Click here to download a PDF copy of this syllabus. For obvious reasons, the structure of this class changed significantly in March 2020. Below is the syllabus as originally written.

Research Strategies in Public Policy

Brooklyn College, Spring 2020

Course Overview: How do you tell if a policy has achieved the desired effect? What explains public support for some policies and not others? What factors lead to different policy outcomes between countries? Reviewing research on these and related questions, this course will provide a foundation in methodological approaches to political science. Students will examine and apply conventional quantitative and qualitative tools, from logistic regression to coding interview data, through a combination of reading discussions and lab exercises. This course also covers brass-tacks skills like defining concepts, formulating research questions, and formatting bibliographies. The course culminates in a literature review assignment, which gives students the opportunity to apply these research skills and familiarize themselves with a body of literature in which they are interested.

Texts: You do not need to purchase books for this course. All readings and worksheets are available digitally, either on Blackboard or through the CUNY library system. If you have trouble accessing or obtaining the reading materials, please let me know as soon as possible.

Requirements and Grading: This course consists of a lecture section each Tuesday and a laboratory section each Thursday. The laboratory sessions will consist of team exercises in the first half of the semester and guided independent work in the second half. Lecture sessions will involve some direct lecture, but will also include seminar-style discussions on assigned texts. It is thus important that you come to Tuesday classes having read and prepared to discuss the assigned texts. Formal requirements are as follows:

• You will be graded on participation. Grading on participation is not black and white, but if you do not consistently come to class prepared with the assigned readings, pull your own weight in team exercises, or stay on task during open labs, your participation grade will suffer. Your participation grade will also suffer if you routinely have your phone out, or if you are generally disruptive in discussion. Your overall participation grade, out of ten points, is awarded at the end of the semester.
• You are expected to complete eight lab exercises. For the first two units, the Thursday session will be dedicated to a mix of independent and team-based exercises. The exercises vary in content, but are all geared toward fundamental research skills. Each exercise is graded out of five points, for a total of forty points for all eight. If you are going to miss a Thursday class, please let me know in advance, and I can provide a take-home version of the exercise.
• You will be expected to give a short presentation on a course reading. In the first two weeks of the semester, students will be sorted into groups of three (give or take). Each group will be asked to select a reading from the syllabus to present to the class. The presentation should emphasize three elements of the article: the research question, the literature review, and the data and methods by which they are collected. An assignment sheet is available on Blackboard.
• You will be expected to complete a literature review. The final project for the semester is a response paper of 7–10 pages concerning a methodological controversy in Political Science. Some sample topics are provided on the literature review assignment sheet, but you will be permitted to pursue your own with instructor approval. The goal is to help you scope and synthesize current literature on a contemporary topic of debate. You will be asked to turn in a 1–2 page proposal, including a short prospective bibliography, on April 2. The proposal will be graded out of 5 points. A rough draft of the paper (around 4–6 pages) is due by April 23 and will be graded out of fifteen points. The final draft will be due at the final lab meeting, May 14, and graded out of twenty points.

Since the course as a whole is graded out of 100 points, your raw score at the end of the semester is also your percentage score in the course. I assign letter grades by the usual scale: 93–100 is an A, 90–92 is an A-minus, 87–89 is a B-plus, 83–86 is a B, 80–82 is a B-minus, and so on. Feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns about grading over the course of the semester.

General Class Guidelines: While I do not grade on attendance specifically, you are nonetheless expected to attend class regularly having completed and prepared to discuss the required reading. As not just quantity but also quality of participation is important, I strongly recommend that you stay on topic during class discussions.
 
I do not permit cellphone use during class, and I encourage you to avoid using other electronics as well, if possible. If you use a laptop or tablet in class, please only use it for purposes related to the course (taking notes, consulting readings, e.g.). You are encouraged to print out PDF readings for in-class use.

Academic Integrity: A key part of this course is formatting in-text citations and bibliographies in accordance with the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (the standard in many Political Science journals). Good citation practice is always important, of course, but especially in a course like this, which counts learning to cite properly as one of its core objectives
 
Consistent, complete, and accurate citations are essential for avoiding plagiarism. Plagiarism is any act of presenting someone else’s words and/or ideas as your own. Each student is responsible for knowing what constitutes plagiarism and avoiding it. If you are unsure, the full CUNY Academic Integrity Policy and the Brooklyn College procedure for its implementation is available online here. If a faculty member confirms a violation of academic integrity, they are required to report it. Familiarize yourself with CUNY’s Academic Integrity Policy and avoid violating it.

Accessibility: In order to receive disability-related academic accommodations students must first be registered with the Center for Student Disability Services (CSDS). Students with a documented disability, or who suspect they may have one, are encouraged to set up an appointment with the Director of Student Disability Services by calling (718) 951-5538. If you have already registered with the CSDS, please provide me with the appropriate documentation and discuss your specific needs with me, and I will provide any necessary accommodations.

Course Schedule

• Tues., 1/28: Introductions, syllabus overview.
   
• Thurs., 1/30: Lab Exercise #1 — Resource Scavenger Hunt
   
• Tues., 2/4: Foundations of Empirical Social Science
  • Max Weber, "Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy," in Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Edward Shils (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949).
     
    This is long. Read from p. 89 onward.

Unit 1: Quantitative Methods

• Thurs., 2/6: Lab Exercise #2 — Descriptive Statistics
   
• Tues., 2/11: Time-Series Data
  • Donald Campbell and H. Laurence Ross, "The Connecticut Crackdown on Speeding," Law and Society Review 3 (1968): 33–54.
     
• Thurs., 2/13: Lab Exercise #3 — Bivariate Regression
   
• Tues., 2/18: Linear Regression
  • Colin and Michael Lewis-Beck, "Bivariate Regression: Fitting a Straight Line," in Applied Regression: An Introduction (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2015), 1–21.
  • Joshua Dyck, Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz, and Michael Coates, “Primary Distrust: Political Trust and Support for the Candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the 2016 Primary," PS: Political Science and Politics 51 (April 2018): 351–57.
     
• Thurs., 2/20: Lab Exercise #4 — Coding Variables
   
• Tues., 2/25: Coding and Interpreting Quantitative Data
  • Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, "The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect," Journal of Democracy 27 (July 2016): 5–17.
  • Erik Voeten, "Are people really turning away from democracy?" Journal of Democracy, journalofdemocracy.org/online-exchange-democratic-deconsolidation.
     
• Thurs., 2/27: Lab Exercise 5 — Constructing a Survey
   
• Tues., 3/3: Data Replicability
  • Gøsta Esping-Andersen, "Decommodification in Social Policy," in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 35–54.
  • Lyle Scruggs and James Allan, "Welfare state de-commodification in 18 OECD countries," Journal of European Social Policy 16 (2006): 55–72.

Unit 2: Qualitative Methods

• Thurs., 3/5: Lab Exercise #6 — Constructing an Interview
   
• Tues., 3/10: Causal Arguments
  • Ellen Immergut, “The rules of the game: The logic of health policy-making in France, Switzerland, and Sweden,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, eds. Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 57-89.
     

March 10 was the final day of face-to-face classes for Spring 2020.
 

• Thurs., 3/12: Lab Exercise #7 — Coding Interview Data
   
• Tues., 3/17: Interpreting Interviews
  • Ziad Munson, "United We Stand? Tensions in the Pro-Life Moral Universe," in The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), 132–54.
     
• Thurs., 3/19: Lab Exercise #8 — Citation and Reference Management
   
• Tues., 3/24: Document Analysis
  • Patrick Coy, Lynne Woehrle, and Gregory Maney, "Discursive Legacies: The US Peace Movement and 'Support the Troops,'" Social Problems 55 (2008): 161–189.
     
• Thurs., 3/26: Workshop — Drafting a Proposal

• Tues., 3/31: Concept Formation
  • Giovanni Sartori, "Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics," American Political Science Review 64 (1970): 1033–53.
     
• Thurs., 4/2: Workshop — Synthesizing Extant Research
  • Paper proposal due.

Spring recess begins Weds., 4/8.

Unit 3: Theoretical Perspectives

• Tues., 4/21: Ordering the Political
  • Cedric Robinson, "The Order of Politicality," in The Terms of Order, second ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 7–38.
     
• Thurs., 4/23: Workshop — Peer Review
  • Rough draft due.
     
• Tues., 4/28: Abstraction and Reification
  • Kevin Floyd, "On Capital, Sexuality, and the Situations of Knowledge," in The Reification of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 1–38.
     
• Thurs., 4/30: Workshop — Evaluating Suggestions and Revisions
   
• Tues., 5/5: Models and Assumptions
  • Carol Cohn, "Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals," Signs 12 (1987): 687–718.
     
• Thurs., 5/7: Workshop — Revisions, ctd.
   
• Tues., 5/12: The Purpose of Theory
  • Sheldon Wolin, "Political Theory as a Vocation," in Fugitive Democracy, ed. Nicholas Xenos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 3–32.
     
• Thurs., 5/14: Final Paper Roundtable
  • Final paper due.

return

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