American Government: A Brief Introduction

A fresh, accessible perspective on the fundamentals

Why does the American political system work the way it does? This major revision brings a renewed focus to the institutions, processes, and data that illuminate big questions about governance and representation in the United States. With a new adaptive learning tool, this edition does more than ever to help students understand how American government developed over time and how it works today.

Theodore J. Lowi was John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University. He was elected president of the American Political Science Association in 1990 and was cited as the political scientist who made the most significant contribution to the field during the decade of the 1970s. Among his numerous books are The End of Liberalism and The Pursuit of Justice, on which he collaborated with Robert F. Kennedy.

Benjamin Ginsberg is the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science, Director of the Washington Center for the Study of American Government, and Chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author or coauthor of 20 books including Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public, Politics by Other Means, The Consequences of Consent, and The Captive Public. Before joining the Hopkins faculty in 1992, Ginsberg was Professor of Government at Cornell University. His most recent book is The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. Ginsberg’s published research focuses on political development, presidential politics, participation, and money in politics.

Kenneth A. Shepsle is the George D. Markham Professor of Government and founding member of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Politics in Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic Instability, The Giant Jigsaw Puzzle: Democratic Committee Assignments in the Modern House, Models of Multiparty Electoral Competition, Making and Breaking Governments, and Analyzing Politics: Rationality, Behavior, and Institutions. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1990, and he is the recipient of fellowships by the Hoover Institution, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Shepsle’s research focuses on formal political theory, congressional politics, public policy, and political economy.

Stephen Ansolabehere is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is the coauthor of The Media Game and Going Negative: How Political Advertising Alienates and Polarizes the American Electorate, which was awarded the Goldsmith Book Prize. His articles have appeared in The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Public Opinion Quarterly. He has been awarded fellowships by the Carnegie Corporation Fellowship and the Hoover Institution. He served as a co-director of the CalTech/MIT Voting Project, established in the wake of the 2000 presidential election to evaluate the current state of the reliability and uniformity of U.S. voting systems and propose uniform guidelines and requirements for reliable voting and performance. Ansolabehere’s research focuses on public opinion, elections, mass media, and representation.