The Development Story
Overview
Anyone who writes an introductory American government text faces the challenge of describing and explaining a vast amount of scholarship. One way is to pile fact upon fact and list upon list. It’s a common enough approach but it turns politics into a pretty dry subject. Politics doesn’t have to be dry, and it certainly doesn’t have to be dull. Politics has all the elements of drama, and the added feature of affecting the everyday lives of real people.
The late twentieth century has been a period of extraordinary change in America, which raised new challenges to the practice of government. New people in the millions from Asia and Latin America have joined the American community, bringing with them cultural traditions that have made our society richer and fuller, but also more fragmented and contentious. Traditional institutions, from political parties to families, have weakened dramatically, straining the fabric of our politics but also creating the possibility of adaptive new arrangements. Minorities and women, long denied access to political and economic power, are seeking a fairer share, and sometimes getting it. America’s workers and firms have built a highly productive economy but are now facing the risks and opportunities of the global marketplace. The cold war that dominated our attention in foreign policy for decades has been replaced by ethnic rivalries and localized conflicts that raise troubling new issues of world insecurity that, so far, have defied tidy solutions.
Scholars are trying to keep pace with these changes. Never before has scholarship been so closely tied to the real world. If much of what political scientists study is arcane, we have increasingly connected our work and our thinking to the everyday realities of politics. The result is a clearer and more nuanced understanding of how American government operates. I have tried in this book to convey this advancement in knowledge in an accurate and interesting way.
The author talks about the book.
Textbook's Four Goals for the Student
- To use a narrative text to draw students into the subject, give them a contextual understanding of major concepts and issues, and encourage them to think about the implications for themselves and society
. This is a narrative-based text. It is the opposite of a text that piles list upon list and divides its material into narrow compartments. A narrative text provides plenty of information, but it is always part of a larger discussion.
Research indicates that the narrative form is a superior method for teaching a "soft" science such as political science. Students learn more readily because a narrative makes the subject more readable, more accessible, and more compelling. Studies also indicate that students can read attentively for a longer period of time when a text is in narrative form.
A narrative text weaves together theory, information, and examples in order to bring out key facts and ideas. Each chapter begins by describing a situation that addresses a basic issue. The chapter on civil liberties, for example, begins with a case of the Crichton family, whose home was raided in the middle of the night by gun-toting FBI agents who suspected they were harboring a relative who was suspected of bank robbery. The suspect was not found, and the Crichtons, who were badly frightened by the intrusion, sued the FBI for wrongful search. Did the FBI have sufficient cause for a warrantless search? Or did the FBI violate the Crichtons' constitutional rights? Where should society draw the line between its public safety needs and the rights of an individual? Such questions in the context of a real-life situation immediately plunge students into the chapter’s subject and into the process of thinking about its importance.
- To help students to think critically
. Critical thinking is one of the most important skills that a student can acquire from a social science education. Students do not learn to think critically by engaging in rote memorization. They acquire the skill by reflecting on what they read, by resolving challenges to their customary ways of thinking, and by confronting difficult issues. To this end, each chapter contains "Critical Thinking" boxes that ask students to use the material in the chapter to resolve, at least in their own minds, difficult political issues. And throughout the book, the discussion is structured in ways that ask students to think more deeply and systematically about politics. In the first chapter, for example, the inexact meanings, conflicting implications, and unfulfilled promise of Americans’ most cherished ideals, including liberty and equality, are discussed. The discussion includes the "Chinese Exclusion," a grotesque and not-well-known chapter in our history that should lead students to think about what it means to be an American.
The author talks about critical thinking.
- To promote citizenship
. Students will be citizens for life, and a political science course offers a unique opportunity to bolster their commitment. Each chapter includes a box titled "Citizen Action: Getting Involved, Making a Difference." New to this edition, these boxes reflect my experience with my students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. They want to make a difference in the nation’s public life but are not sure how best to do it. The boxes offer ideas and tools that are meant to stimulate and guide citizen participation.
- To present American government through the analytical lens of political science but in a way that captures the vivid world of real-life politics
. I tried to regularly remind myself during the writing of this book that only a tiny percentage of the students in the introductory course are interested in an academic political science career. Most students take the course because of their interest in politics. I have sought to preserve, even heighten, this interest while also giving students the systematic understanding that a science of politics can provide. I had a model in mind for the type of book I wanted to write. It was V.O. Key’s absorbing Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, which I had read many years earlier as an undergraduate. The late Professor Key was a masterful scholar who had a deep love of politics and who gently chided colleagues whose interest in political science seemed to stop with the "science" part.
Few scholars can match Key’s brilliance, but, thankfully, most political scientists share his fascination with politics. The result of their combined efforts is a body of knowledge about American government that is both precise and politically astute. This scholarship gives the text its unifying core. Political scientists have identified major tendencies in the American political system that are a basis for a systematic understanding of how it operates, namely:
- An enduring set of ideals that are the basis of Americans’ political identity and culture and that are a source of many of their beliefs, aspirations, and conflicts
- An extreme fragmentation of governing authority that is based on an elaborate system of checks and balances, which serves to protect against abuses of political power but also makes it difficult for political majorities to assert power when confronting an entrenched or intense political minority
- A great many competing groups that are a result of the nation’s great size, population diversity, and economic complexity, and that, separately, have considerable power over narrow areas of public policy
- A strong emphasis on individual rights that is a consequence of the nation’s political traditions and that results in substantial benefits to the individual and places substantial claims on the community
- A preference for the marketplace as a means of allocating resources, which has the effect of placing many economic issues beyond the reach of popular majorities
These tendencies are introduced in the first chapter and discussed frequently in subsequent chapters. If students forget many of the points made in this book, they may at least take away from the course a knowledge of the deep understanding of the American political system.
Changes for this Edition
- A new box entitled "Citizen Action: Getting Involved, Making a Difference" has been added to every chapter.
This box and the other boxed features are based on the same instructional philosophy that guided earlier editions. The boxes are not mere fillers or diversions. They are not meant to entertain in the way that some texts use titillating or trivial material to grab momentarily a student’s attention. They are, instead, part of a broad pedagogical strategy: they have the purpose of encouraging students to extend their intellectual range. In addition to the "Citizen Action" and "Critical Thinking" boxes, each chapter has a "How the United States Compares" box and a "States in the Nation" box. The United States in many ways has the world’s preeminent democracy, but it also has distinctive policies and practices. The American states, too, are quite different in their politics and policies, despite belonging to the same union. American students invariably gain a deeper understanding of their own communities when they recognize the ways in which their nation or state differs from others.
The author talks about the Citizen Action feature.
- The chapter on limited government now precedes the chapter on federalism.
In the first three editions, the chapter on federalism preceded the chapter on limited government. This placement reflected the order in which the writers of the Constitution addressed these issues at the Philadelphia convention of 1787. Federalism was the first and most contentious issue of the convention, and the resulting compromises shaped much of the rest of the Constitution and the ratifying debate that followed. But there is also good reason for addressing first the question of limited government, which was the pressing issue for the late colonial period, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Revolution. A survey we conducted of instructors indicated that the large majority prefer to start their discussion of the Constitution in the context of its larger history rather than its more immediate history.
- The shift to candidate-centered campaigns is more fully addressed in chapter 9.
The chapter includes, for example, an extensive discussion of the "money chase" (including the importance of soft money), professional campaign consultants, targeting and positioning as elements of campaign strategy, and televised political advertising.
- The public policy chapters have been expanded.
- A section on the environment has been added to chapter 18.
- Substantial new information on the issue of education policy has been added to chapter 19.
- Additional material on the global economy has been placed in chapter 20.
- The appendix discussing state and local government has been expanded and supplemented with photos and figures.
- The role of the Internet is discussed at numerous points in the text.
- Chapters have been updated to reflect the latest scholarship and most recent political developments at home and abroad.
- More examples relevant to students’ lives have been included to illustrate important concepts.
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