1. What factors help to explain the emergence of democratic political systems? How is democracy related to bureaucracy and rational-legal concepts that you learned about in previ-ous chapters? 

2. In what ways is citizenship an important component of a democratic political system? Do you think low voter turn¬out in the United States is due to a failure of the nation’s citizens? Or do nonvoters in the United States express their political interests in other ways? In what ways could new technologies facilitate political involvement? 

3. The question of who rules the United States is still being debated. In what ways does a pluralist understanding of power and politics in the United States differ from the power elite perspective? Do you think globalization has an effect on who rules the United States? Why or why not? 

4. How are socialism and communism alternatives to capital¬ism? What elements of welfare states are socialistic, and what forces in the United States are resistant to social wel¬fare programs? 

5. What factors help to explain deindustrialization in the United States? What effects has deindustrialization had on other countries? 

6. How is deindustrialization related to the decline of labor unions? Is there any hope for the labor movement in the United States? Elsewhere in the world? 

7. How is our society characterized by rampant and insatiable consumerism? How do we use consumption to satisfy our needs in the world today? Do you agree that we tend to consume beyond our needs? 

8. In what ways might consumption today be described as the new religion? 

9. What is the critical view of consumption offered by post¬modernists? What is their positive view of consumption? Can these views be reconciled?

10. What was the euro crisis? In what ways was it an economic crisis? In what ways did it show the linkage between the economy and government? Were the great fears asso¬ciated with the crisis well-founded? Is another euro crisis looming?