CONCLUSION: PREPARING TO ANALYZE THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM

This introductory chapter has set the stage for an analytical treatment of the phenomena that constitute American politics. This analytical approach requires attention to argument and evidence. To construct an argument about some facet of American politics—Why do incumbent legislators in the House and Senate have so much success in securing reelection? Why does the president dominate media attention?—we can draw on a set of five principles. The linchpin is the rationality principle, which emphasizes individual goal seeking as a key explanation for behavioral patterns. But politics is a collective undertaking, and it is often structured by political arrangements, so we also focus on collective action and the institutions in which such action occurs through the lens of the collective action principle and the institution principle. The combination of goal-seeking individuals engaging in collective activity in institutional contexts provides leverage for understanding why governments govern as they do—making laws, passing budgets, implementing policies, rendering judicial judgments—that is, the policy principle. But we could not make entire sense of these activities without an appreciation of the broader historical path: the history principle. These five principles, then, are tools of analysis. They are also tools of discovery, permitting the interested observer to uncover new ideas about why politics works as it does.

To know if an argument truly contributes to our understanding of the real world, we need to look at evidence. In the study of American politics, much of this evidence takes the form of quantitative data, and much of it is accessible online. Making sense of such evidence is what political scientists do. In Analyzing the Evidence on pp. 26–31, we provide a brief glimpse of how to go about this task. We hope it helps you think analytically about political information as we move through the rest of the book.

Drawing on the lesson of the history principle, we will begin in the remaining chapters of Part 1 by setting the historical stage. Then, with analytical principles and strategies in hand, we can understand what influenced and inspired the founding generation to create a national government and a federal political system, while preserving individual rights and liberties.