The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (36 page)

The finance minister of the UK. The title goes back to the reign of Henry III of England in the thirteenth century.

 
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Mathematical theory which analyses the arbitrarily unpredictable consequences of an arbitrarily small shift from
equilibrium
in a complex system. Frequently referred to by variants of the claim that ‘a flutter of a butterfly's wing may cause a thunderstorm’. Used in politics and international relations more to debunk claims to scientific precision than to advance formal models of chaos.

 
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Originally a term from Christian theology, meaning ‘a favour specially given by God's grace’, the word was appropriated by
Weber
to mean ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural… or … exceptional powers or qualities’. The term was used to refer to the spellbinding powers which apparently enabled Hitler to have such a hold over the German people. Weber gave interesting examples of how charisma comes to be ‘routinized’ as by its nature it cannot be passed on. Critics of Weber query whether the term can be defined in a sufficiently precise way to be of use.

 
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Charity derives from the Latin for affection, and in general connotes (Christian) love and benevolence. There is no statutory definition of a charitable organization, but case law in England and Wales has identified four principal charitable purposes:

(1) trusts for the relief of poverty;
(2) trusts for the advancement of education;
(3) trusts for the advancement of religion;
(4) and trusts for other purposes beneficial to the community, not falling under any of the previous heads.

In Scottish law charity refers to trusts for the relief of poverty. The wider account is used for the purposes of the Inland Revenue, which accords certain fiscal privileges to the charitable form of voluntary organization. There are over 170,000 charities registered with the Charity Commissioners for England and Wales, a branch of government which exercises the quasi-judicial function of giving advice, investigating, and checking abuse.
In UK law political objects are not charitable, and so political parties and institutions which exist in order to influence government policy on particular issues (i.e.
pressure groups
) cannot normally be regarded as charitable. However, a charity may conduct reasonable advocacy of causes which directly further its objects and which are ancillary to the achievement of those objects.
PB1 

 
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Game which takes its name from ‘dare’ games said to be played by Californian teenagers: two people are driving headon at one another on a narrow road; the first to swerve is chicken. When two people are playing, Chicken is best represented by the following diagram:
where
a
>
b
>
c
>
d
and in each box the letter before the comma is what I get and the letter after the comma is what you get. The paradoxical feature of Chicken is that each player has an incentive to try to lock the other into co-operating (here, swerving) by announcing in advance that he or she will defect (here, keep going). If this works, the defector will get
a
(the best result) and the co-operator
c
(the third-best). But if both players do it and neither swerves, both get
d
, their worst outcome: something which was widely feared in the
Cuban Missile Crisis
of 1962. Furthermore, the
supergame
faced by each Chicken player in deciding whether to precommit him- or herself to defection is itself a Chicken game. Chicken is thus very different to
Prisoners' Dilemma
despite a close superficial resemblance. Real-life contributors' dilemmas usually resemble one or the other. Everybody is tempted to
free ride
, that is let others contribute and benefit from their contributions without paying oneself. If universal free-riding leads to the worst outcome for everybody, the game is a form of Chicken. If it leads to a suboptimal, but not the worst, outcome for everybody, it is probably a form of Prisoners' Dilemma.

 
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