Analysis of Electoral Politics

Catalog description

The new politics, its technology, and the strategic perspectives that underlie it. PL SC 429 Analysis of Electoral Politics (3)(BA) This course meets the Bachelor of Arts degree requirements. This course engages students in the empirical study of electoral politics in the United States. Elections in the U.S. are about voters, candidates and the rules that determine what these actors do to structure the course of the election and that lead to the final outcome. In empirical political science, analysis involves the systematic examination and evaluation of relevant data to solve a problem or answer a question. In this course, then, students use data about voters to systematically analyze their actions and decisions in U.S. presidential elections, with an emphasis on understanding why they make the choices they do to produce the resulting election outcomes. Throughout the course, students will draw on a range of publicly available data and use statistical analyses to investigate the "cost" of voting; evaluate competing theories of voter choice; examine how candidate evaluations, candidates' issue stances and retrospective evaluations of candidates influence voter choice; assess how vote choice is shaped by an individual's partisan identification; and evaluate how social demographic trends shape election outcomes. At the conclusion of the course, students will have the substantive knowledge and analytic skills to evaluate the assertions and conclusions of politicians, pundits, and political scientists as they contemplate campaigns and election outcomes. Students are required to have an understanding of introductory statistics (equivalent to the knowledge they would gain from PL SC 309 or STAT 200 ) prior to taking this course.