Why and how do interest groups participate in electoral politics? What are the benefits of this activity, and the drawbacks? Do groups really influence outcomes? We look past conventional wisdom and examine data to help us understand the more complex answers to these questions that don't get covered on cable news.

An internship will help you gain invaluable knowledge and skills that can serve as a stepping-stone to your career. You can find an internship locally, in a major city, or abroad. Seeking an internship requires a great deal of initiative on your part - you must both find a site where you can work and connect with a faculty member who will support you in your academic efforts related to that work.

The study of networks in political science, the social sciences and beyond has grown rapidly in recent years. This course is a comprehensive introduction to methods for analyzing network data. We will cover network data collection and management, the formulation of network theory and hypotheses, network visualization and description; and methods for the statistical analysis of networks. The course will introduce multiple applications of political network analysis in the real world.

Reading of selected political theorists from 16th to 19th centuries: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Marx, and Nietzsche. Emphasis on the nature of the political world and the forms of understanding and activity appropriate to it.

A practicum/internship will help you gain invaluable knowledge and skills that can serve as a stepping-stone to your career. You can find an internship locally, in a major city, or abroad. Seeking an practicum/internship requires a great deal of initiative on your part - you must both find a site where you can work and connect with a faculty member who will support you in your academic efforts related to that work.

This course will focus on advanced topics in survey design and analysis. Topics covered include different approaches to sampling, how to construct and use survey weights, and tools for analyzing and enriching survey data, including approaches to conducting matching and multiple imputation, as well as the construction and analysis of panel data. The course will also focus on designing and analyzing survey experiments.

This course introduces students to how the Supreme Court works as a legal institution, by examining landmark civil liberties decisions of the Court within their political and historical contexts. As an Integrative Experience course, this course also connects knowledge and skills from multiple sources, helps build oral communication, collaboration, and critical thinking skills, and strengthens students' analytical understanding of how the Supreme Court works. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-POLSCI majors.

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The media have been known as the "fourth branch" of the American political system, and not without reason. This course examines the changing role of media in American politics. Key issues include how media shapes citizens' thinking about politics, how politicians and citizen activists try to advance their goals through media, and how media outlets themselves shape what is considered news.