With fresh insight from new co-author Andrea Campbell, We the People, Twelfth Edition, once again sets the standard for showing students how government impacts their lives and why it matters who participates. Campbell relates true, personal stories of how government affects ordinary citizens. This focus is reinforced by the book's signature "Who Are Americans?" and "Who Participates?" features which motivate critical thinking about how Americans experience and shape politics. Learning goals ensure that students maintain consistent focus on core concepts in the text, in its companion InQuizitive learning tool, and in supporting critical-thinking exercises.

Author Biography

Benjamin Ginsberg is the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science, Director of the Washington Center for the Study of American Government, and Chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author or coauthor of 20 books including Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public, Politics by Other Means, The Consequences of Consent, and The Captive Public. Before joining the Hopkins faculty in 1992, Ginsberg was Professor of Government at Cornell University. His most recent book is The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. Ginsberg's published research focuses on political development, presidential politics, participation, and money in politics. Theodore J. Lowi was John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University. He was elected president of the American Political Science Association in 1990 and was cited as the political scientist who made the most significant contribution to the field during the decade of the 1970s. Among his numerous books are The End of Liberalism and The Pursuit of Justice, on which he collaborated with Robert F. Kennedy. Margaret Weir is Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She has written widely on social policy in Europe and the United States. She is the author of Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States and coauthor (with Ira Katznelson) of Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal. Weir has also edited (with Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol) The Politics of Social Policy in the United States. Caroline J. Tolbert is Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa, where she regularly teaches the introductory American government course and was awarded the Collegiate Scholar Award for excellence in teaching and research. Her research explores political behavior, elections, American state politics, and the Internet and politics. Tolbert is coauthor of Digital Citizenship: The Internet Society and Participation; Why Iowa? How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process; and Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide. Digital Citizenship was ranked one of 20 best-selling titles in the social sciences by the American Library Association in 2007. Her latest coauthored scholarly book is Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Opportunity. She is President of the State Politics and Policy Section of the American Political Science Association. Andrea Louise Campbell is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Campbell's interests include American politics, political behavior, public opinion, and political inequality, particularly their intersection with social welfare policy, health policy, and tax policy. She is the author of Trapped in America's Safety Net: One Family's Struggle (2014), How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Citizen Activism and the American Welfare State (2003) and, with Kimberly J. Morgan, The Delegated Welfare State: Medicare, Markets, and the Governance of Social Provision (2011). Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Behavior, Comparative Political Studies, Politics & Society, Studies in American Political Development, and Health Affairs, among others. She holds an A.B. degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Social Insurance and served on the National Academy of Sciences Commission on the Fiscal Future of the United States.