bobcatpolisci1

As faculty, I'd suggest that something like this tends to make absolutely no difference when it comes to PhD admissions in, say, top 50 programs. If you think about admissions as a game in which the ad com tries to predict future research success, this is a pretty weak signal. In my current department, something like this has never come up in any admissions discussion I've been a part of. In my old (MA-granting) department, I had students who were active in this sort of thing. I encouraged them if they chose to participate, but provided the same advice--it's something to do now if you have a passion for it, or if you're looking to build skills for a non-academic position. But for those wanting to go on for PhDs, I suggested that more time on the thesis or on GRE prep was probably time better spent. Listen. Grad schools need these kinds of organizations. They fulfill important functions on campus, and can give students valuable skills. But they don't make a middling student a better admissions candidate. Unlike college admissions,, or even MA admissions, PhD admissions is just about whether or not we think you can finish the program, do good research (and perhaps, depending on the program, teach with some proficiency), and get a job. That's what matters, that's what affects a portion of our rankings, and what builds our visibility. Maybe it ought to be different, but that's how it works.

No, sparky, I can't argue that every single intro to American Government class is (or should be) taught the same way. But since Canon wrote the most widely-used intro to American Government textbook in American universities, it might stand to reason that his approach represents something of a core consensus among political scientists about what kinds of materials ought to be taught in a 101 class. The fact that you seem to suggest that your course would differ markedly from what most political scientists would teach provides some evidence, I would think, of why JDs are not often hired to teach these kinds of classes, except at marginal institutions. Also, I do enjoy your arguments about what is and isn't appropriate material for intro classes as opposed to graduate school courses. I suppose that the fact that topics (like judicial behavior) in Canon's text are in fact being taught in community colleges might surprise you. Perhaps you've not been an undergraduate for a while, or you attended an especially inferior college, but this "level" of material is being taught in intro-level political science course by my colleagues and I everyday, and we generally find that students have no trouble following it. Perhaps we should dumb down to your standards, but I'd prefer not to. But the bigger point is that, despite the fact that you suggest all political science theories and explanations are "made-up," the things you cite in response that you've apparently heard of ("iron triangles," "donkey voters") don't really represent the mainstream ways in which political scientists think about these issues anymore. I'd agree that a good class should encourage critical thinking, but I'd also argue that one especially good way to do that is to provide students with the major controversies in political science, and help them to parse them out. Canon's text, along with every other text I've used at this level, presents multiple approaches to answering questions like "how do people choose how to vote?" and encourages students to adjudicate among them. In my class, they leave with more than the half-dozen theories I remember from my law classes--they leave with a general notion of how our explanations for political phenomena have changed over time, and what that might mean for our future. They also learn how academic knowledge is produced, which is a crucial skill for teaching students how to think critically about the information they encounter (and I see you didn't really respond to the portion of my comments in which I defended the teaching of "methods" in intro classes). The sad truth is that the course you propose between the lines would look a lot like an American Government course did before the behavioralist revolution of the 1950s: Focused mostly on institutions and laws, with little attention to how people act (strategically or otherwise) inside them. What you propose teaching sounds outdated, not particularly sophisticated, and doesn't really reflect all the things we know about how political systems function that we didn't 60 years ago. So why would anyone hire you, if they could get even a mediocre PhD? It sounds like you don't think students can handle complex material (and so would suggest they save it until "graduate school"), would offer atheoretical, oversimplified, and outdated explanations of political phenomena, and would generally not provide students with either the breadth or depth that a generically trained actual no-shit political scientist would. So, perhaps the answer is this. An average JD (or you, based on my reading of your comments) might be qualified to teach a course entitled "Intro to American Government." But this class would not offer the same depth or breadth of material, would not involve any instruction about how political science knowledge is produced, would not offer the theoretical groundwork necessary for students to succeed in upper-level course, and would traffic in a limited range of outdated theories. Instead, what they'd get is "I'm just a bill on Capitol Hill" and some stuff on what the law says. Sweet. But I'm sure there'd be critical thinking, right? PS. Lawyers don't really have a monopoly on the socratic method. But since you've shifted your argument some to one based on pedagogy (You PhDs teach all that boring theory, but I make them engage!), consider this: A actually balanced classroom approach involves more than socratic quizzing. At its best, an intro to American class can deliver the opportunity to help students create political knowledge, but working hands-on with polling data, or re-districting studies, or with elected officials, or any number of other primary sources. Even a mediocre class involves getting students to think like social scientists in some way or another. Are you a social scientist? Can you teach others how to think like one? Again, this is a reason departments prefer PhDs...

I'll bite. Let's just take Intro to American Government. If you look at David Canon's intro syllabus--http://users.polisci...all10/index.htm---(he wrote one of the most popular textbooks on American government used in universities), you can actually see his lecture notes. So, let's discuss. In the class session on democracy in America, he covers various theories about what democracy is and what kinds of underlying conditions are required to sustain it (participation, deliberation, capitalism). All of these theories are produced by social scientists, and the debates surrounding the validity of these theories (which, having attended his lecture, I can assure you he discusses) are covered primarily in political science journals. On the "institutions" (Congress, Presidency, Courts, Bureaucracy), most of the material that's covered focuses on the behavior of actors within institutions--ie What motivates the actions of congresspeople with regards to the bills they sponsor/the votes they make? Or how do presidential administrations expand presidential power, and under what circumstances to presidents succeed at enlarging the power of the executive branch, or how do presidents construct and use their power (discussing Neustadt's very influential theory of presidential behavior)? Or under what conditions do congressional oversight committees grant more or less discretion to bureaucratic offices? Or what determines the behavior of senators and judicial nominees during confirmation hearings? Or (for you lawyer wannabes out there) how do we measure the ideological preferences of SC justices, and how do their ideologies affect voting patters over time (not as obvious as you'd think, and all based on research done by political scientists)? On public opinion, campaigns, and media politics: what determines voter turnout? Why is voter turnout in the US low compared to other established democracies? How do people decide which candidates to vote for? How are partisan attachments formed? To what extend are people persuaded in their political preferences by the media? What kinds of media are most persuasive? Cognitively, how do people process political information? What sorts of campaign strategies are most effective at increasing the probability of a candidate's election? How much does money actually matter in determining election outcomes? Interest Groups: Under what conditions do interest groups mobilize to support/oppose legislation? What factors determine their success and failure? Parties: What purpose do political parties serve in the American political system, and how is it different than in other systems? Do parties act differently depending on their goals/audiences (parties in government, parties in electorate, parties in organization), and what determines their success or failure at achieving their goals? What is electoral realignment, and what might cause it? How do "party systems" change over time? Why are third parties so rarely successful in American politics? Social, Economic, and Foreign Policy: How do parties and legislators formulate policy goals and policy? In what ways are/aren't they responsive to popular opinion? How do legislators evaluate the success/failure of policy choices? What are the normative bases of popular debates over policy options in the US? And, of course, he doesn't explicitly cover political culture, but most do. That's just an intro class. To teach that material effectively (i.e. to answer the questions posed under the various topics), you'd have to be able to provide examples and case studies to illustrate each point, and know the debates encapsulated by each question (as in, the various schools of thought with regards to the degree and means of media influence in political behavior--Zaller's massive media effects, McCombs on agenda-setting, Iyengar and Kinder's experiments on priming, Druckman and Chong on framing). Now, maybe you could half-ass it, and just make up some explanations off the cuff . But that's not really teaching a class on American government offered by a political science department, is it? Most of these questions don't have definitive, black and white answers, but there is a body of political science knowledge that constitutes our current best effort to answer them. I'd assert that most political science curriculum design committees expect instructors to be able to communicate those best current answers, how we arrived at them, and what their strengths/weaknesses are with regards to previous answers. This means that in an intro class, you also teach research methods--what's an opinion poll? How do they sample respondents? What's a confidence interval (no intro American class doesn't talk about confidence intervals)? More broadly, even an intro class generally discusses the scientific method with regards to social science research, the idea of independent and dependent variables, and spends at least some time on how political scientists know what they know. I'd assert that most of that material could be better taught by an average instructor with no more than the training offered by a PhD in political science than by an average instructor with no more than JD training. Why? Because all of those debates, the current state of knowledge in each area of debate, and the requisite methods for arriving at that knowledge forms the core curriculum of a PhD program in political science, and it does not in law school. Nearly every mediocre PhD in poli sci trained in American politics will have that material at their fingertips (hell, I do, and my PhD in poli sci focused on Middle Eastern politics), whereas a JD would have to learn the vast majority of it outside of the la school curriculum (and I also took several law school courses while pursuing my PhD in poli sci, to acquire some specialized knowledge relevant to my specific research topic, almost none of which I would be able to use in my teaching). And that;s why a PhD in poli sci is more qualified to teach intro to American than an average JD. One class down.