Teaching

Courses Taught

POLS 30815 How to (Not) Lie with Stats
Are stay-at-home orders effective during a pandemic? Should parents allow kids to have screen time? What role did demographic shifts play in the 2020 elections? Does the infield shift work? Modern society constantly faces questions that require data, statistics, and other empirical evidence to answer well. But the proliferation of niche media outlets, the rise of fake news, and the increase in academic research retraction makes navigating potential answers to these questions difficult. This course is designed to give students tools to confront this challenge by developing their statistical and information literacy skills. It will demonstrate how data and statistical analyses are susceptible to a wide variety of known and implicit biases, which may ultimately lead consumers of information to make problematic choices. The course will consider this issue from the perspectives of consumers of research as well as researchers themselves. We will discuss effective strategies for reading and interpreting quantitative research while considering the incentives researchers face in producing it. Ultimately, students will complete the class better equipped to evaluate empirical claims made by news outlets, social media, instructors, and their peers. The goal is to encourage students to approach data-driven answers to important questions with appropriate tools rather than blind acceptance or excessive skepticism.

POLS 33002-02 State Politics and Government
Although US state-level governments have been described as “laboratories of democracy” where a significant amount of policy making takes place, many of us who study political science often familiarize ourselves only with government at the federal and international levels. However, state governments create many of the policies we experience in everyday life and the federal government will look to state policies for direction. The importance of state governments was especially evident in the case of COVID-19, as states decided for themselves how to prevent the spread of the virus and administer the vaccine, resulting in a hodgepodge of regulations across the country. State government wields a lot of power over our lives, and it is important for us to understand not only what our state-level representatives are doing, but also the law-making powers they hold.

While we all live in the same country, we experience and understand politics in very different ways. This class is structured to familiarize students with the unique governmental challenges and features of the American states, as well as to provide them with the analytical insight and methodological capabilities to critically engage with political questions in the future. We will do this by focusing on interactions among citizens, offices – such as governors and legislators – and intervening institutions (e.g. campaigns & elections, interest groups, and direct democracy) at the state level.

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