Jillson - American Government

The social sciences analyze human societies and their social, political, and economic structures, processes, and products. Political science is one of the social sciences, as are its sister social sciences, Anthropology, Sociology, Economics, and Psychology. Political science studies ideas, institutions, behavior, and policy as they both reflect and structure influence and power at the international, national, and state and local levels. This book deals with U.S. national politics, though with regular reference to the politics of other nations for instructive comparisons.

American politics is a fascinating area of study. This has probably always been true, but it has never been truer than it is today. Whether you are president, pundit, scholar, or student, you have to decide what to make of Islamic fundamentalism, Russian democracy, global free trade, and nuclear weapons in North Korea. Closer to home you have to decide what to make of the response to the coronavirus, the fear that social security might go broke, and judicial activism.

On the other hand, how difficult can it be for a college professor to introduce a college student to American politics? After all, politics and government are all around us: in the newspapers that we read, on the electronic devices we carry, and in the high school history and civics courses that we all tooksome more recently than others. We all have a general feel for American politics.

But for most students, even those who have been out in the world for a while between high school and college, information about politics and government comes in bits and pieces having little structure and less meaning. How do the pieces of American politics fit together, from public opinion and political participation, to constitutional limitations and political institutions, to the enactment of particular laws, policies, and programs? This book offers a systematic introduction to American government and politics for college and university students.

In my experience, students have three broad reactions to the initial description of virtually any aspect of the American political system. Whether the discussion is of the electoral process, the committee system in Congress, or the rules governing eligibility for food stamps, the preeminent and continuing question that students bring to the discussion is: How does it work? Answering this questionthe descriptive questionis usually the easy part. Halfway through the answer, the students brow begins to knit and that quizzical look that teachers know so well comes over the students face, and he or she asks: Why do we do it that way? The teachers answer, of course, is couched in terms of how things came to be this waythe historical explanationand then, almost inevitably, and often immediately, students want to know about potential alternativesthe normative concernisnt there a better way to do this?

My goal in this book is to provide solid descriptive and historical answers to the first two questions and open and encourage discussion among students and between students and their teachers of the broader issues involved. Historical development and institutional change are the organizing themes of this book. History regularly empties ideas and institutions of their initial meanings and refills them with different, although never wholly different, meanings more relevant to the new day. Freedom, equality, and democracy did not mean the same thing to Thomas Jefferson as they came to mean to Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. They did not mean exactly the same thing to Donald Trump that they meant to his predecessors. Moreover, the presidency that Trump occupied was simply not the same office that Roosevelt, Lincoln, or Jefferson occupied.

On the assumption that it is hard to know where you are going if you do not know where you have been, each chapter of this text opens with a discussion of the origins and development of the subject of the chapter, whether that be individual rights and liberties, the electoral system, the presidency, or Americas place in the world. Once we know how some aspect of American politics stands today and how it got that way, we are in position to begin a discussion of what alternatives might look like. A truly useful text should show where we have been, where we are today, and where we seem to be headed.