Government & Politics

Exam board: AQA
Level: A-Level
Subject: Politics
First teaching: September 2017
First exams: Summer 2018

Create confident, literate and well-prepared students with skills-focused, topic specific workbooks.
Our Student Workbooks build students understanding, developing the confidence and exam skills they need, whilst providing ready prepared lesson solutions.
– Supplements key resources such as textbooks to adapt easily to existing schemes of work
– Offers time-saving and economical lesson solutions for both specialist and non-specialist teachers
– Provides flexible resource material to reinforce and apply topic understanding throughout the course, as classwork or extension tasks, or with revision
– Creates opportunities for self-directed learning and assessment with answers to tasks and activities supplied online
– Prepares students to meet the demands of the specification by practising exam technique and developing their literacy skills

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You may be OK with standard stuff like Conservatism and Democracy, but do you really know what Patrimonialism is? And what about Oligarchy? Anarcho-syndicalism?

Politics is, we are willing to bet, the most passionately argued-over subject matter, and yet how many of us flounder around in confrontational debates because we have no grip on political theory, just a vague notion that they are all out to get us?

30-Second Politics will help dispel this fog mistrust and paranoia. It challenges political theorists of all colors to come up with no-frill, no-spin, tell-it-like-it-is explanations of the 50 most important political -isms, -archies, and -ocracies that have pertained since the time of Periclean Athens. At no public expense, the book explains each political theory in nothing more than two pages, 300 words, and some propaganda-style imagery, for we all know that a picture opportunity is worth a thousand words of dull interview.

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Exam board: AQA
Level: A-level
Subject: Politics
First teaching: September 2017
First exams: Summer 2018 (AS); Summer 2019 (A-level)

With My Revision Notes, every student can:
– Plan and manage a successful revision programme using the topic-by-topic planner
– Consolidate subject knowledge by working through clear and focused content coverage
– Test understanding and identify areas for improvement with regular ‘Now Test Yourself’ tasks and answers- Improve exam technique through practice questions, expert tips and examples of typical mistakes to avoid

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In the United States, politics has become increasingly nationalized in recent years as voter decision-making is now driven by partisan or national political forces rather than the attributes of individual candidates. Indeed, voters now seem more concerned with which of the two national parties will be in power across all levels of government as opposed to which candidate will represent them individually. The phenomenon has now reached levels unseen since the nineteenth century, when the party ballot was in use and voters were generally unable to select among individual candidates.

Nationalized Politics asks and answers the question, “how has nationalization influenced elections across different political eras?” Jamie L. Carson, Joel Sievert, and Ryan D. Williamson look at historical variation in nationalization through an analysis of congressional elections from 1840 to 2020. By examining roughly 180 years of elections, the authors leverage considerable differences in electoral competition, electoral rules, nationalization, polarization, and partisan advantage via the incumbency advantage. Moreover, Carson, Sievert, and Williamson employ a unique survey design to capture citizen attitudes toward the nationalization of politics to further consider the question of how nationalization is currently shaping politics. Providing a comprehensive history of US congressional elections, Nationalized Politics illustrates the roots of the current electoral landscape in the US.

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States are more vulnerable than people think. They can collapse in an instant—when consent is withdrawn.This is the thesis of this thrilling book. Murray Rothbard writes a classic introduction to one of the great political essays in the history of ideas.In times when dictators the world over are falling from pressure from their own people, this book, written nearly 500 years ago, is truly the prophetic tract of our times.Étienne de La Boétie was born in Sarlat, in the Périgord region of southwest France, in 1530, to an aristocratic family, and became a dear friend of Michel de Montaigne. But he ought to be remembered for this astonishingly important essay, one of the greatest in the history of political thought. It will shake the way you think of the state. His thesis and argument amount to the best answer to Machiavelli ever penned as well as one of the seminal essays in defense of liberty.La Boétie’s task is to investigate the nature of the state and its strange status as a tiny minority of the population that adheres to different rules from everyone else and claims the authority to rule everyone else, maintaining a monopoly on law. It strikes him as obviously implausible that such an institution has any staying power. It can be overthrown in an instant if people withdraw their consent.He then investigates the mystery as to why people do not withdraw, given what is obvious to him that everyone would be better off without the state. This sends him on a speculative journey to investigate the power of propaganda, fear, and ideology in causing people to acquiesce in their own subjection. Is it cowardice? Perhaps. Habit and tradition. Perhaps. Perhaps it is ideological illusion and intellectual confusion.La Boétie goes on to make a case as to why people ought to withdraw their consent immediately. He urges all people to rise up and cast off tyranny simply by refusing to concede that the state is in charge.The tyrant has “nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you?”Then these inspiring words: “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”In all these areas, the author has anticipated Jefferson and Arendt, Gandhi and Spooner, and those who overthrew Soviet tyranny. The essay has profound relevance for understanding history and all our times.As Rothbard writes in his spectacular introduction, “La Boetie’s Discourse has a vital importance for the modern reader—an importance that goes beyond the sheer pleasure of reading a great and seminal work on political philosophy, or, for the libertarian, of reading the first libertarian political philosopher in the Western world. For La Boétie speaks most sharply to the problem which all libertarians—indeed, all opponents of despotism—find particularly difficult: the problem of strategy. Facing the devastating and seemingly overwhelming power of the modern State, how can a free and very different world be brought about? How in the world can we get from here to there, from a world of tyranny to a world of freedom? Precisely because of his abstract and timeless methodology, La Boétie offers vital insights into this eternal problem.”

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Jürgen Habermas’s book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first published in 1962, has long been recognized as one of the most important works of twentieth-century social thought. Blending philosophy and social history, it offered an account of the public sphere as a domain that mediates between civil society and the state in which citizens could discuss matters of common concern and participate in democratic decision-making through the formation of public opinion.  Now, in view of the digital revolution and the resulting crisis of democracy, he returns to this important topic.

In this new book Habermas focuses on digital media, in particular social media, which are increasingly relegating traditional mass media to the background. While the new media initially promised to empower users, this promise is being undermined by their algorithm-steered platform structure that promotes self-enclosed informational ‘bubbles’ and discursive ‘echo chambers’ in which users split into a plurality of pseudo-publics that are largely closed off from one other. Habermas argues that, without appropriate regulation of digital media, this new structural transformation is in danger of hollowing out the institutions through which democracies can shape social and economic processes and address urgent collective problems, ranging from growing social inequality to the climate crisis. 

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This work presents the argument that given our legal system as it is now composed, the judiciary cannot act neutrally but instead must act politically. This edition has been updated to include material covering “Spycatcher”, the Guildford Four and Lord Denning.

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This Student Guide will help you to:

* Identify key content for the exams with our concise coverage of topics
* Avoid common pitfalls with clear definitions and exam tips throughout
* Reinforce your learning with bullet-list summaries at the end of each section
* Make links between topics with synoptic links highlighted throughout
* Test your knowledge with rapid-fire knowledge check questions and answers
* Find out what examiners are looking for with our Questions & Answers section, for the core political ideas, plus Anarchism, Feminism and Nationalism

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Exam papers covered: Edexcel AS and A level Politics
First teaching: September 2017
First exams: Summer 2018

This Student Book with e-book is specifically designed for the Edexcel AS and A level Politics 2017 specifications, giving you comprehensive coverage of the qualification content and great support for the new assessments – in both print and digital formats.

• Covers the whole of the two-year A level course, and includes all three components of the course so you have everything you need in one book.
• Clearly explains all key terminology and includes support for the assessments in every unit, including exam-style questions and guidance with exam technique.
• Comes with an e-book to give you easy online access to the textbook content on the go.

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