system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are the terms big government and small government used in social science?

These terms get thrown around a lot in politics, but are they useful in academia? I've been thinking about it and they seem kinda ill defined. Like, a medieval monarchy is theoretically big government because the king has complete authority over the lives and property of his subjects. But in practice he can't even perform simple bureaucratic tasks that more permissive modern democracies take for granted like collecting income taxes. Is there an agreed upon definition for these words in academia?
gpt
No, because they don't mean anything. You're correct that they're vaguely defined amorphous terms. There's no point in using a term in political science if it's only going to obscure your point. 

And beyond that, academic writing on political and economic systems doesn't lend itself to such overt and meaningless pejoratives, **using a term that vague and politicized would be about as appropriate as writing a Biology paper about the moral failures of abortion.** 

If a freshman year undergrad used the term "big government" in an assignment, they'd lose points. You can comment on what the priorities and aims of that state are (e.g., to what level the state provides welfare programs, what portion of GDP is government spending, etc., etc.), but there's little functional use to a vague term like "big government"