Free The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics by Iain McLean

principles. This gives the Church superiority over the State, though no right to interfere in secular matters. It may, however, invoke the power of the State, e.g. to suppress heresy. Thus were sown the seeds of the medieval Church—State controversy.
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    Australian ballot
    A ballot prepared by public officials listing all the candidates for office. So called by late nineteenth-century American reformers, who wished to substitute such ballots, as used in Australia, for the earlier American practice whereby parties prepared their own lists of their candidates and handed them to their supporters. As ‘Australian’ ballots are now virtually universal, the term is obsolete.
     
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    autarchy , autarky
    These two derivatives of similar but different Greek roots ( archein , to rule; arkeein , to suffice) are frequently confused. ‘Autarchy’ means self-government, usually nowadays without pejorative overtones. ‘Autarky’ is invariably used pejoratively to mean self-government in a manner condemned by the speaker. A regime is autarkic if it tries to be self-sufficient by cutting off trade and intercourse with the rest of the world.
     
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    Authoritarian Personality
    Title of 1940s study by Berkeley researchers into the psychological origins of anti-Semitism . The term was used to refer to an ‘ethnocentric’ personality pattern characterized by traits such as obedience, dogmatism, prejudice, contempt for weakness, low tolerance for ambiguity, hostility to members of ‘outgroups’, and superstition.
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    authoritarianism
    A style of government in which the rulers demand unquestioning obedience from the ruled. Traditionally, ‘authoritarians’ have argued for a high degree of determination by governments of belief and behaviour and a correspondingly smaller significance for individual-choice. But it is possible to be authoritarian in some spheres while being more liberal in others. Frederick the Great is alleged to have said, ‘I have an agreement with my people: they can say what they like and I can do what I like’.
Authoritarianism has become simply a ‘boo’ word, referring to overweening and intolerant government irrespective of the justification, or lack of it, of such practices. Thus it often means exactly the same as despotism, an older word. A number of American political scientists in the Cold War period distinguished between ‘authoritarian’ and ‘totalitarian’ governments. The former (mainly military regimes) had two advantages over the latter: they did not last as long and, though they could repress their political opponents as brutally as any known regimes, they left a larger sphere for private life. (Totalitarian regimes were, in this context, invariably communist.) Thus, where conditions were not yet ripe for democracy, there were relative advantages to authoritarianism.
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    authority
    The right or the capacity, or both, to have proposals or prescriptions or instructions accepted without recourse to persuasion, bargaining, or force. Systems of rules, including legal systems, typically entitle particular office-bearers to make decisions or issue instructions: such office-bearers have authority conferred on them by the rules and the practices which constitute the relevant activity. Umpires and referees, for example, have authority under the rules and practices constitutive of most sporting contests. Law enforcement officers are authorized to issue instructions, but they also receive the right to behave in ways which would not be acceptable in the absence of authorization: for example, to search persons or premises. To have authority in these ways is to be the bearer of an office and to be able to point to the relation between that office and a set of rules. In itself, this says nothing about the capacity in fact of such an office-holder to