opinion.

Intro Stuff: Bureaucracy (the real meaning) = A large, complex organization composed of appointed officials, where authority is divided among several managers and/or departments. Bureaucracies have come to be associated with “waste, confusion, red tape, and rigidity.” We blame many of our problems on “the bureaucracy.” But in actuality, many of the problems are a result of the actions of Congress, the courts, and the president.

1. Introduction
   1. The Congress that the U.S. and most Latin American countries has is different from the Parliament that most European nations have because in Europe, a person who wants to run for office must persuade his party to nominate him, while in America, politicians can run for themselves.
      1. In Europe, people vote for parties; in America, they vote for individuals.

1. Explaining Proliferation
   1. Interest groups are active participants in the political scene, lobbying for certain causes.
   2. There are so many interest groups in the U.S. because there are so many cleavages, or differences, in opinion, because the Constitution contributes by giving so many points where they can contact the gov’t (political authority is shared by the president, the courts, and Congress), and because today’s weak political parties let lobbies work directly on the gov’t.