Program Overview: Textbook Development

Virtually all of the current textbooks used in U.S. high schools for comparative politics are AP-level textbooks. For years, the leading textbook in the field has been Almond and Powell's Comparative Politics2. Their parent work is university-level, but so widely used that they have written a special high school edition which is cited here. Gabriel Almond was one of the pioneers of the functional approach to comparative politics. His two functions of interest groups-interest articulation and interest aggregation-are iconic examples of the level of abstraction and consequent difficulty reached in the book. Like comparative politics textbooks, the first parts of Almond and Powell (totaling over 150 pages) set out the model employed. The remainder of the book presents a dozen country studies (one chapter each), including the United States. The country studies apply the authors' model on a comparative basis, albeit one case at a time. The authors select their countries from a list developed by the College Board for AP courses. The list includes one country from each major subcontinent, more or less.

Most of the textbooks in comparative politics follow the Almond and Powell example. Authors begin with a rather sophisticated theoretical framework, often systems or functionalist, followed by country studies that apply the framework or set it into motion.

Our textbook follows a quite different format and set of expectations. When we received our grant, we spent many hours researching existing textbooks in comparative politics, but based on a rather specific research question that is based in turn on a rather specific objective.

Our objective, quite candidly, is to mainstream the teaching of comparative civics, and, therefore, our strategy is to place it wherever it fits most comfortably in the curriculum. Toward that end, the question guiding our textbook development (and the program development of which it is a part) asks: "What should middle school and high school students know about civics in comparative perspective, not to pass the AP test in Comparative Politics, but to meet the existing National Standards in Civics and Government and the emerging International Framework in Civics?"

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