Introduction and Prefatory Remarks

University courses in American Government (including a few that I've taught in the past) have become little more than civics refreshers. We teach and explain The Constitution, some classic readings (usually amounting to one or two of The Federalist Papers, maybe a selection of DeTocqueville), and tell you to read the newspaper. We walk you through the different parts of the U.S. political system. You learn that there are 435 members of Congress, you are explained the back-breaking logic of the electoral college, and you debate "current issues." Your principal reading over the course of the semester is a textbook written for 6th-graders.

That's nice and all, but I really hope you learned your civics in high school. My plan for this course is quite different. To be specific, this course will be more theoretical, more comparative, and will NOT have a basic text.

1. THEORY. Political scientists and other social scientists have actually written a lot about politics in the United States over the past century. People like William Riker, Theda Skocpol, Robert Putnam, Mancur Olson, Hanna Pitkin, Stephen Skowronek, Kenneth Shepsle, Garrett Hardin, Samuel Beer, David Mayhew, Donald Kinder, James Q. Wilson, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and many others have spent much of their lives studying American politics from all sorts of perspectives. In this course you will read their work, and I will ask you to engage critically with it.

Of course, we will study the Constitution, the Federalist, the Anti-Federalist, and many other "classic writings" intensively. [In fact, we will read them more intensively than most other university undergraduates in the United States. Check out the syllabus.] Yet it is my prediction that you will gain more from this class if you engage critically with the classics by comparing them to contemporary thinking about politics. It turns out that contemporary political scientists have some pretty smart things to say about the thoughts of Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, DeTocqueville, Jay and others.

Beyond that, I hope you learn something about the concepts that political scientists have been working with over the past few decades, things like "agenda-setting," "the state," "transaction costs," "framing," "capture," "spatial voting," "party discipline," "retrospective voting," "moral hazard," "Duverger's Law," "bounded rationality" and other things.

2. COMPARATIVE. It is also my hope that we will study American politics in the context of world politics, to ask why the United States mimics or differs from other nations. Why, for instance, do we have two parties [for the last 140 years, the same two dominant parties] when so many other political systems are characterized by three or more viable parties? Why are bureaucracies and "states" in other nations of the world seemingly more powerful than they are here? Do other nations organize their election and their legislatures in the same way that we do? Why or why not?

3. NO DOMINANT TEXT. I wish a good overall text existed for a class like this, but my prediction is that you will learn better from a broad selection of readings than from a single textbook. There is, of course, a "basics of American government" textbook for this course, but you will need it only for fact-checking and things like that.

4. WRITING. Oh yeah, one other thing. I think that you are best served as undergraduates at Harvard University not so much when you learn to take multiple choice or memorization exams as when you learn to write creatively and rigorously. Periodically throughout the course, I will ask you to examine critically the writings of the Federalists, DeTocqueville, contemporary political scientists, even the opinions of Supreme Court justices. I will expect you to come up with novel and original interpretations of their thinking, and I will ask you to challenge their arguments. I will, furthermore, expect you to make your points cogently, succinctly, persuasively and clearly. I have faith that you can do it.

Now you, young Crimsonian, may disagree with this philosophy, in which case you have two options. Seek your Introduction to American Government elsewhere (and I won't be offended if you do), or stick it out with me and your fellow students in class and come along for the ride. I'm the one to blame if it's not an enriching, challenging undergraduate experience.

Besides, what do you think Nigel and the boys would do?