| A | B |
|---|
| Backbenchers | Members of a parliament who are not in the government or shadow cabinet. |
| Collective Responsibility | The doctrine that all cabinet members must agree with all decisions. |
| Collectivist Consensus | Cross-party British support for the welfare state that lasted until the late 1970s. |
| Corporatism | In Europe arrangements through which government, business, and labor leaders cooperatively set microeconomic or macroeconomic policy, normally outside of the regular electoral legislative process. In Mexico and elsewhere in the 3rd world, another term to descrive the way people are integrated into the system via patron-client relationships. |
| Devolution | The process of decentralizing power from national governments that stops short of feudalism. |
| Euroskeptics | People opposed to expansion of teh EU's power. |
| First-Past-The-Post | Electoral system based on single-member districs in which the candidate recieves the most votes wins. |
| Gradualism | The belief that change should occurs slowly or incrementally. |
| Magna Carta | Established that the king was not an absolute monarch. |
| Manifesto | In Britain and other parliamentary systems, another term for a party's platform in an election campaign. |
| Nationalization | Philosophies or attitudes that stress teh importance of extending the power or support for a nation; government takeover of private business. |
| Parliamentary Party | The members of parliament from a single party. |
| Privatization | The selling off of state-owned companies. |
| Proportional Representation | Electoral system in which parties recieve a number of seats in parliament proportionate to their share of the vote. |
| Shadow Cabinet | In systems like Britain's the official leadership of the opposition party that "shadows" the cabinet. |
| Third Way | A term used to describe the new and more central left-wing parites of the 1990s, most notably Britain's "New Labour." |
| Three-Line Whip | In a parliamentary system, statements to MPs that they must vote according to the party's wishes. |
| White Paper | In Britain and elsewhere, a government statement that outlines proposed legislation; the last stage before the submission of a formal bill. |
| Alliance | Coalition of British Liberals and Social Democrats in the 1980s that became the Liberal Democrats of today. |
| Beveridge Report | Published in the 1940s; set the stage for the British welfare state. |
| Confederation of British Industry | The leading British business interest group. |
| Conservative Party | Britain's most important right-of-center party, in power more often than not for two centuries. |
| Good Friday Agreement | A pratical peace agreement reached by the major parties in Northern Ireland with the British and Irish governments on, not suprisingly, Good Friday 1998. |
| Great Reform Act | Law passed in 1832 that expanded the suffrage; widely seen as a key step toward democracy in Britain. |
| House of Commons | The all-important lower house of the British Parliament. |
| House of Lords | The weaker upper house of the British Parliament, slated for reform of abolition. |
| Labour Party | The leading left-wing party in Britain, in power since 1997. |
| Liberal Democratic Party | In Britain, the number-three party and in some ways the most radical; in Japan, the dominant party since the 1950; in Russia, the neofacist and racist opposition party led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky. |
| Maastricht Treaty | Created the EU and EMU; signed in 1992. |
| Social Democratic Party | Germany's left-of-center party, in power since 1997. |
| Tories | Informal name for Britain's Conservative Party. |
| Trade Union Congress | Britain's leading trade union confederation. |
