UGC-NET Rural Society, Polity & Institutions: practice questions

Question 1 · hard

Robert Redfield's folk-urban continuum was developed from fieldwork in:

1. Törbel, Switzerland
2. Kishan Garhi, Uttar Pradesh
3. Rampura, Karnataka
4. Yucatán, Mexico

Question 2 · easy

Max Weber's three dimensions of stratification are:

1. Class, status and party
2. Owners, managers and workers
3. Caste, class and gender
4. Varna, jati and gotra

Question 3 · hard

Louis Dumont, in Homo Hierarchicus (1966), argued that the fundamental principle underlying the caste system is:

1. The opposition between purity and pollution
2. The racial origins of different caste groups
3. Competition between castes for political office
4. Control over land and agrarian surplus

Question 4 · medium

Douglass North defined institutions as:

1. The players of the game: firms, cooperatives and government departments that pursue goals
2. Buildings and infrastructure provided by the state for public use, such as markets and roads
3. The rules of the game: humanly devised formal and informal constraints that shape interaction
4. Statistical regularities in prices that emerge from competitive markets over long periods

Question 5 · medium

Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons (1990) identified design principles of long-enduring commons institutions. Which of these is one of them?

1. Transfer of the resource to private owners with secure title
2. Graduated sanctions for those who break the rules
3. Management of the resource by a central government agency
4. Equal division of the resource among all households at once

Question 6 · medium

In Everett Lee's theory of migration (1966), which set of factors determines the decision to migrate?

1. Distance, gravity, population size and the economic mass of the destination city
2. Caste rank, landholding, education and family size of the household head at origin
3. Wage differences, unemployment rates and the cost of transport between two regions only
4. Factors at origin, factors at destination, intervening obstacles and personal factors

Question 7 · hard

The new economics of labour migration (Stark and Bloom, 1985) differs from the Harris-Todaro model mainly in treating migration as:

1. A cultural process through which migrants adopt urban values and lose village ties
2. A forced movement caused by land alienation, famine or conflict at the place of origin
3. An individual response to the difference between rural and expected urban wages
4. A household strategy to diversify risk and overcome missing credit and insurance markets

Question 8 · hard

James Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) explains apparent peasant conservatism as:

1. Irrational attachment to tradition that persists only because of illiteracy and lack of contact with towns
2. A subsistence ethic: households close to the margin put 'safety first' and avoid risky innovations
3. The result of an image of limited good that makes peasants hostile to any success
4. A fixed cultural trait of fatalism that education and extension cannot change

Question 9 · hard

On Sherry Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation (1969), 'consultation' falls in which group of rungs?

1. Citizen power
2. Tokenism
3. Delegated control
4. Non-participation

Question 10 · hard

Naila Kabeer (1999) defined empowerment as the expansion in people's ability to make strategic life choices where this was previously denied, measured through three interrelated dimensions:

1. Access, control and benefits
2. Resources, agency and achievements
3. Income, education and health
4. Voice, choice and exit