it. Lasswell’s definition provides a strong analytic framework because it focuses our attention on questions we can ask to figure out what is going on in politics.
analysis understanding how something works by breaking it down into its component parts
Accordingly, in this book, we analyze American politics in terms of three sets of questions:
Who are the parties involved? What resources, powers, and rights do they bring to the struggle?
What do they have at stake? What do they stand to win or lose? Is it power, influence, position, policy, or values?
How do the rules shape the outcome? Where do the rules come from? What strategies or tactics do the political actors employ to use the rules to get what they want?
If you know who is involved in a political situation, what is at stake, and how (under what rules) the conflict over resources will eventually be resolved, you will have a pretty good grasp of what is going on, and you will probably be able to figure out new situations, even when your days of taking an American government course are far behind you. To get you in the habit of asking those questions, we have designed some features in this text explicitly to reinforce them.
As you found at the start of your reading, each chapter opens with a What’s at Stake . . . ? feature that analyzes a political situation in terms of what various groups of citizens stand to win or lose. Each chapter ends with a Let’s Revisit: What’s at Stake . . . ? feature, where we return to the issues raised in the introduction, once you have the substantive material of the chapter under your belt. We reinforce the task of analysis with a Don’t Be Fooled by . . . feature appearing in some chapters that discusses ways you can improve your critical thinking skills by analyzing (that is, taking apart) different kinds of sources of information about politics. The trick to learning how to think critically is to do it. It helps to have a model to follow, however, and we provide one in The Big Picture on pages 38–39. The Big Picture infographics relate the book’s themes to the big concepts, big processes, and big data that will help you make sense of American politics. Snapshots of America provide you with a lot more data to help you understand who the American people are, and they include Behind the Numbers boxes to help you dig into the question of what challenges our diversity poses for the task of governance.
critical thinking analysis and evaluation of ideas and arguments based on reason and evidence
As political scientists, however, not only do we want to understand how the system works, but we also want to assess how well it works. A second task of critical thinking is evaluation, or seeing how well something measures up according to a standard or principle. We could choose any number of standards by which to evaluate American politics, but the most relevant, for most of us, is the principle of democracy and the role of citizens.
evaluation assessing how well something works or performs according to a particular standard or yardstick
THE BIG PICTURE: How to Think Critically
We can draw on the two traditions of self-interested and public-interested citizenship we have discussed to evaluate the powers, opportunities, and challenges presented to American citizens by the system of government under which they live. In addition to the two competing threads of citizenship in America, we can also look at the kinds of action that citizens engage in and whether they take advantage of the options available to them. The United States has elements of the elite, pluralist, and participatory ideals of democracy we discussed earlier, and one way to evaluate citizenship in America is to look at what opportunities for participation exist and whether citizens take advantage of them.
To evaluate how democratic the United States is, we include in each chapter a section called Citizenship and . . . , which looks at the changing concept and practice of citizenship in this country with respect to the chapter’s subject matter. That feature looks at citizenship from many angles, considering the following types of questions: What role do “the people” have in American politics? How has that role expanded or diminished over time? What kinds of political participation do the rules of American politics (formal and informal) allow, encourage, or require citizens to take? What kinds of political participation are discouraged, limited, or forbidden? Do citizens take advantage of the opportunities for political action that the rules provide them? How do they react to the rules that limit their participation? How do citizens in different times exercise their rights and responsibilities? What do citizens need to do to keep the republic? and How democratic is the United States?
To put all this in perspective, many chapters include another feature that gives you a more concrete idea of what citizen participation might mean on a personal level. Profiles in Citizenship introduce you to individuals who have committed a good part of their lives to public service, focusing on what citizenship means to those people and on what they think all citizens can do to keep the republic.
Each of these features is designed to help you to think critically about American politics, either by analyzing power in terms of who gets what, and how, or by evaluating citizenship to determine how well we are following Benjamin Franklin’s mandate to keep the republic.
In Your Own Words
Understand the essential reasons for approaching politics from a perspective of critical thinking, analysis, and evaluation.
Citizenship and Politics: The gap between the democratic narrative and the practice of American politics
One of the core values of American political culture is democracy, an ideal that unites citizens—both those who are born here as well as more newly minted naturalized citizens—in the activity of self-governance. In terms of the right to vote, we have grown more democratic in the past two hundred years. Many more people can participate now—women, African Americans, and eighteen-year-olds. Although it has been subject to some authoritarian battering lately, as have other democracies around the world, our national narrative, one shared by most Americans no matter what our ideological positions, is that we are a strong and active democracy, if not the premier democracy in the world.
Does it matter to the success of a democracy if relatively few people take an active political role (by paying attention, voting, exchanging political views, and the like)?
The prevailing narrative is that the American notion of democracy doesn’t ask much of us except that we pay attention to the news of the day and come together periodically and vote to elect our public officials. But most of us don’t even do that. The news we get, as we have seen, is highly mediated by people who are trying to influence our views, American turnout rates (the percentages of people who go to the polls and vote on election days) are abysmally low compared to those of other Western industrialized democracies, and surveys show that many Americans are apathetic toward politics. Even in 2008, a year of unusually high turnout, only about 60 percent of eligible voters cast a vote although, remarkably, that number was almost duplicated in the midterms of 2018.
How does American democracy work with such low rates of participation or interest on the part of the citizenry? One theory, based on the elite notion of democracy described in Chapter 1, claims that it doesn’t really matter whether people participate in politics because all important decisions are made
