Political Science

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18 primes originate from Political Science and 34 more draw from it as a secondary origin — sort the Origin column to separate them. They span 24 subdomains; sort by that column to group them, or click any subdomain to filter to it.

Prime	Origin	Subdomain	Description
Accountability	Primary	—	Responsibility for actions.
Agency Problem	Also draws from	—	Misaligned incentives.
Alienation	Also draws from	—	Disconnection from system.
Brinkmanship	Primary	Strategic Studies	Deliberately raising a stochastic risk of shared catastrophe, using the rising probability as a bargaining lever.
Commitment Device	Also draws from	—	A self-imposed constraint that binds one's own future choices.
Compromise	Primary	NegotiationPolitical Theory	Compromise resolves partly incompatible demands when each party accepts a bounded concession so that a mutually admissible agreement or configuration becomes reachable.
Cooperation	Also draws from	—	Agents bear individual costs to produce a shared benefit.
Critical Juncture	Primary	Political Science History	Moment where small variations produce divergent locked-in paths.
Decision-maker Anonymity	Also draws from	Protected Collective Decision Processes	Keep an individual decision contributor or their contribution link unidentifiable to a specified interested audience while the contribution still enters a collective decision.
Delegation of Authority	Also draws from	—	Assign responsibility.
Equity	Also draws from	—	Context-sensitive fairness.
Escalation Dominance	Primary	Strategic Studies	Holding a credible per-rung advantage across a conflict's intensity ladder, so the contest resolves below the top because the disadvantaged party prefers stopping to climbing into a losing position.
Free Riding	Also draws from	—	The systematic under-provision that results when individuals can enjoy a non-excludable shared good without contributing proportionately to producing it.
Game-Theoretic Strategy	Also draws from	—	Strategic interaction analysis.
Governance	Also draws from	—	The durable architecture of authority, accountability, and decision rights through which a group makes binding collective choices and resolves disputes internally.
Groupthink	Also draws from	—	Conformity overrides realism.
In-Group / Out-Group	Also draws from	—	Partition of a social field into an identified 'us' and a contrasted 'them'.
Incrementalism	Also draws from	—	Advance from the current state through bounded, locally intelligible changes, using the consequences of each committed step to constrain or redirect the next instead of requiring one comprehensive jump planned in advance.
Informal Fallacy	Also draws from	Informal Logic and Argumentation	A named, recurring pattern of defective argument whose error lies not in logical form but in content, context, or the relevance and acceptability of its premises — so it can be valid in form yet still fail as reasoning.
Innovation Sandbox	Primary	Regulatory Design	A bounded enclosure where prohibited or untested behaviour runs without its consequences escaping.
Institution	Also draws from	—	A durable, self-reproducing complex of rules, roles, and shared expectations.
Layered Coordination & Oversight	Also draws from	—	Multi-tier control.
Legibility	Primary	State Capacity and Administration	A distant actor makes heterogeneous local reality governable by projecting it into standardized, simplified representations, gaining comparison and control while discarding context the scheme cannot see.
Legitimacy	Primary	—	Accepted authority.
Local Autonomy & Tiered Escalation	Primary	—	Escalate when needed.
Manufactured Dependency for Role Capture	Primary	Incentive Structures	An agent covertly sustains a problem to keep occupying the valued role attached to solving it.
Narrative Persuasion	Also draws from	Marketing and Advertising	Shift attitude or belief through story-mediated transportation that bypasses counter-argument by delivering the payload as experience rather than claim.
Nirvana Fallacy	Also draws from	Argumentation and Reasoning	Rejecting a real, available option because it falls short of an idealized counterfactual, when the operative comparison should be against the best feasible alternative.
No One Is Above the Rules	Primary	—	Universal accountability.
No True Scotsman	Also draws from	Informal Logic	When a counterexample to a universal claim appears, membership in the subject category is redefined to exclude it, preserving the claim by emptying it of content.
Non-Zero-Sum Game	Also draws from	Game Theory	A strategic interaction whose joint payoff is not fixed: cooperative play can create value and destructive play can destroy it, so the size of the pie is endogenous to the strategy profile.
Preference	Also draws from	Decision Theory	Agent's ordering over a choice set on some evaluative dimension.
Preference Falsification	Primary	Public Opinion Collective Action	Under asymmetric cost on expression, agents voice a cheaper preference than the one they privately hold, so the visible distribution diverges from the held one.
Preference Heterogeneity and Conflict	Also draws from	Organizational Psychology	Incompatible agent preferences create impasses and partial dissatisfaction.
Private-Public Preference Divergence	Also draws from	Collective Belief and Public Opinion	A systematic gap between the distribution of privately-held preferences (or beliefs) in a group and the distribution publicly expressed or inferred, sustained because each member reads others' conformity as conviction and conforms in turn.
Property Rights	Also draws from	—	An enforceable bundle of exclusive entitlements over a resource.
Proximity Capture	Primary	Observer Observed Relations	An observer with a duty of independent judgement gradually absorbs the target's frame through sustained proximity, eroding the independence the role requires.
Public Goods	Also draws from	—	Non-excludable goods.
Regime Change	Primary	—	A discontinuous flip of a system from one stable operating regime to a qualitatively different one, where the same inputs produce fundamentally different responses on either side of a feedback-driven threshold.
Regulatory Capture	Also draws from	Regulatory Economics	Regulated agents gain influence over institution redirecting it.
Rights vs. Freedoms	Also draws from	—	Claims vs liberties.
Sacred	Also draws from	—	Things set apart as inviolable and demanding reverence.
Separation of Powers	Primary	—	Divide authority.
Severed Accountability Via Unearned Revenue	Primary	Principal Agent Dynamics	When an agent's revenue arrives through a channel that bypasses the principals it would otherwise answer to, the accountability link is severed and predictable goal-drift follows.
Social Capital	Also draws from	—	Value of relationships.
Solidarity	Also draws from	—	Shared commitment and mutual support within a group.
Sovereignty	Primary	—	Supreme authority.
Stated–Revealed Preference Gap	Also draws from	Preference MeasurementHealth BehaviorOrganizational BehaviorProduct Research	A reported preference and behavior under a real choice opportunity systematically diverge, so the mismatch must be analyzed as two differently distorted access channels rather than automatically treating either as the agent's true valuation.
Structural Violence	Also draws from	—	Systemic harm.
Tragedy of the Commons	Also draws from	—	Resource depletion from self-interest.
Transparency	Primary	—	Open processes.
Wisdom of the Crowds	Also draws from	—	Many independent noisy signals combine into an estimate better than any individual (information aggregation).