Teaching

Survey research is an important method that political scientists often use to understand people in the world around us. By asking a standardized set of questions to a random sample of respondents, we can make inferences regarding the opinions and behavior of the larger population from which it was drawn. Surveys also offer numerous opportunities for experimental research, allowing scholars to make confident causal claims about the determinants of public opinion and behavior. In recent years, the advent of Internet-based surveying and online recruitment of respondents has “democratized” survey research, allowing many researchers and scholars with limited resources to design and conduct their own surveys from scratch. Surveys are also increasingly conducted around the world, outside of the context of advanced democracies where this method originated. Yet these developments have introduced new challenges in terms of ensuring that inferences drawn from survey research are valid. Topics include sampling, survey modes, questionnaire design, survey experiments, pre-analysis plans, ethics and the Institutional Review Board, and analyzing survey data.

Taught: Spring 2024

Reproducibility and open scientific practices are increasingly required of scientists and researchers. Training on how to apply these practices in data analysis has not kept up with demand. During this course, students will develop skills to meet this demand. This course uses a practical approach based on iterative application assignments that provide students with practical experience with real data problems.

Taught: Spring 2024

The aim of this course is both to share the academic research on political attitudes, public opinion, and political behavior and to link this research into places where active research is taking place on the big questions of our age. Topics to be covered include many of the theories developed to explain how public opinion is formed, if and why it changes, and the relationship between public opinion and the political behavior of citizens and elites. Therefore, the course will describe and analyze many of the factors that influence the formation, structure and variation in public opinion: information processing, education, core values, racial attitudes, political orientation (ideology and party identification), political elites, social groups, the media and religion. Additional topics include presidential approval, congressional approval, and the relationship between public opinion and public policy. The course will also train students in several concepts of statistical analysis (assuming no prior knowledge) so that students can use these tools as part of their own research projects.

Taught: Fall 2023

This course focuses on the politics and political conflicts within and around bureaucratic organizations, primarily but not exclusively those of the federal government. Attention is given to the characteristics of bureaucratic organizations and their members; their relations with one another as well as with other participants in policy making also considered. Major activities within bureaucracies–planning, program development, organizing, and service delivery– are discussed with a view of clarifying their political implications and consequences and the problems associated with controlling and changing bureaucracies.

This course is intended to introduce you to the political and legal rationales behind, the historical origins of, and the procedures used by the U.S. federal bureaucracy. The goal of the course is to provide a richer view of both why and how the federal bureaucracy “does what it does.” The course will provide students with a better sense of how they can influence politics at the federal level. The bureaucracy, as we will see in the course, is the place where policy is actually made (as opposed to being chosen – which is done by a combination of Congress, the President, the courts, and (ultimately) the voters.) Accordingly, many of the most potent ways to affect public policy require involvement with federal agencies.

Taught: Fall 2023