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

A Novel Approach to Politics turns conventional textbook wisdom on its head by using pop culture references to illustrate key concepts and cover recent political events. This is a textbook students want to read. Adopters of previous editions from schools all over the country are thanking author Douglas A. Van Belle for some of their best student evaluations to date.

With this Fifth Edition, Van Belle brings the book fully up to date with recent events such as Trump’s executive orders on immigration, the 2016 elections in the US, current policy debates including recent court decisions that may affect gerrymandering, international happenings such as Brexit, and other assorted intergalactic matters. Van Belle adds a wealth of new and recent movies and books to the text as he illustrates key concepts in political science through examples that captivate students. Employing a wide range of references from 1984 to Game of Thrones to House of Cards, students are given a solid foundation in institutions, ideology, and economics. To keep things grounded, the textbook nuts and bolts are still there to aid students, including chapter objectives, chapter summaries, bolded key terms, and discussion questions.

Give your students the SAGE edge! 

SAGE edge offers a robust online environment featuring an impressive array of free tools and resources for review, study, and further exploration, keeping both instructors and students on the cutting edge of teaching and learning. Learn more at edge.sagepub.com/vanbelle5e.

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.