Spring 2021 (Post-Election) Course Update
For students look for updates on the Spring 2021 plans:
(1). Am I teaching? Yes. I am going to go ahead and teach Gov. 50 and Gov. 65. I had the opportunity to be out on leave this spring (Spring 2021), but as the election returns came in… I thought, there is no way I am not going to teach public admin (with an incoming administration, which is always an interesting time) and public opinion (what just happened?) after an election like that. So I’m currently planning to be out on a research leave in Spring 2022. If you want to take these courses at any point over the next two years, now’s the time.
(2). Gov. 65 (public opinion) will include a lot of new material related to the 2020 election. I mean: how could it not? As I wrote in the CMC post-election questions, it is certainly worth waiting until the vote is actually counted to really start making pronouncements about what exactly happened this year with regard to polling and so on. Still, it seems that there is a lot of interest in understanding what actually took place — why the election seemed to be so much closer than expected in some of the key states. This is not the only material in Gov. 65, but it is going to be a big part of the course.
In general, Gov. 65 is a constantly evolving course because:
I am frequently running new projects that I can use as examples in the course.
There are great new publicly-available data sets for more recent events.
The state of public opinion itself is changing.
The state-of-the-art technology for data collection and analysis continues to change rapidly too.
This spring we’ll focus a fair amount on a couple of major themes:
Understanding the 2020 election (I ran a pre-election survey this year, and we’ll look at other data too). This will involve both the technical aspects (how did the polling go? What should be done to improve it?) and the substantive interpretation (what does it all mean?).
My continued interest in primary elections and within-party competition for office (and the implications for political accountability and the success or failure of particular political ideologies). I have a lot of new data for this.
The intersection between public opinion and political institutions. This is a major theme of a project on the death penalty I’m working on currently with fellow CMC Professor Bessette. Included as part of this survey project is some interesting data on public attitudes towards “defunding the police” as well, and related topics.
I think it will be a lot of fun. At least in terms of material: a lot of what we will work with in class is directly related to current research projects of mine. This is stuff I really care about (and will argue you should too!).
I am still thinking about how best to manage teaching this material remotely, if that is what we end up doing. I’m still learning from my current students this term (Fall 2020) about what is working and not. Of course, we’ll also get some certainty before too long about whether there will be an on-campus component or not. What I wrote in the late October update is still true: there will be some synchronous and some asynchronous components of the course. I think this course in particular requires a lot of 1-on-1 (or at least very small groups) work, so I will build in a lot of opportunities for that.
This course is easier if you’ve already had a stats-related course (like Gov. 55), but a lot of this material is not directly covered in any great detail in those first-level courses, so it is not a requirement. I’ll teach a lot of this at the level of “hand-waiving” at some of the details; I am not going to try to teach you several semesters of stats all at once. We will also do this course using Stata, which I think is a nice balance between being professionally useful and being accessible.
This course will count as a Group A elective for the data science sequence and as an elective in the data science major. It also counts as an elective for the public policy major and the government major.
If you are interested in the course, feel free to send me an email to check in and ask whatever questions you might have.
(3). The material from Gov. 50 will be critical for understanding the coming conflicts in the Biden Administration. Whatever the final results of the 2020 election turn out to be — we won’t know the outcome of the two Georgia runoffs for U.S. Senate for some time — it seems likely that Democrats will not have an easy time passing legislation in the U.S. Senate. Additionally, with recent additions to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden Administration will face a skeptical judiciary. So several of the major themes of Gov. 50 will end up being important for the unfolding story of U.S. politics:
How will the conflicts between the more moderate and more progressive Democrats play out within the administration, and how will that translate into action by federal agencies?
What are the limits of executive power for action in periods of congressional gridlock?
“Whose bureaucracy is this anyway?” Does it belong to Congress, or President Biden? To what extent for each, and for what purposes?
And, in the presence of gridlock in Washington: what’s going on in public administration at the state and local level?
This should be a really fascinating time, with many events related to the course material actually occurring as the term unfolds.
As with Gov. 65, this is also a course I really enjoy teaching because it is close to my own research interests. Public administration is about a lot more than just learning what people do who run agencies (although that is quite interesting!). It’s about thinking through how anything gets done in a democracy, where the elected officials themselves aren’t going to do the actual work. Studying public administration helps to answer this question: “ok, the election is over… so… now what?”
As with Gov. 65, I wrote up some initial thoughts about how I will manage this in the spring (in October; see the previous blog post). The plan will continue to be developed as I get some more information back from my current students, get a bit more detail about CMC’s plans for the spring, and have a chance to think in some more detail about how I want to modify the course post-election.
These things will definitely be in the plan:
I still think everyone interested in public affairs should read The Power Broker. This is a great extended example for this course. Frequently, students have mentioned to me after the class (in their evaluations, or just chatting later) that this was a highlight of the course. I love the book. We’re doing it. (PS: this makes a great audio book, so if you are tired of Zoom… this is something you can do while taking a walk. It’s great.).
I like doing asynchronous podcasts for a lot of content delivery. I particularly like the idea that you can listen to these and get your eyes of a screen too — I know students are spending a lot of time in their chairs at their computers. I’ll try to liberate you from that as much as I can. Of course, there will be some synchronous components too, and plenty of opportunities for discussion and so on.
Writing assignments that are intended to have you practice the actual skills you will need in for working in public affairs. (Lots of writing memos.)
A focus on exploring careers in public affairs. I think this is one of the exciting parts about taking a course in public administration — you get a sense of what people actually do, and how they get those jobs, and whether or not you think those might be fun careers (they are!).
Gov. 50 satisfies the policy process requirement in the public policy major. It also satisfies the intermediate requirement in the government major.
Before closing this out: I do want to say ‘thank you’ to my current students in Gov. 20 and Gov. 116. I’ve been so lucky to have an outstanding group this fall, with all the challenges of teaching remotely, having the election, and all the other stuff. They’ve done a lot to help make clear what kinds of issues will be challenges for this spring. To the extent things will go well this spring, a lot of it will be to their credit - not mine.
Let me know if you have questions about the courses!
Andy Sinclair