Acknowledgments

This book belongs to a tradition.

The open-education-resources tradition

The most direct debt is to OpenStax — the Rice University-based publisher whose free, openly licensed college textbooks have, over the past decade, saved American students many billions of dollars. OpenStax did not invent the open-textbook idea, but it proved that a free textbook could match the quality of a $300 commercial volume across the disciplines. The Open American Government Project is in that lineage. So is every other book published under the "Open [Discipline] Project" banner.

The book is also indebted to the broader open-education-resources (OER) movement — to the Saylor Academy, to MIT OpenCourseWare, to the OER Commons, to the Hewlett Foundation's foundational support for open textbooks, to the librarians and faculty members at hundreds of community colleges and state universities who have pushed for textbook adoption decisions that respect students' wallets. The standard American Government textbook, in print from a major publisher, costs $150 to $300. Required course. Often a new edition every two years to defeat the used-book market. The student pays. This book is free, and that is the point.

American Government is a synthesis discipline. No single chapter in this book is original political science; what is offered is a synthesis of generations of work, presented in a balanced and current frame for an undergraduate audience. The book stands on the shoulders of every political scientist whose research it cites.

A partial list, for the major themes:

  • On the political theory of the founding: Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Jack Rakove, Akhil Reed Amar, and the long tradition of Federalist Papers commentary going back to Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay themselves.
  • On Congress: Richard Fenno, David Mayhew, Frances Lee, Sarah Binder, Steven Smith, and the contemporary work of the Brookings and AEI congressional-studies programs.
  • On the presidency: Richard Neustadt, Stephen Skowronek, Andrew Rudalevige, Charlie Savage, and the recent work of the Project on Government Oversight.
  • On the courts and the Constitution: Cass Sunstein, Akhil Reed Amar, Jack Balkin, Sanford Levinson, Lawrence Lessig, Adrian Vermeule, and the originalism scholarship of Steven Calabresi, Randy Barnett, and Will Baude. The Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society both publish journals the book draws on; ideological balance requires reading both.
  • On voting behavior and parties: the long tradition running from V. O. Key through Walter Dean Burnham, the modern work of Alan Abramowitz, Lilliana Mason, Larry Bartels, the team behind the American National Election Studies, and the comparative-politics framework provided by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
  • On polarization and democratic backsliding: Levitsky and Ziblatt, Mason, Ezra Klein, Yascha Mounk, Pippa Norris, and the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) project at the University of Gothenburg.
  • On money in politics: Lawrence Lessig, Bradley Smith, Robert Mutch, Adam Bonica, the Center for Responsive Politics / OpenSecrets team, and the Federal Election Commission's own staff and disclosed data.
  • On gerrymandering and electoral design: Sam Wang, Justin Levitt, Nick Stephanopoulos, the Brennan Center for Justice, the team behind the All About Redistricting project at Loyola Law School, and the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
  • On comparative democracy: Arend Lijphart, Juan Linz, Steven Levitsky, the V-Dem team, the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index team, and the Freedom House analysts.

The list is long, and it is incomplete by design. The bibliography in the back of the book names every primary source cited. Where we have failed to cite an idea we owe to a specific scholar, we apologize and welcome the correction.

A note on ideological range

The scholars cited above span the political spectrum. The book has tried to draw on conservative, libertarian, liberal, progressive, and non-aligned scholarship in proportion to each tradition's contribution to a given question. On any contested question, the book has tried to present the best version of each side's argument with sources from each side. Where the book has failed at this — where a chapter draws too heavily on one tradition's framing, where a contested empirical claim is presented as settled, where a particular intellectual lineage has been short-changed — we welcome correction via pull request. The book is improvable.

The teachers who use this book

The largest source of corrections, additions, and improvements to a textbook like this one is its instructors. The community-college instructor in Texas who notices that an example is dated. The state-university professor in California who flags a balance issue. The high-school AP teacher in Ohio who suggests a clearer way to explain bicameralism. The international-school instructor in Singapore who points out that an example assumes American context the book hasn't established.

Every contribution makes the book better. The repository acknowledges contributors by name (with permission). If you teach from this book and find an error or an improvement, please send it. The CC-BY-SA license means your corrections become part of the book that future students and teachers use.

AI authoring tools

This book was drafted using AI authoring tools — specifically, large language models (Claude, primarily) acting under detailed authorial direction. The drafting process involved generating chapter drafts at scale, then human review, fact-checking, balance auditing, source verification, and revision. This is worth being explicit about for three reasons.

First, transparency. AI tools are now used in commercial-textbook production whether their publishers say so or not. We say so. The drafts are AI-generated; the editorial frame, the balance commitments, the structural decisions, the source selection, and the revision are human. The result is a hybrid that has gone through more revisions in many places than a comparable commercial textbook receives.

Second, the limits of the tool. AI drafting can produce factual errors that look authoritative. AI drafting can drift toward the framings most represented in its training data, which on American politics tends to skew toward the framings of mainstream English-language political journalism. The book has been audited for both kinds of error, but auditing is incomplete. Specific corrections from readers are essential, and the contributing pathway is open precisely because no AI-assisted text can be relied on in isolation.

Third, the gain from the tool. The book exists at all because AI-assisted drafting made a 40-chapter, balanced, current treatment achievable for a small editorial team and a free price tag. A traditional commercial-textbook process for a comparable book would take five years and cost the student $200 a copy. This book took months and is free. That is a tradeoff worth being honest about. We have tried to keep the pedagogical and editorial commitments at commercial-textbook quality while taking advantage of the lower drafting cost. Readers will judge whether we have succeeded.

To the students

This book is for the millions of American college and high-school students who are required to take a course in American Government, who pay $150 or more for a textbook they will mostly not finish, and who deserve a better deal. You are why the book exists. The book is free. The license lets you copy it, print it, share it, adapt it, translate it. Use it. If something in it is wrong, tell us. The book belongs to you.

— The Open American Government Project 2026