Political scientist in the context of "Benedict Anderson"

A social class or social stratum is a grouping of people into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common ones being: the working class, the middle class and the upper class. Membership of a social class is commonly considered dependent on education, wealth, occupation, income, and belonging to a particular subculture or social network.

Class is a subject of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and social historians. The term has a wide range of sometimes conflicting meanings, and there is no broad consensus on a definition of class. Some people argue that due to social mobility, class boundaries do not exist. In common parlance, the term social class is usually synonymous with socioeconomic class, defined as "people having the same social, economic, cultural, political or educational status", e.g. the working class, "an emerging professional class" etc. However, academics distinguish social class from socioeconomic status, using the former to refer to one's relatively stable cultural background and the latter to refer to one's current social and economic situation which is consequently more changeable over time.

A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in elections and participate in governance. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific ideological or policy goals.

Political parties have become a major part of the politics of almost every country, as modern party organizations developed and spread around the world over the last few centuries. Although some countries have no political parties, this is extremely rare. Most countries have several parties while others only have one. Parties are important in the politics of autocracies as well as democracies, though usually democracies have more political parties than autocracies. Autocracies often have a single party that governs the country, and some political scientists consider competition between two or more parties to be an essential part of democracy.

James Gardner March (January 15, 1928 – September 27, 2018) was an American political scientist, sociologist, and economist. A professor at Stanford University in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Graduate School of Education, he is best known for his research on organizations, his (jointly with Richard Cyert) seminal work on A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, and the organizational decision making model known as the Garbage Can Model.

Maurice Duverger (/ˈduːvərʒeɪ/ DOO-vər-zhay; French: [mɔʁis dyvɛʁʒe]; 5 June 1917 – 16 December 2014) was a French jurist, sociologist, political scientist and politician born in Angoulême, Charente. Starting his career as a jurist at the University of Bordeaux, Duverger became more and more involved in political science and in 1948 founded one of the first faculties for political science in Bordeaux, France. An emeritus professor of the Sorbonne and member of the FNSP, he has published many books and articles in international newspapers, such as Corriere della Sera and la Repubblica in Italy, El País in Spain, and especially Le Monde in France.

Duverger studied the evolution of political systems and the institutions that operate in diverse countries, showing a preference for empirical methods of investigation rather than philosophical reasoning. He devised a theory which became known as Duverger's law, which identifies a correlation between a first-past-the-post election system and the formation of a two-party system. While analysing the political system of France, he coined the term semi-presidential system.

The category of newly industrialized country (NIC), newly industrialized economy (NIE) or middle-income country is a socioeconomic classification applied to several countries around the world by political scientists and economists. They represent a subset of developing countries whose economic growth is much higher than that of other developing countries; and where the social consequences of industrialization, such as urbanization, are reorganizing society.