Coming in December, this valuable supplement will provide an insider’s guide to the 2010 midterm elections. When placing your order, be sure to use the ISBN on this page to ensure that your students receive the supplement packaged FREE with their textbook.

The Logic of American Politics, 4th Edition

The logic of American politics? Are those snickers from your students as they deride the phrase an oxymoron? By helping them see that political institutions and practices are imperfect solutions to collective action problems, distinguished scholars Samuel Kernell and Gary C. Jacobson—and new coauthor Thad Kousser—reveal a rationale to the U.S. political system and give students a window through which they can not only view American politics but also come to understand it.

Known for its engaging narrative, the book’s new edition continues to weave historical context, current politics, and analytic concepts into a text that gently strengthens students’ theoretical understanding while hooking them with great storytelling. In order to make the argument fully accessible to a student audience, the new edition highlights passages that apply the collective action and institutional design themes presented in the introduction.

The fourth edition has been revised and updated throughout, and will include full coverage of the 2008 elections. Two major developments in the new edition deserve special note:

• a new section in the first chapter introduces students to a “toolkit” of institutional design concepts—command, veto, agenda control, voting rules, delegation—and examples of how they work.With this toolkit, students learn the concepts for exploring America’s governmental system in later chapters.

• with a fully revised final chapter, Logic looks forward to assess the implications of its argument for widely promoted reforms of policy and institutions.

Tables, figures, photographs, cartoons, bolded key terms, a glossary, annotated reading lists, review questions, and exercises help illustrate core ideas and aid in review and study. A series of thematic boxes further the book’s analytic framework:

• Logic of Politics examines the design of various political institutions in light of the objectives they were intended to achieve.

• Strategy and Choice shows how officeholders and those seeking to influence them employ institutions to advance their goals.

• Politics to Policy highlights how public policies reflect the institutions that produce them and evaluate institutional capacity to solve the nation’s problems.

For more information about The Logic of American Politics, 4th Edition, click here.

Lone Star Politics

Texas is in a bit of a dilemma—it is a rapidly growing state saddled with a constitution that was written by conservative farmers in 1876. Texas’s government struggles to meet the needs of an increasingly diversified population and the challenges of an economy driven by large multi-national corporations, many on the cutting edge of the information age. How has Texas developed and flourished over the years, but failed to fully respond to these changes?

Lone Star Politics explicitly focuses on the disconnect between the outsized myth of Texas with its legendary political history and the reality of the state’s day-to-day governance to help explain who gets what resources and how they are distributed. The engaging and accessible writing style makes this a book that students of all levels will actually want to read. And when they do, they’ll get both description and analysis, a balance of institutions and behavior, as well as comparisons of Texas with other states.,p> “Texas vs. _______” feature boxes use narrative, tabular data, and critical thinking questions to show how Texas works differently from the rest of the country, while “Texas Legends” boxes show how certain celebrated figures and institutions influence Texans and their identity as well as shape Texas politics today.

For more information about Lone Star Politics, click here.