Block 3 Featured Course / Department: Political Science / Professor: Dr. Dana Wolfe
The goal of this course is to help you make sense of elections by using a Political Science lens. To do so, this course will be broken into four main sections. First, we will consider how people think about politics, paying particular attention to the power of identity. Second, we will think about how elections and candidates prime those identities by diving into the 2016 & 2020 elections (and the years that led up to this point). Having established a broad understanding of how and why elections may matter, we will then turn to the 2024 Presidential campaign, trying to predict what will happen and then debrief the results. Finally, we will analyze some of the more fundamental building blocks of campaigns, including media messaging and government efforts.
Reading List
Required texts:
- Lilianna Mason, Uncivil Agreement
- Kathy Cramer, The Politics of Resentment
- Ismail White & Chryl Laird, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior
- Susan Caroll, Gender and Elections
- John Sides, Michael Tesler, & Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America
- John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, & Lynn Vavreck, The Bitter End: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy
- Matthew H. Graham & Milan W. Svolik, “Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States”