American Government
By the standards of Introduction to American Politics textbooks, this is a comprehensive offering. Offers coverage of topics that most instructors would cover in such a class, including political behavior, civil rights/liberties, American political culture, and structure. While some textbooks do delve deeper into certain subjects (seemingly at random), it is good to see a textbook that offers nuts and bolts that will make it usable to nearly any instructor, allowing them ample room to discuss areas of their expertise without conflicting with the textbook. However, chapters are sometimes questionably or confusingly organized, and compress wider subjects that usually receive broader treatment into footnotes or brief passages.
There are some lapses here. For instance, right off the bat, the critique of socialism seems to take the position that socialism is inherently and entirely distinct from our system, which isn’t accurate. It can be said that in capitalism, “government accumulates wealth and then redistributes it to citizens.” China is not a socialist country; it is an oligarchic authoritarian regime. In his haste to laud American democracy as a good, if evolving, system, the author sometimes fails to recognize critical perspectives, or interpret them as straw-men. The analysis of Presidents attending Ivy League institutions is a bit misleading as evidence of elitism, for example. The division of provisions of the Bill of Rights into three categories is arguable at best. 11.1 seems to overstate the present state of equality in Congressional elections, especially given voter suppression. Elazar is a bit dated to present as useful fact (14.2) Many Supreme Court Justices do not regard the Court systems as the guardians of individual rights, but reserve this right to Congress—the Court, in their eyes, is there only to enforce laws that are made, whether right or wrong, so long as they are strictly in concordance with the Constitution. LGBT rights seem to be given less treatment than African American rights. But the textbook does well dealing with less amorphous topics, like the simple history of the Constitution or structural questions; for instance, the discussion of the eccentricities of the double-jeopardy concept. In the balance, I would say that the textbook does not do as good a job of providing multiple viewpoints—or being honest about its own orientations—as those that are professionally published. But that does not render it an invalid tool.
This is certainly the Achilles Heel of American government textbooks, some of which have been written as direct reactions to, say, the 2016 elections or the lens of inequality. For the most part, this book does as good a job—if not better—at sidestepping this capsules in time and offering something that need not be edited or updated often (though, some updates are always necessary as government is constantly evolving). But by sticking to institutional logic, historical examples, and well-established topic controversies that are not going to go away (abortion, executive orders and the use of force, the civil service), the book does an excellent job at avoiding the publishing industry’s penchant for planned obsolescence. Perhaps its status as an open textbook is one reason why it is so easy to avoid a chapter on Trump’s tweets, as this is stuff that publishers vaunt as the need for new editions.
The text is fairly clear but lacks some of the professional editing that I frequently see in pay-to-play textbooks. There are no grammar or spelling errors, but sometimes the choice or placement of topics doesn’t align with the larger argument being made in a chapter, which can be confusing. For example, in talking about Courts, jumping from the concept of jurisdiction (complex) to Hamilton and the Federalist, and then to the historical evolution of the Court is a bit jarring. Subchapter titles like ‘organizing to govern’ are a bit confusing. Words seem arbitrarily capitalized (why capitalize Scalia and McConnell)? Sometimes the content makes leaps (are heuristics really an appropriate topic for an Intro to Government textbook, given how complex the concept is in the political psych literature)? But fundamentally, I often found myself searching for particular lessons, only to find the introduction to those lessons a bit dry or even meandering.
The book follows a relatively consistent framework for presentation throughout. Each chapter is structured similarly. I’ve covered organization under ‘clarity’ above, so setting this aside, the textbook is good at being consistent in its tone and content, and chapters are easy enough to utilize. But as I noted above, the unhelpfulness of bolded terms can be genuinely confusing and are inconsistent (Katie Holmes gets bolded? Geraldo Rivera?) For students looking to identify key terms, this bolding does feel mightily inconsistent.
I think that the textbook goes too far in this direction. The subchapters are very short, and while they sometimes deal with distinct topics, it would often be more efficient to discuss big ideas by combining them into a more cohesive and less chopped-up narrative. I’m not sure, for instance, that 6.2 and 6.3 need to be different chapters, and have concerns about the modularity of chapter 5 in particular. However, I can’t really think of a way to sidestep these concerns – all authors must make choices.
Generally speaking, I think this textbook does as good a job at this as any other good textbook. There is no unifying logic, but the lack of this epistemological perspective is one strength of the book. It isn’t a text about how, say, rational choice affects American politics, but more of a carpet-bombing of information. I do think that some modules could be combined, but for the most part the author accomplishes this well.
While I am generally unfamiliar with how open-resource textbooks are supposed to be ideally positioned, the book provides excellent navigational tools on the left side of the bar that made it easy for me to find what I wanted. Within the chapters, there are simple navigational links—often to external resources—that are helpful and not distracting.
There isn’t much to say here. The book is competently written and produced. While some sentences are a bit languid and I might have organized thoughts differently, there is no direct error in any sentence that I could see.
This is tricky, as some American politics textbooks emerge from an activist mentality of pointing out how—for lack of a better term—messed up American culture can be. Here, the author does provide a chapter on our crappy treatment of some groups, but it is not as inclusive as it could be, and sidesteps coverage of some important groups. This is a difficult problem, because our history of oppression and inequality is lengthy and robust, and so where does one start? I would say, though, that while the book is not insensitive, there are plenty of opportunities to weave considerations of the struggles of various groups into its pages rather than shoeboxing them into a few chapters. To some extent, though, that would make this a book with a specific orientation, which defies one of its strengths.
In the balance, I recognize the critiques above may not sound like the book is a good resource. Actually, I think it is. I don’t think it’s as good as hearing from some of the real experts in the field and their approach, and I don’t think it would be a good match for some faculty who like to teach from a given perspective. But that’s ok! I am strongly considering adopting this for my students, though I wish that it were weightier and lengthier.