A Novel Approach to Politics: Introducing Political Science through Books, Movies, and Popular Culture

Students often complain that textbooks are boring, especially the door-stoppers in use for most survey courses. But they’ve never had a textbook like this. Just ask adopters of the first edition who are thanking Novel Approach for some of their best student evaluations to date.

Van Belle and Mash deliver the core concepts and real-world political examples you expect from an introductory book, just in a way that your students will actually have fun reading and will retain after the exam. With enlightening, yet entertaining, references ranging from 1984 to The Dark Knight, students take away more from discussions of institutions, ideology, and economics because concepts are introduced using popular culture. Revisions to the second edition, in addition to a wealth of new and recent movies and books, include new features on major political theorists and expanded stand-alone institutional chapters on the legislature and the executive.

Never fear―the textbook stuff is here too―chapter summaries, bolded key terms, and discussion questions.

Douglas A. Van Belle is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. He is currently examining how science fiction as thought experiment shapes the conceptual space between science and society. Other areas of research include simulations of international politics, rational choice and revolutionary collective action, global media freedom, the social nature of science and SETI, Palaeontology and scientific progress in the Social Sciences, media’s influence on foreign aid bureaucracies, international information flows and the necessary conditions for the adoption of disaster risk reduction policies, the role of science fiction in society, and the use of science fiction to teach politics. His latest novel, A World Adrift, is set in the skies of Venus, 800 years after it was first colonized, and explores the human impact of the politics of extreme resource scarcity.

Spurred on by the blatant discrimination inherent in the statement "Trix are for Kids," at age 4 Ken Mash attempted to file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the rabbit and other animals similarly situated. After three errors in one inning squashed his dreams of playing for the Mets, his overactive justice complex led him to pursue a career as a lawyer and politician. While earning his B.A. in political science he discovered what those jobs were really like. Thus, Ken′s next degree was in mixology. Eighteen months later, his fiancée informed him that she was leaving town to do graduate work and that she would go either with him or without him. A couple of degrees later, he is currently a political science professor at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of the honors program and the pre-law advisor. He has delivered numerous papers and talks on American politics, constitutional law, and civil liberties, and he is very active in the faculty association. He currently resides in Nanticoke, PA, with his wife and four children where he is now content in knowing that his parents were mistaken when, as a child, they told him that he was wasting his time watching T.V. and movies.