Recipient of a 2021 McGuffey Longevity Award from the Textbook & Academic Authors Association (TAA) Why does the American political system work the way it does? Find the answers in The Logic of American Politics. This best-selling text arms students with a toolkit of institutional design concepts—command, veto, agenda control, voting rules, and delegation—that help them recognize how the American political system was designed and why it works the way it does. The authors build students′ critical thinking through a simple yet powerful idea: politics is about solving collective action problems. Thoroughly updated to account for the most recent events and data, the Ninth Edition explores the increase in political polarization, the growing emotional involvement people have to politics, Americans’ reactions to changing demographics, the partisan politics of judicial selection, and the changing nature of presidential leadership. Revised to include the 2018 election results and analysis, this edition provides students with the tools they need to make sense of today’s government. A Complete Teaching and Learning Package SAGE Premium Video Included in the interactive eBook! SAGE Premium Video boosts comprehension and bolsters analysis— featuring animations of basic American government concepts and recent news clips connected to key topics in the book. Preview a video about voter turnout. Interactive eBook Includes access to SAGE Premium Video, multimedia tools, and much more! Save when you bundle the interactive eBook with the new edition. Order using bundle ISBN 978-1-5443-6664-7. Learn more. SAGE coursepacks FREE! Easily import our quality instructor and student resources content into your school’s learning management system (LMS) and save time. Learn more. SAGE edge FREE online resources for students to make learning easier. See how your students benefit. SAGE course outcomes: Measure Results, Track Success Outlined in your text and mapped to chapter learning objectives, SAGE course outcomes are crafted with specific course outcomes in mind and are vetted by advisors in the field. See how SAGE course outcomes tie in with this book’s chapter-level objectives at edge.sagepub.com/kernell9e. CQ Press Lecture Spark Designed to save you time and ignite student engagement, these free weekly lecture launchers focus on current event topics tied to key concepts in American government. Access this week’s topic.

A core American politics textbook, complete with a range of free teaching ancillaries The American political system is extraordinary and complex. Samuel Kernell and Gary Jacobson help students develop a sophisticated appreciation of the possibilities and limits of American politics. Encouraged to think and not merely to memorise facts, students will come to understand why political institutions, the politicians who occupy them, and the citizens who monitor and respond to their actions, behave as they do. A nation as large and diverse as the United States faces enormous challenges. Kernell and Jacobson analyse political institutions and practices as (imperfect) solutions to problems facing people who need to act collectively, highlighting throughout the text such obstacles as conflicts over values and interests, the difficulty of agreeing on a course of action, and the problem of free riding. They describe how the choices made to resolve such problems at one moment affect politics in the future, long after the problems have faded.The intelligible logic of American politics is analysed further in three sets of thematic boxes that appear throughout the text: The Logic of Politics boxes dissect the design of various political institutions in light of the objectives they were intended to achieve Strategy and Choice boxes, new to the second edition, show how officeholders and those seeking to influence them employ institutions to advance their goals. Politics to Policy boxes show how public policies reflect the institutions that produce them and evaluate institutional capacity to solve America's problems. Public policy is treated as an integral subject and is examined throughout the book, rather than in separate chapters that are often left unassigned. Politics into Policy boxes, in particular, extend the authors' analysis, looking at such issues as: the tightening of the borders in the wake of terrorists attacks, how smoking evolved from a private to a public issue, and the decades-long battle over campaign finance reform.Special features include: * Chapters open with lively and topical stories that draw students in* Thematic questions at the beginning of each chapter serve both to preview important themes and to get students thinking critically. * An abundance of carefully produced or selected tables, figures, photographs, and other visuals, thoroughly updated for the second edition, illustrate and expand on the text. Captions enrich or exemplify points of discussion. New exercises on the accompanying website help students learn to interpret the graphic presentation of data. * Key terms are defined in boldface on first use, summarized at chapter end (with page numbers), and defined in a glossary at the back of the book. * Chapter objectives, summaries, and electronically-graded quizzes to help students review and study the material are offered on the web at logic.cqpress.com. Annotated suggested readings lists and endnotes assist students in their exploration of American politics beyond the pages of the book. Additionally, the Logic website provides CQ Weekly articles that illustrate the logic in contemporary American politics, as well as links to the best relevant sites on the Internet.Adopters will receive a free subscription to CQ's Politics Daily e-newsletter. Unlike general news sources that focus on national polls and punditry, CQ Politics Daily analyses th

In this political history of twentieth-century Mexico, Gladys McCormick argues that the key to understanding the immense power of the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is to be found in the countryside. Using newly available sources, including declassified secret police files and oral histories, McCormick looks at large-scale sugar cooperatives in Morelos and Puebla, two major agricultural regions that serve as microcosms of events across the nation. She argues that Mexico's rural peoples, despite shouldering much of the financial burden of modernization policies, formed the PRI regime's most fervent base of support. McCormick demonstrates how the PRI exploited this support, using key parts of the countryside to test and refine instruments of control--including the regulation of protest, manipulation of collective memories of rural communities, and selective application of violence against critics--that it later employed in other areas, both rural and urban. With three peasant leaders, brothers named Ruben, Porfirio, and Antonio Jaramillo, at the heart of her story, McCormick draws a capacious picture of peasant activism, disillusion, and compromise in state formation, revealing the basis for an enduring political culture dominated by the PRI. On a broader level, McCormick demonstrates the connections among modern state building in Latin America, the consolidation of new forms of authoritarian rule, and the deployment of violence on all sides.