Note
This page describes my current and planned courses at Claremont McKenna. Current CMC/5C students should free to get in touch to ask questions: asinclair at cmc dot edu.
This page lists full-semester standard courses.
I also have offered an independent study for CMC’s Washington Program from time to time. If you are headed to DC, and are interested, I would be happy to talk to you about plans for offering independent study options in the future.
I also am quite active in the CMC Summer Research Program, which I consider to be an important part of my teaching responsibilities. This is a neat opportunity (for CMC students in a variety of majors) to spend a summer doing funded research projects on campus. If you haven’t heard about it, check it out here: https://www.cmc.edu/summer-research. If you are interested in working with me, please get in touch.
Prospective students should make sure to check in with the Admissions Office about visiting courses by following this link (here). I think there is a lot to love about being a student at CMC (and at the other Claremont Colleges as well). We’re doing great stuff! Come join us.
An important note: If you are interested in how I am going to approach my Spring 2021 courses, see this blog post: here.
Gov’t 20: Introduction to American Politics
Gov’t 20 is a popular course at CMC because many non-majors also take this to fill their graduation requirements. While some of the content is in common between sections, professors design and teach their own version of this course - so you should look around to see which Gov’t 20 section might most interest you. I am always happy to have students of any major in Gov’t 20 — I don’t mean to convert everyone into Government or Public Policy majors, but I will do my best to convert you into having a lifelong interest in politics, no matter what you do. Students without much of a background in American politics are also always welcome; if you are worried about not knowing much about American politics going into the course, be sure to let me know. I want everyone to be successful.
I really enjoy teaching this course. While introductory, in the sense that it assumes very little knowledge about American government or politics, it is not simplistic. This is an opportunity to examine the whole of American politics and think about the really big and important questions and challenges in our society. See the links below for some versions of the syllabus for this course.
Gov’t 50: Introduction to Public Administration
As a society, we focus a lot of attention on elections and the relationships between voters and elected politicians. That’s a good thing! Elections are important and I have spent a great deal of my research energy studying them. Still, there is more to politics. Every day, governments large (the U.S. federal government) and small (the City of Pasadena) make important decisions about how to implement policies.
An elected politician does not staff the window at the DMV, or count the bears in a National Park, or administer the MTA. It’s not just which public policies a legislature can pass that matters - it’s also how those policies are administered (for a more extensive view of this argument, see here). For a democratic policy process to function, there needs to be some reasonably well-functioning tie not only between voters and politicians but also between politicians and the rest of the “policy workers,” like bureaucrats and contractors. Making those links function, and do the things we might want them to do, is quite challenging - and sometimes requires trading off between desirable but conflicting goals.
This course gets at some of the fundamental challenges of democratic policymaking. For example, on one hand, we often want bureaucrats to act independently and to use their technical expertise without “interference.” On the other hand, we also want them to be responsive to what voters want and to fit into a constitutional order which places power in the hands of elected officials. These issues raise all kinds of ethical and practical dilemmas. Exploring them is the point of the course.
In addition to some standard readings in public administration, this course will also feature an extended example: the career of Robert Moses, as described in Robert Caro’s famous book, The Power Broker. This is a truly epic book; if you want to check out a bit about it, see the “40-years on” piece in the NYT (here). One of my students described The Power Broker as the “eighth wonder of the world” (thanks, Ian). It’s one of my favorite books of all time! And it also happens that the career of Robert Moses spans much of the development of modern American public administration, from the reform movements of the progressive era, through the new deal, and into post-war America. You’ll get to look at great characters like Belle Moskowitz, Al Smith, and Franklin Roosevelt. It is a fantastic study of politics. So we’ll read it throughout the semester (some students like to do this on audio book, which can be a lot of fun too).
As I have designed the course, it really serves these goals:
To give students practical insight into what careers in public service actually look like. Assignments also involve researching public affairs graduate schools and people who actually hold unelected public service jobs. I really had no idea what the options were in this field when I was an undergraduate; it helps to take a look around.
To give students practical skills for public affairs careers: most papers are written as memos — the ship of state sails across a sea of memos.
To expose students to the important questions of the field at the level of political and constitutional theory.
To expose students to concepts of public management, and the practical challenges of public administration at the city, state, and federal levels in the United States.
To encourage students to think about how administration influences politics, shapes public policy, and matters for outcomes that we all actually care about.
To help students form their own views on the tradeoffs involved in different kinds of administrative arrangements. Some of the questions in the field do not have simple answers about what is best.
I suppose, also, I hope to share how much fun, and how interesting, public administration can be. I once had a public administration scholar, when I was still figuring out what I was going to study, make a joke about: “I study the bureaucracy. That’s boring. What do you do?” Nope. This is fascinating. This is important. This is fun. You’ll see.
This course satisfies the policy process requirement (item 3) in the public policy major and the intermediate course requirement (item 4) in the government major. I am also happy to have students simply interested in taking the course as an elective; there are plenty of reasons for students in other majors (interested in careers ranging from consulting to scientific research) to have an interest in public administration. If you have questions about the course, feel free to get in touch. An example syllabus is below. I will generally teach this course in the spring semester.
Gov’t 65: Public Opinion, Theory and Practice for Public Policy
This course combines the technical aspects of a survey methods course with literature in political science and public policy on the role of public opinion in public affairs. In short: we are going to study what public opinion is, why we care about it, and how we measure it all in the same course.
The goal for the course is to make it possible for you to read, understand, and place in context current work on public opinion; to execute your own data analysis; and to write up the results of your analysis in a way that an ordinary human being can read them. Ideally, a student will leave this course with a completed project which can be used as a writing/analysis sample for job and graduate school applications.
As with many of my other courses, I also want to reach students who may not realize that they are interested in quantitative social science, or realize how much fun it is. For what it is worth: I didn’t like math much for quite some time. But, it turns out, I really enjoy being able to use these kinds of tools to answer questions that I actually care about answering. That got me hooked, and maybe it will for you as well.
The general teaching strategy here is mostly for me to have you read more accessible books to motivate the questions we address and then to present the more technical material in class. I got some great feedback from the first cohort to do this at CMC (thank you, Spring 2019 team!), and so now the course features a number of smaller assignments (more like a problem-set model) to help you build up your skills.
It will be helpful, but is not strictly required, for students to have taken a prior course involving quantitative methods for social science of some kind - like CMC’s Gov’t 55 (Introduction to Research Methods in Political Science), Econ 120 (Econ Stats), Math 52 (Stats), or Psyc 109 (Psyc Stats). This is a bit more practice-oriented than Econ 125 (Econometrics) might be, depending on the instructor, but you might also benefit from having taken at least some course in which you’ve seen an introduction to linear regression. If you haven’t done any of these courses, that’s fine, and don’t be discouraged from taking the course, but talk to me when you sign up.
You will need to get access to a copy of Stata* and it will be helpful to have a laptop to bring to class so we can workshop materials in class. Stata is installed on CMC’s lab computers – but I strongly advise you to get your own (IC is fine); at the moment, this course is not scheduled to use one of the computer lab classrooms for its regular meetings. You can buy a perpetual license for Stata 16 IC for $225 or get a 6-month license for $48, here: https://www.stata.com/order/new/edu/gradplans/student-pricing/. If cost is an issue with being able to take the course, please make sure to talk to CMC’s financial aid office and to me. I care a great deal about making the course accessible to all CMC students.
The course can count for CMC’s data science sequence (at the moment, get in touch with Professor Huber as a contact for data science until we can get it formally added to the list).
If you have questions about this course, feel free to get in touch. I will generally try to teach this in the spring semester; a copy of the spring 2020 syllabus is below.
Ok: *. For students plugged into the “data science” world, you might wonder: Why not teach this in R? I think Stata is easier to learn quickly. It is a nice balance between having some easy ways to get started (using simple drop-down menus, with lots of defaults, and no real coding required) and being able to do more complicated things (writing your own scripts and much more). Now, it is also true that R is cheaper: it’s free to download. Yet, as one of my colleagues used to say, “R is free… for people who place no value on their time.”
Gov’t 116: Public Policy Process
This course is about the politics of making public policy. While other courses in government and public policy focus on particular parts of the process (for me, Gov’t 50, Public Administration, and Gov’t 65, Public Opinion), this course is focused on theories of how to understand the whole thing put together. My goal in teaching this course is for each student to emerge with their own, better developed, “framework for action” — figuring out how to practically apply theoretical ideas to advance policy solutions to public problems.
This course is closely related to the policy courses I taught at NYU (see UPADM GP 101 and Core GP 1022), and it retains the professional school emphasis on practical skills (op-ed writing, memo writing) and a blend of theory and examples. The course ends with an extended case study on prohibition, which, in one event, is both an example of tremendously successful policy advocacy (getting the thing passed) and just about every policy design failure you can imagine. A theme of the course is that politics will shape the policies you can design and the policies you can design also shape your political opportunities.
I find this a very intellectually satisfying course to teach, and working on this project over the years (along with some of my closest collaborators at NYU) has really shaped the way I think about the world.
This course counts towards both the government (as an elective) and public policy (as a public policy process requirement) majors at CMC. Students from around the colleges are also welcome in the course. If you have questions about it, or about getting in, feel free to ask. A link for an example syllabus is below.
Note: for students who have already done the CMC DC program, there is some chance you will have seen the prohibition reading before. If there is a lot of overlap for one part of the course, just let me know; I have some alternative readings ready.