The U.S. political system suffers from endemic design flaws and is notable for the way that a small subset of Americans—whose interests often don’t align with those of the vast majority of the population—wields disproportionate power. Absent organized and persistent action on the part of ordinary Americans, the system tends to serve the already powerful. That’s why this text is called Attenuated Democracy. To attenuate something is to make it weak or thin. Democracy in America has been thin from the beginning and continues to be so despite some notable progress in voting rights. As political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens wrote, “The essence of democracy is not just having reasonably satisfactory policies; the essence of democracy is popular control of government, with each citizen having an equal voice.” (1) Since this is likely to be your only college-level course on the American political system, it is important to point out the structural weaknesses of our system and the thin nature of our democracy. Whenever you get the chance—in the voting booth, in your job, perhaps if you hold elected office—I encourage you to do something about America’s attenuated democracy.

This book is a broad introduction to Australian politics and public policy. This field of study is important for Australians to understand the exercise of political power, their history and the scope for change. It is also important for analysts outside Australia looking for comparative cases. Within this volume are diverse topics and perspectives, demonstrating that the study of Australian politics and policy is not ‘fixed’. Rather, it is a contested field of academic scholarship. Indeed, the volume’s editors do not all agree on the content of this introduction!

Survey course of American Government/Poltical Science. The following courseware includes resources copyrighted and openly licensed by third parties under a Creative Commons license. Click "Licenses and Attributions" at the bottom of each page for copyright information and license specific to the material on that page.

Designed as a core or supplementary text for upper elementary, middle and high school teachers and students, Building Democracy for All offers instructional ideas, interactive resources, multicultural content, and multimodal learning materials for interest-building explorations of United States government as well as students’ roles as citizens in a democratic society. It focuses on the importance of community engagement and social responsibility as understood and acted upon by middle and high school students—core themes in the 2018 Massachusetts 8th Grade Curriculum Framework, and which are found in many state history and social studies curriculum frameworks around the country.

The authority to amend the Constitution of the United States is derived from Article V of the Constitution. After Congress proposes an amendment, the Archivist of the United States, who heads the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), is charged with responsibility for administering the ratification process under the provisions of 1 U.S.C. 106b. The Archivist has delegated many of the ministerial duties associated with this function to the Director of the Federal Register. Neither Article V of the Constitution nor section 106b describe the ratification process in detail. The Archivist and the Director of the Federal Register follow procedures and customs established by the Secretary of State, who performed these duties until 1950, and the Administrator of General Services, who served in this capacity until NARA assumed responsibility as an independent agency in 1985.

Existing textbooks on international relations treat history in a cursory fashion and perpetuate a Euro-centric perspective. This textbook pioneers a new approach by historicizing the material traditionally taught in International Relations courses, and by explicitly focusing on non-European cases, debates and issues.

The volume is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the international systems that traditionally existed in Europe, East Asia, pre-Columbian Central and South America, Africa and Polynesia. The second part discusses the ways in which these international systems were brought into contact with each other through the agency of Mongols in Central Asia, Arabs in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, Indic and Sinic societies in South East Asia, and the Europeans through their travels and colonial expansion. The concluding section concerns contemporary issues: the processes of decolonization, neo-colonialism and globalization – and their consequences on contemporary society.

History of International Relations provides a unique textbook for undergraduate and graduate students of international relations, and anybody interested in international relations theory, history, and contemporary politics.

This book is designed to be a ‘Day 0' introduction to International Relations. As a beginner's guide, it has been structured to condense the most important information into the smallest space and present that information in the most accessible way. The chapters offer a broad sweep of the basic components of International Relations and the key contemporaryissues that concern the discipline. The narrative arc forms a complete circle, taking readers from no knowledge to competency. The journey starts by examining how the international system was formed and ends by reflecting that International Relations is always adapting to events and is therefore a never-ending journey of discovery. Unlike typical textbooks, there are no boxes, charts, pictures or exercises. The philosophy underpinning this book is that these things can be a distraction. This book, like others in the E-IR Foundations series, is designed to capture attention with an engaging narrative. The chapters are short, with simple paragraphs and clear sentences placing the reader inside crucial issues and debates so they can understand how things work, and where they fit in the world around them.

This book is designed as a foundational entry point to International Relations theory – structured to condense the most important information into the smallest space and present that information in an accessible manner. The first half of the book covers the theories that are most commonly taught in undergraduate programmes. The book then expands to present emerging approaches and offer wider perspectives. Each chapter sets out the basics of a theory whilst also applying it to a real-world event or issue, creating a lively, readable and relevant guide that will help students to see not only what theories are – but why they matter.

Each committee receives many bill referrals over the course of a Congress – far more than the panel is capable of pursuing in any detail. The committee’s chair has the chief agenda-setting authority for the committee; in essence, the chair identifies the bills or issues on which the committee will try to formally act through hearings and/or a markup.

In addition to full legislative authority, the U.S. Constitution provides the Senate with two unique responsibilities: first, the power to confirm certain presidential nominees to the federal judiciary and certain executive branch positions; and second, the power to approve treaties. In the legislative process, treaties are treated very much like bills: they are referred to the Foreign Relations Committee, where they may be considered and reported. The Senate can consider a treaty on the floor under similar procedures used for legislation. However, the Constitution requires that two-thirds of voting Senators agree for a treaty to be ratified.

The process by which a bill becomes law is rarely predictable and can vary significantly from bill to bill. In fact, for many bills, the process will not follow the sequence of congressional stages that are often understood to make up the legislative process. The presentations on specific topics that follow present a more detailed look at each of the common stages through which a bill may move, but keep in mind that complications and variations abound in practice.

Once both chambers of Congress have each agreed to the bill, it is enrolled – that is, prepared in its final official form and then presented to the President. Beginning at midnight on the closing of the day of presentment, the President has ten days, excluding Sundays, to sign or veto the bill. If the bill is signed in that ten-day period, it becomes law. If the president declines to either sign or veto it – that is, he does not act on it in any way – then it becomes law without his signature (except when Congress has adjourned under certain circumstances).

If the President vetoes the bill, it is returned to the congressional chamber in which it originated; that chamber may attempt to override the president’s veto, though a successful override vote requires the support of two-thirds of those voting. If the vote is successful, the other chamber then decides whether or not to attempt its own override vote; here, as well, a successful override vote requires two-thirds of voting members to agree. Only if both chambers vote to override does the bill becomes law notwithstanding the President’s veto. A successful override of a presidential veto is rare.

Bills that are ultimately enacted are delivered to the Office of the Federal Register at the National Archives, assigned a public law number, and included in the next edition of the United State Statutes at Large.

To consider a bill on the floor, the Senate first must agree to bring it up – typically by agreeing to a unanimous consent request or by voting to adopt a motion to proceed to the bill, as discussed earlier. Only once the Senate has agreed to consider a bill may Senators propose amendments to it.

Perhaps the modern Senate’s defining feature is the potential difficulty of reaching a final vote on a matter. Most questions that the Senate considers – from a motion to proceed to a bill, to each amendment, to the bill itself – are not subject to any debate limit. Simply put, Senate rules provide no way for a simple numerical majority to cut off or otherwise impose a debate limit and move to a final vote. As a result, Senators can effectively wage (or threaten to wage) a filibuster – in effect, insist on extended debate in order to delay or prevent a final vote on most amendments, bills, or other motions.

The impetus for this volume was a multitude of conversations regarding pedagogy and teaching related to our judicial process courses. Based on these conversations, we identified four main threads or needs of our colleagues: First, many of us bring or want to bring more “political science” into our classes, though we also want to avoid the high costs of reinventing successful existing courses to do so. Second, our programs all require a political methodology course, and we want to reinforce those lessons in our substantive courses. We want to encourage our students’ understanding of how to read and understand research studies as well as how to craft their own research questions. Third, we want to keep our courses as current as possible. And fourth, we wanted to find a way to bring the cost of our courses down, as we see so many students struggle with the high costs of a college degree. This volume (as well as any future editions) addresses each of these concerns. Open Judicial Politics is a compilation of new and original research in judicial politics written specifically for the undergraduate audience, thus providing accessible examples of political science research that also address some of the more current concerns and controversies in our field. Additionally, every article is accompanied by some type of classroom activity—from basic discussion questions to full-blown simulations—that makes it easier for instructors to adapt the material to their courses and enhance classes with interactives. The chapters of the volume generally follow the well-worn path of most textbooks of judicial politics, making the volume an easy companion for adoption, and the material should fit seamlessly into the preestablished structures of most courses. Finally, the volume is an open-source resource, and adoption of the text adds no cost for our students. Whether one uses one or ten articles, the cost remains nil. This volume includes twenty-two original contributions that we have grouped into nine parts. The studies cover the breadth and scope of the field of judicial politics, with attention to appellate and trial courts, national high courts and intermediate appellate courts, and US courts and their international counterparts, thus providing a large range of materials to complement any judicial process course or text. We are especially pleased that undergraduate students played key roles in the creation of several of these studies, performing data collection and analysis as well as complete authorship from stem to stern. For the second edition, we have added fifteen articles that continue to illustrate key concepts and aspects of judicial politics, following the same formula of empirical research tailored to an undergraduate audience, accompanied by a variety of classroom activities.

American Government 3e aligns with the topics and objectives of many government courses. Faculty involved in the project have endeavored to make government workings, issues, debates, and impacts meaningful and memorable to students while maintaining the conceptual coverage and rigor inherent in the subject. With this objective in mind, the content of this textbook has been developed and arranged to provide a logical progression from the fundamental principles of institutional design at the founding, to avenues of political participation, to thorough coverage of the political structures that constitute American government. The book builds upon what students have already learned and emphasizes connections between topics as well as between theory and applications. The goal of each section is to enable students not just to recognize concepts, but to work with them in ways that will be useful in later courses, future careers, and as engaged citizens.
In order to help students understand the ways that government, society, and individuals interconnect, the revision includes more examples and details regarding the lived experiences of diverse groups and communities within the United States. The authors and reviewers sought to strike a balance between confronting the negative and harmful elements of American government, history, and current events, while demonstrating progress in overcoming them. In doing so, the approach seeks to provide instructors with ample opportunities to open discussions, extend and update concepts, and drive deeper engagement.
Changes made in American Government 3e are described in the preface to help instructors transition to the third edition. The second edition of American Government by OpenStax is available in web view here.

This is a survey course, and it can be used if you are looking to take just one general overview course of political science or if you want to go on to more advanced study in any of the subfields of the discipline, such as American politics, comparative politics, international politics, or political theory. This course will survey the different ways in which political scientists study the phenomena of politics and will deepen your understanding of political life as both a thinker and a citizen. The goal of this course is to introduce you to the discipline's concepts, terminology, and methods and to explore instances of applied political science through real-world examples.

In this introductory course, we will focus on the basic principles of political science by combining a historical study of the discipline's greatest thinkers with an analysis of contemporary issues. We will also identify and discuss the questions that drive the field of political science, including: How do we define the changing nature of power? How do we differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate governance? What are the differences between political institutions and political behavior? How do leaders define who gets to be heard and counted in a political community? By the end of this course, you will be familiar with these issues and capable of discussing them in the context of contemporary politics.

This open educational resource (OER) brings together Canadian and international scholars in a contemporary, pluralistic volume introducing undergraduates in a variety of relevant disciplines to political ideologies and worldviews. This introductory volume is also suitable for a wider general audience. This volume is the first of its kind, a fully open textbook on political worldviews that deals with the historical development of classical ideologies, while expanding and updating the subject using contemporary political examples and non-Eurocentric examinations of ideology. The volume includes chapters on Indigenous worldviews, Confucianism, and the future of ideology in the emerging global order. The volume also contains valuable sets of discussion questions throughout.

El libro busca crear un espacio informático de interacción formativa y de producción, teórico-práctica, entre docentes y estudiantes de cátedras universitarias de diversas facultades, carreras y disciplinas de estudio de la Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina. Es de nuestro interés compartirlo con otras Universidades de América Latina, afines en la temática, que tengan disposición a ser parte de esta experiencia democratizadora de producción y enseñanza académica que ingeniosamente ofrece Proyecto Latin. Organizamos una comunidad interdisciplinaria (Derecho, Ciencia Política, Sociología y Trabajo Social) a partir de expectativas comunes en contenidos y abordajes en el proceso de enseñanza aprendizaje universitario de grado. Las políticas públicas, el género y los Derechos Humanos constituyeron el campo temático de interés común, que forma parte del proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje así como también de estudios e investigaciones de los y las participantes de la comunidad

The focus of this book is on using quantitative research methods to test hypotheses and build theory in political science, public policy and public administration. It is designed for advanced undergraduate courses, or introductory and intermediate graduate-level courses. The first part of the book introduces the scientific method, then covers research design, measurement, descriptive statistics, probability, inference, and basic measures of association. The second part of the book covers bivariate and multiple linear regression using the ordinary least squares, the calculus and matrix algebra that are necessary for understanding bivariate and multiple linear regression, the assumptions that underlie these methods, and then provides a short introduction to generalized linear models.

The book fully embraces the open access and open source philosophies. The book is freely available in the SHAREOK repository; it is written in R Markdown files that are available in a public GitHub repository; it uses and teaches R and RStudio for data analysis, visualization and data management; and it uses publically available survey data (from the Meso-Scale Integrated Socio-geographic Network) to illustrate important concepts and methods. We encourage students to download the data, replicate the examples, and explore further! We also encourage instructors to download the R Markdown files and modify the text for use in different courses.

Our book represents a unique opportunity for three generations of scholars to reflect upon and collectively consider their decades’ long research, and the meaning of that research to both the broader society and to students of contemporary politics. Nicholas Lovrich served as a graduate school mentor to Brent Steel, and Brent in turn mentored Christopher A. Simon as an undergraduate and guided him to study with Lovrich. Steel and Lovrich have collaborated on research for over 30 years, while Simon has frequently collaborated with Steel and Lovrich for nearly 20 years.