If you join the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) now, the mailing reads, you will receive this free bag, perfect for the traveling you can do more of with member lodging discounts. Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association (NRA) will offer free accidental death and dismemberment insurance if you join today. Both will send you a members-only magazine. Why do the AARP and the NRA, like many other interest groups, offer such benefits and gifts?

In several states, notably among them Iowa and Nevada, the presidential nominating process begins with party caucuses, which are:

Which term describes the strategy of obtaining political influence by gaining access to key decision makers in government, or using the courts to exercise influence?

True or False? Elected officials in the United States today are generally selected from single-member districts.

Americans are less likely to vote for minor-party candidates, and more concerned in close elections with wasting their votes, than voters in many other democratic countries because ______________.

In Marbury v. Madison, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall ruled that he could not force Secretary of State James Madison to carry out a previous president’s appointment to a lower judge. In so doing, he established the legal power of the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review. This was the case because:

Prior judicial decisions that are applied to a given case, whether in a federal or state court, are known as:


The Fourteenth Amendment reversed 


The popular term for the system of legal racial segregation that existed in the American South until the middle of the twentieth century is 


August Lumière had her beloved Italian convertible, a vintage early 1960s model that her father had carefully restored, stolen from a local mall a few months ago. Thankfully, her insurance company paid for a replacement. Even so, the company thinks the mall’s owner was to blame for its client’s misfortune, given poor lighting and lack of security around the parking lot. The insurance company filed suit against the mall owner on Lumière’s behalf, asking for $60,000 in reimbursement costs, along with $100,000 in punitive damages. This is an example of a typical sort of _________ case.