Teaching Introduction to American Government/Politics: What We Learn from the Visual Images in Textbooks

Abstract

Political science students learn the fundamental principles and values about the American political system from American government/politics textbooks. Most of the major textbooks used in these courses utilize the traditional institutional and behavioral approaches to the study of American government and politics, which examines institutions and processes from a hegemonic perspective with emphasis being placed on the political actors who dominate these institutions. As a result, the struggles of nondominant groups are not treated as integral in American historical development or political experience. Situated in a literature review of similar studies, we use content analysis to examine visualizations of African Americans in 27 circulating introductory American Government/Politics textbooks to ascertain whether these illustrations reinforce or argue against traditional, hegemonic coverage of politics. To test our hypotheses, we sampled 27 circulating introductory American Government/Politics textbooks published from 2004 to 2007. Our findings support previous studies to indicate continued hegemonic coverage of politics, but with lessening concentration.

Keywords:

• African American politics
• hegemony theory
• visual images

This work originates from a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston, MA. Both authors contributed equally to this work. The authors would like to thank Michael Ford, Gloria Weathers, and Brandon C. Hubbard for their research contributions, the APSA panel and audience for their revision suggestions, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Notes

Source: Data collected from sample of 27 American government/politics textbooks, published between 2004 and 2007 and ranging from the 3rd to 21st editions.

Note. Although this contingency table is useful in revealing patterns that may support testable hypotheses, we use Chi-square as a more robust tool to determine how strong the association of gender is to the three categories of representation. We used χ² as a goodness of fit to test the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between gender and each variable. The Chi-square for gender and leader indicate there is a very strong association between the two variables. The difference in gender and leadership is statistically significant at the .001 level (χ² = 47.023, df = 1). However, the measure of association between gender and victim, is not statistical significant (χ² = 1.163, df = 1). Finally, for gender and poverty, at the .10 level, there is a statistically significant relationship, where (χ² = 3.189, df = 1). However, given the close proximity to our critical value, this relationship though significant is not as profound as the association between gender and leadership. Percentages may not equal 100.

Table format adapted from source (Feiner and Morgan 1990).

∗The Civil Rights chapter is combined with the Civil Liberties chapter and are found either after the American Founding chapters or located at end of text, if no national/domestic and foreign policy chapters are included or located before the national/domestic and foreign policy chapters if included.

^–These texts did not have separate chapters on Civil Rights. The Landy et al. (2004, 1e) included a section on civil rights (averaging about 4–5 pages each) at the end of most chapters in their textbook.

∗∗It should be noted that this is the only text where the Civil Rights chapter accurately precedes the Civil Liberties chapter and follows the American Founding chapters.