Suchergebnisse

Many Political Science courses include sections on campaign finance activity. Courses on Congress and on the Presidency may include sections on the financing of elections for these offices, and courses on campaigns and elections will probably cover campaign finance. In addition, courses on interest groups and on parties may include sections that focus on the activities of these actors in financing campaigns for public office.The Federal Election Commission can provide an assortment of materials that may be useful in teaching about campaign finance. Some of these materials are most useful as sources of data for lecture preparation, while other offerings can be used as part of student projects or papers. In the sections below, these materials will be described, and some classroom uses will be suggested.

This annotated syllabus provides suggestions for college professors who are interested in developing a one-semester course that examines the influence of the news and other public affairs programming provided by the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN) on the formation of the public's opinions about salient issues of national interest.An earlier version of this syllabus was used for advanced undergraduates and graduate students (with an additional reading list and bi-weekly seminar meetings) in a department of communication as a component of their academic preparation in theories of media criticism, performance and "effects," including social responsibility in the news media, media construction of social reality and agenda-setting by the press. This course met twice weekly for one and one-quarter hours.

The courses outlined below are designed to analyze various aspects of the American political process utilizing the capabilities of C-SPAN, the cable coverage of the U.S. Congress. Before exclaiming "Gee, goody, we get to watch T.V.," a few words of explanation are necessary. Until recently, most students of public policy and particularly the Congress were limited to studying it from afar. Woodrow Wilson wrote his classic book Congressional Government (1888) without ever coming to Washington D.C. Many contemporary scholars and journalists interview the participants in the political process and rely on written records, but most cannot base their research on viewing Congress in action. The serious student has had to rely on selective and limited news coverage or wait for a number of years while a select group of events percolated through the academic publishing process to become part of "the literature". Students often come away from political science courses with the impression that the discipline is solely retrospective and lack a feeling for how the tools of political science can be applied to the here and now.

Purpose: The following syllabus is designed to introduce students to public policymaking at the national level of government. As designed, this course has the following goals associated with the process, issues, and institutions of national policymaking:1.Acquaint students with the political dynamics of the policy process— with particular focus on policy networks: those persons from the departments or agencies, members of Congress and their staff, and interest groups who interact on specific policy issues.2.Introduce the complexities of the specific policy issues that form the national agenda (e.g., trade, agriculture, welfare, taxes).3.Emphasize the importance of political institutions and their formal procedures—with particular stress on the budget process and presidential agenda setting.

Most instructors burdened with the sometimes thankless task of teaching an introductory survey course in American government wince at the suggestion that their class is somehow a primer in current affairs. No wonder, for most of us who teach that introductory course expend a great deal of effort to ensure that our readings, our lectures, and our class discussion carefully delineate the difference between political science and political speculation.Yet I fear many of us are so cautious that we wind up throwing the baby out with the bath water. The vast majority of students in our survey courses will not go on to graduate school in political science; indeed, at many institutions, the majority of enrollees in the introductory class may not even be political science majors. Most will become bankers, lawyers, scientists, engineers — in short, "ordinary" citizens rather than full-time, professional observers of politics. In strikes me that the greatest legacy the survey course can provide these students is an inclination to think twice about politics —an appreciation that politics and political choices are rarely as simple or straightforward as they seem in headlines.

The first half of my Introduction to Political Science course deals with normative theory, in particular the theories underlying the American method of organizing a polity. I agree with C.B. MacPherson that Locke's Second Treatise provided the "title deeds" of the liberal state and is a crucial part of American thinking on politics, the individual, and the state. Madison's Federalist #10 is an extension of Locke into the practical matters of organizing a new constitution. This essay describes the classroom use of games, lecture and discussion to introduce students to these theorists.The course begins with Madison, mainly because students can understand and apply the concepts of the entire argument much more quickly. The successful use of games and exercises in the classroom requires an immediate start to student participation, an active expectation of student roles in the course. Two hours of class time is sufficient to discuss and review Madison's argument. Time is spent on its implications for the role of the individual, the state, and the dynamics of politics.

Three years ago I proposed at SUNY Cortland (a liberal arts college emphasizing undergraduate education with a student population of about 5500) the creation of onecredit introductory level module topics courses in our Political Science Department. The purposes of these modules were several: 1) to provide faculty with a testing ground for new courses located at the upper level. One-credit topics modules would allow faculty to experiment with a new course or new subject on a smaller scale, avoiding the necessity of an intellectual and time investment in a full semester offering; 2)to provide some alternate introductory-level course offerings for non-political-science majors in addition to our two core offerings, Introduction to American Government, and Introduction to Comparative World Systems.

In an article entitled "Teaching the Congress and Legislative Process Courses," L. Sandy Maisel found by examining the syllabi of such courses that about half of them involved legislative case study assignments. He suggested that further exploration of these assignments would be appropriate. Since students are so commonly required to do case studies of bills in legislative courses, a description of this type of assignment and discussion of how to implement it would be useful. In this paper, I will cover my use of this type of assignment in a course on the legislative process. In describing this legislative case study requirement, sections on background information, the case study assignment, and student reaction to the assignment, together with a brief conclusion, will be presented.

In teaching political science courses in American government, public policy, and public administration, students have considerable difficulty in conceptualizing the complexity of the two essential values of democratic capitalism.Those values are equality, espousing the values of democracy, and efficiency, depicting the rationale of capitalism.The purpose of this brief essay is to conceptualize more clearly the setting of the infrastructure of public and private relations in the United States. These clusters of power and influence will enable students to comprehend more easily the dynamics of political economy in the United States.