This book brings the study of American politics and government alive by presenting American politics as a dramatic narrative of conflict and change. It adopts an American political development approach in order to show how the past, present, and visions of the future interact to shape governing institutions and political forces. There is a strong emphasis on the role of ideas. Two key political development principles - path dependency and critical choice - are central to explaining how and why the past affects the present and future. Each chapter begins with an opening vignette that epitomizes the key themes of the chapter. The book's developmental approach does not diminish the attention it gives to current matters but it does provide a richer context for the appreciation and understanding of the whole gamut of attitudes, behaviors, organizational activities, and institutional relationships that comprise American political and governmental life.

Author Biography

Marc Landy is Professor of Political Science at Boston College and the winner of the 2009 Boston College Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, Phi Beta Kappa Omicron of Massachusetts. He graduated with a BA, Magna Cum Laude, from Oberlin College and has a PhD in Government from Harvard University. He teaches courses on American political development, the American presidency and American federalism, and he is the former chair of the Political Science Department at Boston College. He also serves as Faculty Chair of the Boston College Irish Institute, coordinating the academic component of its executive programs on various topics in American government, most of which are sponsored by the US State Department. He and Sidney M. Milkis co-wrote Presidential Greatness (2000 ). He is also the author of The Environmental Protection Agency from Nixon to Clinton: Asking the Wrong Questions (1994) and the editor of Creating Competitive Markets: The Politics of Regulatory Reform (2007) and Seeking the Center: Politics and Policymaking at the New Century (2001). Sidney M. Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor in the Department of Politics and Director for Studies in Democracy and Governance at the Miller School of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. His books include The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal (1993); The Politics of Regulatory Change (1996), with Richard Harris; Political Parties and Constitutional Government: Remaking American Democracy (1999); Presidential Greatness (2000), with Marc Landy; The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2011, 6th edition (2011), with Michael Nelson; and, most recently, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (2009). He is the coeditor, with Jerome Mileur, of three volumes on twentieth-century political reform: Progressivism and the New Democracy (1999); The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism (2002); and The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism (2005). His articles have been published in Perspectives on Politics, Political Science Quarterly, The Journal of Policy History, Studies in American Political Development, and numerous edited volumes.