Government 381S Robert C. Luskin Spring, 2019 University of Texas at Austin Unique number: Monday, 6:30-9:30, BAT 15.102 38470 Office: BAT 3.148 Email: [email protected] Phone: 650-380-0430 Office Hours: M 3:00-4:00, T 2:30-3:30, W 3:00-4:00, & by appointment

Political Sophistication

This course is about cognitive engagement in politics—a dimension on which people vary enormously, from those who are walking New Republics or National Reviews or Guardians or Figaros to those who don't know who the President or Prime Minister is. (There are some.) And this variation matters, in ways we shall explore.

Perhaps the broadest variable under this heading is political sophistication (a.k.a. aware- ness, cognitive complexity, or expertise): a matter of both the quantity and the organization of political (regardless of accuracy). Closely related variables include political infor- mation (a matter simply of quantity, regardless of organization or accuracy), knowledge (the quantity of accurate cognition), and misinformation (the quantity of inaccurate cognition).

We consider this whole family of variables: how best to measure them, who has how much of them and why, and to what extent and how they flavor political attitudes and behaviors. Many of the readings and much of the discussion will focus on these variables’ effects—on the recognition and efficient pursuit of one's interests; policy and electoral preferences; attitude ex- tremity; persuadability and the kinds of appeals most likely to persuade; political tolerance; the extent and direction of political participation; the weights given to candidate versus policy con- siderations in voting; etc.

Deliberation, in the conventional sense of serious, open-minded discussion, is also re- lated, since many of its effects operate through sophistication. Thus we shall also read about and discuss the Deliberative Polling project, which can be viewed as a quasi-experiment gauging po- litical sophistication’s effects on policy and electoral preferences.

While many of the best data and much of the best work are on the U.S., it should be clear that these variables are at play, and their consequences felt, in every democratic polity. The course thus straddles American and Comparative Politics (and is listed in both fields). It also draws a great deal from psychology, relevant to both.

Prerequisites

There are no specific prerequisites. It is not important to have taken the core or any other previous course in Political Behavior, Comparative Politics, or American politics, nor to have taken graduate statistics courses (although I do encourage you to do so). First-year students are 2 specifically welcome, and have usually done well.

Format

This is a research seminar, calling on you to discuss the assigned readings and to research and write a substantial paper (consulting as much as necessary with me individually in the pro- cess). My hope is that many will in due course be expandable into publishable articles or disser- tation chapters.

Readings

We shall read all or most of the following books, along with a good many articles, listed below.

Achen, Christopher H. and Larry M. Bartels. 2016. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hochschild, Jennifer L. and Katherine Levine Einstein. 2015. Do Facts Matter?: Information and Misinformation in American Politics. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

Kinder, Donald R. and Nathan P. Kalmoe. 2017. Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lodge, Milton and Charles S. Taber. 2013. The Rationalizing Voter. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

McIntyre, Lee. 2018. Post-Truth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sophia Rosenfeld, Sophia. 2018. Democracy and Truth: A Short History. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Settle, Jaime E. 2018. Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Outline

I Organizational (January 28)

II Meet the Family: Varieties of Political Belief

A. What Are We Talking about? Definition, Measurement, Distribution (February 4)

Converse, Philip E. 1964. The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics. In David Apter (ed.). 3

Ideology and Discontent. New York: Basic Books.

Luskin, Robert C. 1987. Measuring Political Sophistication. American Journal of Political Sci- ence 31: 856-99.

Converse, Philip E. 2000. Assessing the Capacity of Mass Electorates. Annual Review of Polit- ical Science 3: 331-53.

Barabas, Jason, Jennifer Jerit, William Pollock, and Carlisle Rainey. 2014. The Question(s) of Political Knowledge. American Review, 108 (4): 840-855.

Dutant, Julien. 2015. The Legend of the Justified True Belief Analysis. Philosophical Perspec- tives, 29 (1): 95-145.

Luskin, Robert C., Gaurav Sood, James S. Fishkin, and Kyu S. Hahn. Deliberative Distortions? Homogenization, Polarization, and Domination. Revised and resubmitted to the British Journal of Political Science.

Lee, Seonghui and Akitaka Matsuo. 2018. Decomposing political knowledge: what is confi- dence in knowledge and why it matters. Electoral Studies, 51: 1-13.

Vegetti, Federico, Zoltán Fazekas, and Zsombor Zoltán Méder. Sorting your way out: Perceived party positions, political knowledge, and polarization. Acta Politica, 52 (4): 479–501.

Hochschild and Einstein, chs. 1-2.

B. How Much or Little Do People Know? (February 11)

Mondak, Jeffery J., and Belinda Creel Davis. 2001. “Asked and Answered: Knowledge Levels When We Will Not Take ‘Don't Know’ for an Answer.” Political Behavior 23:199-224.

Gibson, James L. and Gregory A. Caldeira. 2009. Knowing the Supreme Court? A Reconsider- ation of Public Ignorance of the High Court. Journal of Politics, 71 (2): 429–441.

Prior, Markus and Arthur Lupia. 2008. Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills. American Journal of Political Science, 52 (1): 169– 183.

Prior, Markus. 2014. Visual Political Knowledge: A Different Road to Competence? Journal of Politics, 76 (1) 41 – 57. Ksiazkiewicz, Aleksander. 2013. Implicit Political Knowledge. PS-Political Science & Politics 46 (3): 553-555. Luskin, Robert C. and John G. Bullock. “‘Don’t Know’ Means ‘Don’t Know’: DK Responses and the Public’s Level of Political Knowledge.” Journal of Politics, 73 (2011): 547–557.

Sturgis, Patrick and Patten Smith. 2009. "Fictitious Issues Revisited: Political Interest, 4

Knowledge and the Generation of Nonattitudes." Political Studies, .

Kuha, Jouni, Sarah Butt, Myrsini Katsikatsou, and Chris J. Skinner. 2018. The Effect of Probing "Don't Know" Responses on Measurement Quality and Nonresponse in Surveys. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 113 (521): 26-40.

DeBell, Matthew. 2013. Harder Than It Looks: Coding Political Knowledge on the ANES. Po- litical Analysis 21: 393–406

Paulhus, Delroy L., P.D. Harms, M. Nadine Bruce, and Daria C. Lysy. 2003. The Over-Claim- ing Technique: Measuring Self-Enhancement Independent of Ability. Journal of Personality and 84: 890-904.

Clifford, Scott and Jennifer Jerit. 2016. Cheating on Political Knowledge Questions in Online Surveys: An Assessment of the Problem and Solutions. Quarterly, 80 (4) 858– 887.

Luskin, Robert C., Bruno Cautrés, Sherry Lowrance, and Dabniel Weitzel. 2018. Political Knowledge in France. Manuscript, University of Texas at Austin.

Luskin, Robert C., Gaurav Sood, and Daniel Weitzel. 2018. Hidden Knowledge, Veiled Igno- rance: Do People Know More—or Even Less—about Politics than Commonly Thought? Manu- script, University of Texas at Austin.

C. Misinformation (February 18)

Kull, S., Ramsay, C., and E. Lewis. 2003. Misperceptions, the media, and the Iraq war. Political Science Quarterly, 118 (4): 569-598.

Nyhan, Brendan and Jason Reifler. 2010. When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32: 303–330.

Lewandowsky, Stephan, Klaus Oberauer, and Gilles E. Gignac. 2013. NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science. Psychological Science, 24(5): 622–633.

Lewandowsky, Stephan, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Colleen M. Seifert, Norbert Schwarz, and John Cook. Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing. Psy- chological Science in the Public Interest, 13(3): 106–131.

Todd K. Hartman and Adam J. Newmark. 2102. Motivated Reasoning, Political Sophistication, and Associations between President Obama and Islam. PS: Political Science & Politics, 45 (3): 449-455.

Prior, Markus, Gaurav Sood, and Kabir Khanna. 2015. You Cannot be Serious: The Impact of Accuracy Incentives on Partisan Bias in Reports of Economic Perceptions. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 10 (4): 489-518. 5

Luskin, Robert C. and Gaurav Sood. 2018. The Waters of Casablanca: On Political Misinfor- mation. Manuscript, University of Texas at Austin.

Bolsen, Toby and James N. Druckman. 2015. Counteracting the Politicization of Science. Jour- nal of Communication 65: 745–769.

Josh Pasek, Gaurav Sood, and Jon A. Krosnick. 2015. Misinformed About the Affordable Care Act? Leveraging Certainty to Assess the Prevalence of Misperceptions. Journal of Communica- tion, 65: 660–673.

Hochschild and Einstein, chs. 3-6.

D. More Debatable or Elaborate Beliefs (including Conspiracy Theories) (February 25)

Lodge and Taber, entire.

Oliver, J. Eric and Thomas J. Wood. 2014. Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion. American Journal of Political Science, 58 (4): 952–966.

Bullock, John G.; Gerber, Alan S.; Hill, Seth J.; et al. 2015. Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 10 (4): 519-578.

Bisgaard, Martin. 2015. Bias Will Find a Way: Economic Perceptions, Attributions of Blame, and Partisan-Motivated Reasoning during Crisis. Journal of Politics, 77 (3): 849-860

Jern, Alan, Kai-min K. Chang, and Charles Kemp. 2014. Belief Polarization Is Not Always Irra- tional. Psychological Review, 121 (2): 206–224.

Pasek, Josh , Tobias H. Stark, Jon A. Krosnick, and Trevor Tompson. 2015. What motivates a conspiracy theory? Birther beliefs, partisanship, liberal-conservative ideology, and anti-Black at- titudes. Electoral Studies, 40: 482-489.

Tworzecki, Hubert and Radosław Markowski. 2014. Knowledge and Partisan Bias: An Uneasy Relationship. East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 28 (4): 836–862

E. Cross-National, Longitudinal, Substantive, and Individual Variation (including the Gender and Other “Gaps”) (March 4)

Iyengar, Shanto, Kyu S. Hahn, Heinz Bonfadelli, and Mirko Marr. 2009. “Dark Areas of Igno- rance” Revisited: Comparing International Affairs Knowledge in Switzerland and the US. Com- munication Research, 36 (3): 341-358.

Schulz, Wolfram, Julian Fraillon, and John Ainley. Measuring young people’s understanding of civics and citizenship in a cross-national study. Educational Psychology, 33 (3): 334-356.

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Banducci, Susan, Heiko Giebler and Sylvia Kritzinger. 2017. Knowing More from Less: How the Information Environment Increases Knowledge of Party Positions, British Journal of Politi- cal Science, 47 (3): 571-588.

Fortunato, David, Randolph T. Stevenson, and Greg Vonnahme. 2016. Context and Political Knowledge: Explaining Cross-National Variation in Partisan Left-Right Knowledge. Journal of Politics, 78 (4): 1211-1228.

Boussalis, Constantine, and Travis G. Coan. 2017. “Elite Polarization and Correcting Misinfor- mation in the “Post-Truth Era”.” Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition 6: 405- 08.

Hambrick, Donald Z. 2003. “Why are some people more knowledgeable than others? A longitu- dinal study of knowledge acquisition.” Memory & Cognition, 31: 902-917.

Grönlund, Kimmo and Henry Milner. The Determinants of Political Knowledge in Comparative Perspective. Scandinavian Political Studies, 29 (4): 386-406.

Dolan, Kathleen. 2011. Do Women and Men Know Different Things? Measuring Gender Dif- ferences in Political Knowledge. Journal of Politics, 73 (1): 97-107.

Fraile, Marta. 2014. Do Women Know Less About Politics Than Men? The Gender Gap in Polit- ical Knowledge in Europe. Social Politics, 21 (2): 261-89.

Abrajano, Marisa. 2015. Reexamining the "Racial Gap" in Political Knowledge. Journal of Poli- tics, 77 (1): 44-54.

Efrén O. Pérez. 2015. Mind the Gap: Why Large Group Deficits in Political Knowledge Emerge—And What To Do About Them. Political Behavior, 37: 933–954.

III Antecedents

A. Individual Attributes: Education, Cognitive Ability, Interest, Personality (March 11)

Prior, Markus. 2010 You’ve Either Got It or You Don’t? The Stability of Political Interest over the Life Cycle. Journal of Politics, 72 (3): 747–766

Deary, Ian J. 2012. Intelligence. Annual Review of Psychology, 63: 453–482.

Luskin, Robert C. 1990. Explaining Political Sophistication. Political Behavior, 12: 331-61.

Hauser, Seth M. 2000. Education, ability, and civic engagement in the contemporary United States. Social Science Research, 29 (4): 556-582.

Arceneaux, Kevin, Martin Johnson, and Hermine H. Maes. 2012. The Genetic Basis of Political Sophistication. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 15 (1): 34–41

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Luskin, Robert C. and Joseph C. Ten Barge. n.d. Education, Intelligence and Political Sophisti- cation. Manuscript, University of Texas at Austin.

Rasmussen, Stig Hebbelstrup Rye. 2016. Education or Personality Traits and Intelligence as De- terminants of Political Knowledge? Political Studies, 64 (4): 1036-1054.

Levine, Timothy R. Truth-Default Theory (TDT): A Theory of Human Deception and Decep- tion Detection. 2014. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33 (4):

Douglas, Karen M. 2016. Someone is pulling the strings: hypersensitive agency detection and belief in conspiracy theories. Thinking & Reasoning, 22 (1): 57-77

Carl, Noah, Nathan Cofnas, Michael A. Woodley of Menie. 2016. Scientific literacy, optimism about science and conservatism. Personality and Individual Differences 94: 299–302.

Gigerenzer, Gerd, and Rocio Garcia-Retamero. 2017. “Cassandra’s Regret: The Psychology of Not Wanting to Know.” Psychological Review, 124 (2): 179-96.

Mercier, Hugo. 2017. “How Gullible Are We? A Review of the Evidence from Psychology and Social Science.” Review of General Psychology 21 (2): 103-22.

B. Learning from the Media (March 25)

Settle, entire.

Shin, Jieun, Lian Jian, Kevin Driscoll, and François Bar. 2018. The diffusion of misinformation on social media: Temporal pattern, message, and source. Computers in Human Behavior, 83: 278-287.

Pennycook, Gordon, Tyrone D. Cannon, and David G. Rand. 2018. Prior Exposure Increases Perceived Accuracy of Fake News. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147 (12): 1865-1880.

Jerit, Jennifer, Jason Barabas, and Toby Bolsen. 2006. Citizens, Knowledge, and the Infor- mation Environment. American Journal of Political Science, 50 (2): 266–282.

Prior, Markus. 2005. News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout. American Journal of Political Science, 49 (3): 577–592.

Barabas, Jason and Jennifer Jerit. 2009. Estimating the Causal Effects of Media Coverage on Policy-Specific Knowledge. American Journal of Political Science, 53 (1): 73–89.

Soroka, Stuart, Blake Andrew, Toril Aalberg, Shanto Iyengar, James Curran, Sharon Coen, Kaori Hayashi, Paul Jones, Gianpetro Mazzoleni, June Woong Rhee, David Rowe, and Rod Tiffen. 2012. Auntie Knows Best? Public Broadcasters and Current Affairs Knowledge. British Journal of Political Science, 43: 719–739.

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C. Learning from Others: Discussion and (Hypothetically) Deliberation (April 1)

Luskin, Robert C., James S. Fishkin, and Roger Jowell. 2002. Considered Opinions: Delibera- tive Polling in the U.K. British Journal of Political Science, 32 (July): 455-87.

Andersen, Vibeke Normann & Kasper M. Hansen. 2007. How deliberation makes better citi- zens: The Danish Deliberative Poll on the euro. European Journal of Political Research 46: 531–556.

Gastil, John, Laura Black, and Kara Moscovitz. 2008. Ideology, Attitude Change, and Delibera- tion in Small Face-to-Face Groups. Political Communication, 25:1,23-46.

Lupia, Arthur. 2002. Deliberation Disconnected: What it Takes to Improve Civic Competence. Law and Contemporary Problems, 65: 133-150.

Ahn, T. K., Robert Huckfeldt, and John Barry Ryan. 2010. Communication, Influence, and In- formational Asymmetries among Voters. , 31 (5): 763-787.

List, Christian, Robert C. Luskin, James S. Fishkin, and Iain McLean. 2013. Deliberation, Sin- gle-Peakedness, and the Possibility of Meaningful Democracy: Evidence from Deliberative Polls.

Eveland, William P. Jr. and Myiah Hutchens Hively. 2009. Political Discussion Frequency, Net- work Size, and ‘‘Heterogeneity’’ of Discussion as Predictors of Political Knowledge and Partici- pation. Journal of Communication, 59 (2): 205-224.

Eveland, William P. Jr., Alyssa C. Morey, and Myiah J. Hutchens. 2011. Beyond Deliberation: New Directions for the Study of Informal Political Conversation from a Communication Per- spective. Journal of Communication, 61: 1082–1103.

IV Effects

A. Policy Preferences (April 8)

Althaus, Scott L. 1998. Information Effects in Collective Preferences. American Political Sci- ence Review 92: 545-58.

Gilens, Martin. 2001. Political ignorance and collective policy preferences. American Political Science Review, 95 (2): 379-396.

Bartels, Larry M. 2005. Homer Gets a Tax Cut: Inequality and Public Policy in the American Mind. Perspectives on Politics, 3 (1): 15-31.

Lupia, Arthur, Adam Seth Levine, Jesse O. Menning, and Gisela Sin. 2007. Were Bush Tax Cut Supporters “Simply Ignorant?” A Second Look at Conservatives and Liberals in “Homer Gets a Tax Cut.” Perspectives on Politics, 9

Bartels, Larry M. 2007. Homer Gets a Warm Hug: A Note on Ignorance and Extenuation. Per- spectives on Politics, 5 (4): 785-790.

Ansolabehere, Stephen, Jonathan Rodden, and James M. Snyder. 2008. The Strength of Issues: Using Multiple Measures to Gauge Preference Stability, Ideological Constraint, and Issue Vot- ing. American Political Science Review, 102 (2): 215-232.

Berinsky, Adam J. 2002. Silent Voices: Social Welfare Policy Opinions and Political Equality in America. American Journal of Political Science, 46 (2): 276-287.

Sides, John. 2016. Stories or Science? Facts, Frames, and Policy Attitudes. American Politics Research, 44(3): 387–414.

Jerit, Jennifer and Jason Barabas. 2006. Bankrupt rhetoric: How misleading information affects knowledge about social security. Public Opinion Quarterly, 70(3), 278–303.

Healy, Andrew and Neil Malhotra. 2009. Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy. American Political Science Review, 103 (3): 387-406

Kuziemko, Ilyana, Michael I. Norton, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva. 2015. How Elastic Are Preferences for Redistribution? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments. American Economic Review, 105 (4): 1478–1508.

Ganzach, Yoav. 2018. Intelligence and the rationality of political preferences. Intelligence, 69: 59-70.

B. Political Reasoning (Including Heuristics) (April 15)

Kahneman, entire

Evans, Jonathan St. B. T. and Keith E. Stanovich. 2013. Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cog- nition : Advancing the Debate. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8: 223-241.

Tversky, Amos and Daniel Kahneman. 1974. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Bi- ases. Science, 185: 1124-31.

Lupia, Arthur. 1994. Shortcuts Versus Encyclopedias: Information and in California Insurance Reform Elections. American Political Science Review, 88 (1): 63-76.

Lau, Richard R. and David P. Redlawsk. 2001. Advantages and disadvantages of cognitive heu- ristics in political decision making. American Journal of Political Science 45 (4): 951-971.

Dancey, Logan. and Geoffrey Sheagley. 2013. Heuristics Behaving Badly: Party Cues and Voter Knowledge. American Journal of Political Science, 57 (2): 312–325.

Walton, Douglas N. 2010. Why fallacies appear to be better arguments than they are. Informal 10

Logic, 30 (2): 159-184.

C. Ideology and Attitude Extremity (April 22)

Kinder and Kalmoe, entire.

Van Hiel, Alain and Ivan Mervielde. 2003. The Measurement of Cognitive Complexity and Its Relationship With Political Extremism. Political Psychology, 24 (4): 781-801.

Jost, John T., Christopher M. Federico, and Jaime L. Napier. 2009. Political Ideology: Its Structure, Functions, and Elective Affinities. Annual Review of Psychology, 60: 307–37

Graham, Jesse, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek. 2009. Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96 (5): 1029–1046. van der Meer, Tom W. G. , Jan W. van Deth, and Peer L. H. Scheepers. 2009. The Politicized Participant: Ideology and Political Action in 20 Democracies. Comparative Political Studies, 42: 1426-1457.

Federico, Christopher M. and Corrie V. Hunt. 2013. Political Information, Political Involve- ment, and Reliance on Ideology in Political Evaluation. Political Behavior 35: 89–112.

Carl, Noah. 2014. Verbal intelligence is correlated with socially and economically liberal beliefs. Intelligence 44: 142–148.

Makowsky, Michael D. and Stephen C. Miller. 2014. Education, Intelligence, and Attitude Ex- tremity. Public Opinion Quarterly 78 (4): 832-858.

D. Voting and Elections (April 29)

Achen and Bartels, esp. chs. 4-7 and 10.

Bartels, Larry M. 1996. Uninformed Votes: Information Effects in Presidential Elections. American Journal of Political Science, 40: 194-230.

Lau, Richard R., David J. Andersen, and David P. Redlawsk. 2008. An Exploration of Correct Voting in Recent U.S. Presidential Elections. American Journal of Political Science, 52 (2): 395–411

Arnold, Jason Ross. 2012. The electoral consequences of voter ignorance. Electoral Studies, 31 (4): 796-815.

Blais, André, Elisabeth Gidengil, Patrick Fournier, and Neil Nevitte. 2009. Information, visibil- ity and elections: Why electoral outcomes differ when voters are better informed. European Journal of Political Research 48: 256–280.

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Stubager, Rune, Henrik Bech Seeberg, and Florence So. 2018. One size doesn't fit all: Voter de- cision criteria heterogeneity and vote choice. Electoral Studies, 52: 1-10.

Luskin, Robert C. and Suzanne Globetti. 1997. “Candidate versus Policy Considerations in the Voting Decision: The Role of Political Sophistication,” unpublished manuscript, Department of Government, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712.

Healy, Andrew and Neil Malhotra. 2013. Retrospective Voting Reconsidered. Annual Review of Political Science, 16: 285–306.

V Knowledge, Misinformation, Other Beliefs and Democracy (May 6)

Rosenfeld, entire.

McIntyre, entire

Luskin, Robert C. 2002. From Denial to Extenuation (and Finally beyond): Political Sophistication and Citizen Competence. In James H. Kuklinski (ed.), Political Psychology and Political Behavior. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Luskin, Robert C. 2002. “The Heavenly Public: What Would the Ideal Democratic Citizenry Be Like?” In George Rabinowitz and Michael B. MacKuen (eds.), Electoral Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming.

Lupia, Arthur. 2006. How elitism undermines the study of voter competence. Critical Review, 18 (1-3): 217-232.

Kinder, Donald R. 2006. Belief Systems Today. Critical Review, 18 (1-3): 197-216.

Converse, Philip E. 2006. Democratic theory and electoral reality. Critical Review,18 (1): 297- 329.

Assignments and Evaluation

Paper. The primary written assignment will be the paper. Most will presumably be em- pirical, though not necessarily statistically imposing. Some may be non-empirical—theoretical or methodological. Topics may concern the U.S., specific other countries, comparisons across countries, general psychological mechanisms, or theoretical or normative issues, as suits individ- uals’ interests. Most of you will presumably draw on one or more archived datasets available from the ICPSR or other archives around the world. I strongly encourage you to consult with me about your choice of topic and data and about other questions relating to your paper as necessary.

The papers should be emailed to me as Word attachments by 5:00 p.m., Wednesday, May 15.

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Short Essays. Students will also compose weekly short essays of no more than two sin- gle-spaced typed pages apiece. These should center on the week's readings and culminate in a question suitable for class discussion. The questions and their preambles should express some interesting criticism, extrapolation, speculation, or juxtaposition. They may be genuinely inter- rogatory, but may as usefully be rhetorical or argumentative. Among other possibilities, you may wish to call attention to internal contradictions or to inconsistencies with other authors or other evidence, challenge the adequacy of measurement, question whether the results support the interpretation, indicate ways in which the results may not generalize to other settings or circum- stances, point to variables that may have been omitted, or suggest ways in which the argument or results have implications for other, perhaps broader questions. An ideal question might be the germ of an eventual paper or perhaps even a dissertation. The essays should be emailed as Word attachments by class day at 10:00 a.m.

Final Grade. The short essays will count for 30% combined, class participation for 20%, and the paper for 50%. The penalty for lateness, on both the short essays and the term pa- per, is 3 points (on the customary 100-point scale) per twenty-four hours.

NOTE: Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabili- ties, 471-6259, http://www.utexas.edu/diversity/ddce/ssd/.