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A Review of: “Politics in Britain”

In Politics in Britain Bruce F. Norton has brought to bear decades of experience teaching American students about British politics. Norton thus approaches the subject with an eye to what would need to be explained to students coming from the American system such as policy-making in a parliamentary system, the role of class in British political attitudes and party politics, the composition and functions of strong political party organizations, and the role of pressure groups in a system far more corporatist than ours. The result is a text that is immensely useful for undergraduate courses in comparative politics and British politics. The book is highly readable; it is written without jargon and yet introduces the key terms necessary for studying the British system. It uses frequent, both contemporary and historical, examples to illustrate the system it describes. It considers the subject in thematic ways that will help students grasp the major concepts. For example, the chapter on history is organized around how the union came to be, not just in formal, institutional terms but in popular terms as well. The themes are fear, relief, and pride, which gave people common cause and facilitated nationbuilding. In this chapter Norton discusses the Protestant Ascendancy, the successive wars with France, economic interests in the expanding and developing market, the developing transportation and communications infrastructure, the monarch, and the suffrage as means of unification. The book is also very current, working in not only examples from contemporary politics but also, for instance, discussion of the evolution of popular attitudes towards government and the notion of class identity into the chapter on political culture and analysis of the functioning of the devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales in the chapter on local governments. Overall, the organization of the writing is tight and directed towards answering principal questions about how the political system came to be and how it functions in the present. The book includes chapters on all the requisite subjects, including history, political culture, the constitution, parties, elections, interest groups, parliament and the executive, the judiciary, local government and the European Union, minus a chapter on the media, and possibly foreign policy or Britain in the world. Norton is judicious about the extras; the text has few of the distracting sidebars that often appear in