MASS POLITICAL BEHAVIOR - CORE COURSES

Graduate Studies

The following three seminars are required for students who want to specialize in Mass Political Behavior as either a secondary or tertiary field.

PS2235 Electoral Politics (Professor Barker)
This course focuses on questions pertaining to campaigns, elections, and voting in the United States, with an emphasis on presidential elections. Specifically, this course addresses why people participate, why they vote the way they do, and what determines electoral winners. Accordingly, we review the relevant literature pertaining to the role played by party ID, ideology and issue voting, groups and social networks, religion, campaigns, media, economic voting, and candidate traits, among other things.

PS2230 Mass Political Behavior (Professor Hurwitz)
This course focuses on mass belief systems—i.e., what individuals know, how their attitudes and values are structured, and the genesis of such attitudes and values. In the first half of the seminar we examine both the level of knowledge that citizens have and the ways in which individuals think about political issues and policies. Specifically, we discuss four possible means by which policy attitudes can be structured: liberal-conservative ideology, values, self-interest, and likes/dislikes of policy recipient groups. The second half of the seminar focuses more on the origins of political attitudes, exploring the contributions made by political elites, the mass media, and the broader political environment (e.g., friends, neighbors, the work place, the church, and more).

PS2313 Comparative Political Behavior (Professor Finkel)
This course is an introduction to the study of comparative mass political behavior. The seminar will focus on research questions related to cross-national differences and similarities in public opinion, voting behavior, and other forms of political participation. The course begins with a brief discussion of the nature and measurement of mass opinion, and then covers topics related to voter turnout, participation in non-electoral activities including political protest, and the debate over the role of "social capital" in stimulating participation and positive democratic outcomes. It then turns turn to alternative models of voter choice that emphasize: social group cleavages such as class, gender, ethnicity and religion; social-psychological models emphasizing partisan attachments, issue attitudes and candidate appeals; and economic models emphasizing macro-economic outcomes and voter perceptions of government performance as primary explanatory factors. The last section of the course is devoted to the relationship between public opinion, democratic values and the development and stability of democratic regimes. This section covers the early “civic culture” approach and more recent extensions, and then examine research related to the structure and sources of regime support, trust in democratic institutions, and support for democratic values such as political tolerance and minority rights.

Revised: September 14, 2007