INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN POLITICS

We are constantly inundated with political information from friends and family to social media posts to advertising campaigns to news programming to ... we will just leave it at that for now. To be honest, that should not come as a surprise given that politics effects our lives constantly from the federal to the state to the local level. But how do we wade through that political information we receive throughout the day? We start thinking like a social scientist (and more specifically, a political scientist) and we learn about the individual and institutional political forces at play. In this course, we are going to explore American politics in a scientific manner. What do I mean by that? Well, we are going to answer questions such as: Why do people run for office? Why do people vote (and choose to vote the way that they do)? How is policy created? Why do American political institutions seem to be so slow at making policy, executing it, and upholding it or striking it down? What we are not going to do in this class is debate the rights and wrongs of political parties or your individual political beliefs. We are going to use quantitative and qualitative approaches to study American politics at the individual and institutional level. In doing so you will learn to be a critical consumer of political information that can be used in your next classes and in your daily life.