America's Democratic Republic is part of the highly popular Penguin Academic Series, which offers accessibly written, elegantly designed, and highly affordable trade-format books by pre-eminent scholars.

Written with a lively, narrative style and constructed around a single “story line,” this text gets to the heart of American's frustrations with our government. Acknowledging that citizens' cynicism tends to make people withdraw from civic life, this text examines why our government can seem so unsatisfactory, identifying the heart of the American political system: strong democratic aspirations among the general public conflicting with the republican constitutional foundations on which the country is based.