Watch and learn! Carefully selected videos will help bring key concepts and theories to life, preparing you for your studies and exams.

Click on the following links which will open in a new window.

1. Interlocking Directorates

The website http://www.theyrule.net/ allows you to see relationships of the U.S. ruling class. Using their interactive menus, you can build maps connecting major U.S. corporations, institutions, and the members that sit on each of their boards. Explore the site by selecting one of the corporations listed and display their board of directors. What other corporations and institutions are they associated with? How does this relate to Dye’s analysis from your textbook?

2. Who Rules America?

There is a website associated with William Domhoff's book Who Rules America? For a more detailed analysis of America’s ruling class, explore the links on his website. You may want to view the diagrams of the interlocking directorates or read about how power functions at the local level.

3. Money and Politics

The Center for Responsive Politics is a “non-partisan, non-profit research group based in Washington, D.C. that tracks money in politics and its effect on elections and public policy.” By accessing their free database, you can view how many campaign contributions each candidate has received. You can also search who made contributions. Look at one of the most recent presidential or Congressional elections. How much money did the candidates receive? Who received the most contributions? Where did the money come from and how does this vary across candidates? Look at what industries made contributions. What percentage did they give to the Democrats and Republicans, respectively? Who spent the most on lobbying? Why do you think these groups spend so much on political campaigns?

As discussed in Chapter 8, think tanks provide an important role in doing research and then feeding their research findings and policy recommendations to sympathetic politicians, lobbyists and journalists. Here are two web sites for two important think tanks – the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation. What do you find in common about these sites? What differences did you notice? Can you see how one might be more influential with Republican policy makers and the other with Democratic policy makers?