Government, taken apart.

Learn each unit with in-depth visuals and explanations

AP US Government and Politics

5 chapters

Foundations of American democracy

the Constitution and federalism

Congress, the president and the Supreme Court as paper towers on the Constitution, a red veto arcing from the president back to Congress

Interactions among branches of government

Congress, the president, the bureaucracy and the courts

The House of Representatives’ 435 seats and the Senate’s 100 as hemicycles, yea seats standing red and nays gray, each with a tally board showing 232 yeas past the 218 majority and 57 yeas short of the 60 needed for cloture

Civil liberties and civil rights

the Bill of Rights and equal protection

Ten paper tablets of the Bill of Rights standing between a gray block of government and a crowd of pawns, the First Amendment’s tablet red where a blue push from government meets it

American political ideologies and beliefs

values, polls and policy

A hypothetical electorate of 1,500 voter balls on a floor, red for approve, with a random sample of 400 sorted into a tray beside it and a dot plot of the samples’ estimates piling up inside a blue margin-of-error band around the true 54.1%, one red dot just outside

Political participation

voting, parties, groups and media

The 2024 Electoral College as two stacks of state slabs, red rising past a 270-to-win line to 312 and blue reaching 226, the largest states labeled