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A core American politics textbook, complete with a range of free teaching ancillaries The American political system is extraordinary and complex. Samuel Kernell and Gary Jacobson help students develop a sophisticated appreciation of the possibilities and limits of American politics. Encouraged to think and not merely to memorise facts, students will come to understand why political institutions, the politicians who occupy them, and the citizens who monitor and respond to their actions, behave as they do. A nation as large and diverse as the United States faces enormous challenges. Kernell and Jacobson analyse political institutions and practices as (imperfect) solutions to problems facing people who need to act collectively, highlighting throughout the text such obstacles as conflicts over values and interests, the difficulty of agreeing on a course of action, and the problem of free riding. They describe how the choices made to resolve such problems at one moment affect politics in the future, long after the problems have faded.The intelligible logic of American politics is analysed further in three sets of thematic boxes that appear throughout the text: The Logic of Politics boxes dissect the design of various political institutions in light of the objectives they were intended to achieve Strategy and Choice boxes, new to the second edition, show how officeholders and those seeking to influence them employ institutions to advance their goals. Politics to Policy boxes show how public policies reflect the institutions that produce them and evaluate institutional capacity to solve America's problems. Public policy is treated as an integral subject and is examined throughout the book, rather than in separate chapters that are often left unassigned. Politics into Policy boxes, in particular, extend the authors' analysis, looking at such issues as: the tightening of the borders in the wake of terrorists attacks, how smoking evolved from a private to a public issue, and the decades-long battle over campaign finance reform.Special features include: * Chapters open with lively and topical stories that draw students in* Thematic questions at the beginning of each chapter serve both to preview important themes and to get students thinking critically. * An abundance of carefully produced or selected tables, figures, photographs, and other visuals, thoroughly updated for the second edition, illustrate and expand on the text. Captions enrich or exemplify points of discussion. New exercises on the accompanying website help students learn to interpret the graphic presentation of data. * Key terms are defined in boldface on first use, summarized at chapter end (with page numbers), and defined in a glossary at the back of the book. * Chapter objectives, summaries, and electronically-graded quizzes to help students review and study the material are offered on the web at logic.cqpress.com. Annotated suggested readings lists and endnotes assist students in their exploration of American politics beyond the pages of the book. Additionally, the Logic website provides CQ Weekly articles that illustrate the logic in contemporary American politics, as well as links to the best relevant sites on the Internet.Adopters will receive a free subscription to CQ's Politics Daily e-newsletter. Unlike general news sources that focus on national polls and punditry, CQ Politics Daily analyses th
Why does the American political system work the way it does? After observing the strains of intense partisanship and divided government, many Americans are wondering what logic, if any, can be found in politics. With both sides of the political spectrum being so different from one another and the scales often tipping in the favor of the opposing party by a fraction of a percentage point, how can anyone work the system to their advantage? With fresh analysis of the 2022 midterm election results, the Eleventh Edition of bestselling textbook The Logic of American Politics provides students with the tools they need to make sense of our government today. Weaving together historical context, contemporary politics, and a "toolkit" of institutional design concepts, the authors build an understanding of political institutions and practices as imperfect solutions to collective action problems. This title is accompanied by a complete teaching and learning package. Contact your SAGE representative to request a demo. Learning Platform / Courseware SAGE Vantage is an intuitive learning platform that integrates quality SAGE textbook content with assignable multimedia activities and auto-graded assessments to drive student engagement and ensure accountability. Unparalleled in its ease of use and built for dynamic teaching and learning, Vantage offers customizable LMS integration and best-in-class support. It’s a learning platform you, and your students, will actually love. Learn more. Assignable Video with Assessment Assignable video (available in SAGE Vantage) is tied to learning objectives and curated exclusively for this text to bring concepts to life. Watch a sample video now. LMS Cartridge: Import this title’s instructor resources into your school’s learning management system (LMS) and save time. Don’t use an LMS? You can still access all of the same online resources for this title via the password-protected Instructor Resource Site. Learn more.
"To discover who rules, follow the gold." This is the argument of Golden Rule, a provocative, pungent history of modern American politics. Although the role big money plays in defining political outcomes has long been obvious to ordinary Americans, most pundits and scholars have virtually dismissed this assumption. Even in light of skyrocketing campaign costs, the belief that major financial interests primarily determine who parties nominate and where they stand on the issues—that, in effect, Democrats and Republicans are merely the left and right wings of the "Property Party"—has been ignored by most political scientists. Offering evidence ranging from the nineteenth century to the 1994 mid-term elections, Golden Rule shows that voters are "right on the money." Thomas Ferguson breaks completely with traditional voter centered accounts of party politics. In its place he outlines an "investment approach," in which powerful investors, not unorganized voters, dominate campaigns and elections. Because businesses "invest" in political parties and their candidates, changes in industrial structures—between large firms and sectors—can alter the agenda of party politics and the shape of public policy. Golden Rule presents revised versions of widely read essays in which Ferguson advanced and tested his theory, including his seminal study of the role played by capital intensive multinationals and international financiers in the New Deal. The chapter "Studies in Money Driven Politics" brings this aspect of American politics into better focus, along with other studies of Federal Reserve policy making and campaign finance in the 1936 election. Ferguson analyzes how a changing world economy and other social developments broke up the New Deal system in our own time, through careful studies of the 1988 and 1992 elections. The essay on 1992 contains an extended analysis of the emergence of the Clinton coalition and Ross Perot's dramatic independent insurgency. A postscript on the 1994 elections demonstrates the controlling impact of money on several key campaigns. This controversial work by a theorist of money and politics in the U.S. relates to issues in campaign finance reform, PACs, policymaking, public financing, and how today's elections work.
This collection examines the strategic behavior of key players in American politics from the Founding Fathers to the Super PACs, by showing that political actors, though motivated by their own interests, are governed by the Constitution, the law, and institutional rules, as well as influenced by the strategies of others.
Congress regularly enacts laws that benefit particular groups or localities while imposing costs on everyone else. Sometimes, however, Congress breaks free of such parochial concerns and enacts bills that serve the general public, not just special interest groups. In this important and original book, R. Douglas Arnold offers a theory that explains not only why special interests frequently triumph but also why the general public sometimes wins. By showing how legislative leaders build coalitions for both types of programs, he illuminates recent legislative decisions in such areas as economic, tax, and energy policy. Arnold's theory of policy making rests on a reinterpretation of the relationship between legislators' actions and their constituents' policy preferences. Most scholars explore the impact that citizens' existing policy preferences have on legislators' decisions. They ignore citizens who have no opinions because they assume that uninformed citizens cannot possibly affect legislators' choices. Arnold examines the influence of citizens' potential preferences, however, and argues that legislators also respond to these preferences in order to avoid future electoral problems. He shows how legislators estimate the political consequences of their voting decisions, taking into account both the existing preferences of attentive citizens and the potential preferences of inattentive citizens. He then analyzes how coalition leaders manipulate the legislative situation in order to make it attractive for legislators to support a general interest bill.
For decades, the reigning scholarly wisdom about nuclear weapons policy has been that the United States only needs the ability to absorb an enemy nuclear attack and still be able to respond with a devastating counterattack. So long as the US, or any other nation, retains such an assured retaliation capability, no sane leader would intentionally launch a nuclear attack against it, and nuclear deterrence will hold. According to this theory, possessing more weapons than necessary for a second-strike capability is illogical. This argument is reasonable, but, when compared to the empirical record, it raises an important puzzle. Empirically, we see that the United States has always maintained a nuclear posture that is much more robust than a mere second-strike capability. In The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy, Matthew Kroenig challenges the conventional wisdom and explains why a robust nuclear posture, above and beyond a mere second-strike capability, contributes to a state's national security goals. In fact, when a state has a robust nuclear weapons force, such a capability reduces its expected costs in a war, provides it with bargaining leverage, and ultimately enhances nuclear deterrence. This book provides a novel theoretical explanation for why military nuclear advantages translate into geopolitical advantages. In so doing, it helps resolve one of the most-intractable puzzles in international security studies. Buoyed by an innovative thesis and a vast array of historical and quantitative evidence, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy will force scholars to reconsider their basic assumptions about the logic of nuclear deterrence.
This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.
The authors of this ambitious book address a fundamental political question: why are leaders who produce peace and prosperity turned out of office while those who preside over corruption, war, and misery endure? Considering this political puzzle, they also answer the related economic question of why some countries experience successful economic development and others do not. The authors construct a provocative theory on the selection of leaders and present specific formal models from which their central claims can be deduced. They show how political leaders allocate resources and how institutions for selecting leaders create incentives for leaders to pursue good and bad public policy. They also extend the model to explain the consequences of war on political survival. Throughout the book, they provide illustrations from history, ranging from ancient Sparta to Vichy France, and test the model against statistics gathered from cross-national data. The authors explain the political intuition underlying their theory in nontechnical language, reserving formal proofs for chapter appendixes. They conclude by presenting policy prescriptions based on what has been demonstrated theoretically and empirically.
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