Princeton Readings in American Politics

One feature of the American political media that I’ve oft had occasion to the lament is the lack of influence by the field of political science. It’s generally taken for granted that some familiarity with economists’ research is relevant to writing about economic issues, but people seem very comfortable making broad, sweeping assertions about the American political system that are totally uninformed by research into it. It’s true that political science isn’t really science like physics that’s going to definitively answer every question you might have, but empirical and theoretical inquiry by political scientists can and does shed a lot of light on a lot of important issues. Certainly it seems to me to stand up to economics as a viable body of research, so I don’t know why people are so comfortable ignoring it.

One issue, however, may be that it’s not very accessible. So I’d like to offer a preliminary recommendation to anyone interested in deepening their understanding of American politics to check out Richard Valelly’s edited volume Princeton Readings in American Politics. This is academic work, so it’s a bit slow-going and I certainly haven’t read it cover-to-cover yet (full disclosure: I got sent a free copy by PUP) but what I have read has been interesting. And as you can see from the table of contents it covers a nice broad range of important topics in US politics.