Syllabi for the Fall Semester

Here are the links to my syllabi for the semester. I’m teaching three courses.

• Intro to American Politics
• Intro to Political Methods
• Voting Behavior and Political Participation

Introduction to American Politics

The intro to American politics course uses Keeping the Republic by Barbour and Wright. I didn’t assign a reader but do assign extra readings occasionally. The class runs a standard three-midterm-plus-final setup, but I’m also asking students to write a critical book review based on one of three public policy books:

• Michelle Alexander (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, New York: The New Press.
• Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer (2015). $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin.
• Andrea Louise Campbell (2014). Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle. Chicago Studies in American Politics. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

This is the first time I’ve taught intro, but I’d eventually like to get to a point where I could run it without a textbook — every week built from papers, articles, and book chapters instead of a chapter reading.

Introduction to Political Methods

Most political methods courses seem to fall into one of two camps: one focused heavily on philosophy of science, the other run like a baby-stats course with heavy emphasis on doing quantitative analysis in some stat package.

I think there’s a third way, which is the sometimes-uneasy combination of the two — and that’s how I’m running methods (in the tradition of how it’s been run the last few times at UMM). The first two-thirds of the class focuses on how to ask good questions, how to write a lit review, etc. The last third focuses on doing quantitative analysis in R. I’m assigning parts of Political Analysis Using R. The university has “free” access to a bunch of Springer books, which saves students the cost of a Stata book and introduces them to a free program that looks good on a resume. Sounds good to me.

Voting Behavior and Political Participation

This course is a general introduction to political behavior, usually run during election years. My twist focuses more on the political-participation half of the title. The first third covers election-type topics and “voting behavior” — partisanship, media, priming and framing, electoral rules, etc.

The second third covers mass political action — group changes, protests, and social capital.

The final third, which I think is a unique addition, deals with the link between public policy and political participation. Often called policy feedback, this section covers how policies can construct citizens, create constituencies, and shape political participation.

One challenge with this course is that it isn’t textbook-based at all — hopefully that doesn’t mean too much reading toward the end.