California Politics and Government: A Practical Approach (Guide to Science Teaching Series.)
THE PROMISE AND PERFORMANCE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY incorporates the best political science scholarship in a concise and readable format that will challenge your students? preconceived notions about American politics. Regardless of whether they are cynical, patriotic or neutral, this text will provide them with the analytical tools to explore whether or not and to what extent our system functions properly.I believe that the Bond text is superior to most of the other American Government texts in terms of content. Its strength lies in the way that it attempts to bring current empirical research on American politics into the introductory discussion of the subject. . . . Pedagogically I like the authors? focus on issues related to the promise and performance of American democracy.The three biggest strengths of the text are: it challenges students to questions the performance of the American governmental system and asks students to engage the material at a deeper level; the text uses very good examples as hooks at the beginning of each chapter that should lead to more student interest in the text; because the text uses an approach of challenging students to assess performance the text reads less like a traditional textbook that reports only the facts (which students find less appealing).Without exaggerating, I believe that their introduction to the concept of democratic government is the best in any introductory American Government text that I have seen.The book has ?a very contemporary focus, very alert to current development in political science, with no obvious political or ideological bias, and a thesis that can be used to provoke student discussion.?--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.