PEARSON EDUCATION Cause and Consequence in American Politics

Debuting it its first edition, Cause and Consequence in American Politics emphasizes and explores causal questions in American politics. This best-selling author team writes with a clear, straightforward style brimming with rich, real-world examples. This text helps you to apply critical thinking tools―tools pulled directly from a social scientist’s playbook―to start answering those questions, see past today’s headlines, and understand why things really happen in our political world. From the Back Cover An Emphasis on Causality.  From the very first chapter the authors train students to distinguish between the concepts of “correlation” and “causation” as they examine political phenomena, helping turn them into good critical thinkers and more thoughtful citizens.  “How Do We Know?”  In every chapter, this unique feature hooks students with a provocative, important political question related to that chapter’s topic and then schools them in the techniques political scientists use to answer it.  Each box provides context for – and underscores the importance of –  the question, highlights the means and challenges of answering it, and ends with a summary on what conclusions social scientists have reached. Political Culture Emphasis.  Chapter 2, “Political Culture,” sets the stage for the book’s emphasis on how Americans’ shared political culture―our prizing of  individualism, democracy, and liberty, respect for property, and religious rights―influences our politics and government. Case Studies.  Integrated throughout, these high-interest, in-depth examples apply the ideas developed in the book to real world events, bringing abstract concepts to life and making them concrete.   Each Case Study concludes with “Thinking Critically” questions that help students understand, apply, and synthesize key points. Section Headings as Complete Sentences. Headings and subheadings throughout the text take the form of complete sentences, giving students a clear and complete snapshot of the concepts and key points about to be discussed.  Together, the headings form a précis that can also be used as a study and review tool.  Study Assists.  Key terms are boldfaced and appear with definitions in the margin, allowing students to review important concepts with ease.  Key terms are also found at the end of each chapter and in the glossary. About the Author X. J. Kennedy, after graduation from Seton Hall and Columbia, became a journalist second class in the Navy (Actually, I was pretty eighth class). His poems, some published in the New Yorker, were first collected in Nude Descending a Staircase (1961). Since then he has written six more collections, several widely adopted literature and writing textbooks, and seventeen books for children, including two novels. He has taught at Michigan, North Carolina (Greensboro), California (Irvine), Wellesley, Tufts, and Leeds. Cited in Bartletts Familiar Quotations and reprinted in some 200 anthologies, his verse has brought him a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lamont Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an Aiken-Taylor prize, the Robert Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America, and the Award for Poetry for Children from the National Council of Teachers of English. He now lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he and his wife Dorothy have collaborated on four books and five children.   Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and critic. He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and three collections of criticism, most notably Can Poetry Matter? (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. A best-selling literary anthologist, Gioia has edited or co-edited over two dozen collections of poetry, fiction, and drama. He has also written two opera libretti and has collaborated with composers in