Robert C. Luskin University of Texas at Austin
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Government 370L Robert C. Luskin Fall, 2017 University of Texas at Austin Unique number: 38830 MW 1:00-2:30, CLA 0.118 Office: BAT 3.148 Phone: 650-380-0430, 512-879-9974 Office Hours: M 2:30-3:30, T 1:30-2:30, W 2:30-3:30, & by appointment American Election Campaigns This course comes in four intermingled parts. The bulk of our meetings will be as a seminar, meaning that we, not I, shall discuss the readings (see below). The next largest share will be devoted to a computer simulation of a U.S. Senate election. Your candidate may make personal appearances, produce and air campaign commercials, make appeals by direct mail, fund-raise, conduct polls, and so on, and the outcome will depend on the choices you and your opponents make. One or more other sessions are usually given over to guest speakers who have been involved in election campaigns in one capacity or another. And, finally, since this is a Writing Flag course, several sessions will be devoted to discussions of writing and written assignments. Past semesters’ speakers have included Tom Craddick, a Texas State Representative and formerly Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives; U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar; Justice Bob Gammage, late of the Texas Supreme Court and before that a U.S. Congressman; the late Bernard Rapoport, a longtime Democratic activist and fundraiser (and former Chair of the UT Board of Regents); Royal Masset, Political Director of the Republican Party of Texas; Dave MacNeely, a journalist covering state and national politics for the Austin-American Statesman; William P. Hobby, the former Lieutenant Governor; Susan Hendrix of H & C Media, a Democratic media consultant; Dean Rindy and Cynthia Miller of Rindy Miller Garcia Media, also Democratic media consultants; David Weeks and Suzanne Erickson of R & R Partners, a Republican media consultant who has worked for Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchinson, among others; Blaine Bull of Public Strategies, Inc., a major consulting firm; Matthew Dowd, once of Public Strategies, Inc., more recently of the Bush 2000 and 2004 campaigns and Bush administration, and now a prominent national political commentator; Mark MacKinnon, also once of Public Strategies, Inc., the principal media advisor to George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns and to John McCain’s 2008 nomination campaign, and now a prominent national political commentator and founder of the No Labels movement; Bill Emery and Peck Young of Emery and Young, a Democratic consulting firm; Dan Bartlett, an alumnus of this course who served as a spokesman for Governor Bush and the Bush 2000 campaign and later as Communications Director in the Bush White House; and Karl Rove, formerly of Karl Rove & Company, a Republican consulting firm, later the chief political strategist for the Bush 2000 and 2004 campaigns and Counselor to President Bush), and now (does anyone not know all this?) a prominent national political commentator and principal of American Crossroads, a major Republican super-PAC. There are no formal prerequisites beyond eligibility to take upper division Government courses. The goal is for students to learn and think about contemporary American election campaigns—about both how they work and the ways in which that may be desirable or 2 undesirable. There will be no exams, but a heavy reading load and two papers drawing on the readings. You will also be asked to provide written feedback on another student’s paper. The papers, feedback, and contributions in class discussion will be the means of assessing how far individual students have met the course goal. The class is a seminar, and I expect students to participate in the discussion. Not just to talk for the sake of talking, of course, but to make sensible, insightful contributions, based at least partly on the readings. I shall provide lists of questions to stimulate discussion and may assign 3-4 students to share their thoughts to open each class session. You should always come prepared to cite one-to-three things in the day’s readings that you find particularly interesting, important, or debatable and to say why you think they are interesting, important, or debatable. A tentative course schedule, indicating when we shall do what, is given below. The class will use the UT Blackboard website, on which I shall post some course materials, and through which I shall send emails as necessary. Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities, 471-6259, http://www.utexas.edu/diversity/ddce/ssd/ The course also carries a Writing Flag, which means that there will be written assignments, on which there will be feedback from your fellow students and me, and that those assignments will constitute a significant portion of your course grade. Writing Flag classes meet the Core Communications objectives of Critical Thinking, Communication, Teamwork, and Personal Responsibility, established by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. I encourage students who need additional help with their writing to work with the staff of the Undergraduate Writing Center in the Perry-Castaneda Library (PCL). The reading load is unusually heavy (though the books by Norris and Snyder are extremely short). And, as noted, I do plan on asking students about their reactions to the readings. So, even though the two papers are the only written assignments, and there are no exams, this is not a course for the faint-hearted. Be warned! It will be a lot of work. But also, I believe, extremely interesting. Texts Herbert B. Asher. 2016. Polling and the Public: What Every Citizen Should Know (9th ed.). Washington, DC: CQ Press. Robert S. Erikson and Kent L. Tedin. 2014. American Public Opinion (9th ed., updated). New York, NY: Longman. William H. Flanigan, Nancy H. Zingale, Elizabeth A. Theiss-Morse, and Michael W. Wagner. 2014. Political Behavior of the American Electorate (13th ed.). Washington, DC: CQ Press. Jennifer L. Hochschild and Katherine Levine Einstein. 2015. Do facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in American Politics. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Malcolm Nance. 2016 (with 2017 Introduction to the Appendix). The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election. New York, 3 NY: Skyhorse Publishing. Pippa Norris. 2017. Why American Elections Are Flawed (And How to Fix Them). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Larry Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and Geoffrey Skelley (eds.). 2017. Trumped: The 2016 Election That Broke All the Rules. Rowman & Littlefield. Michael John Burton, William J. Miller, and Daniel M. Shea. 2015. Campaign Craft: The Strategies, Tactics, and Art of Political Campaign Management (5th ed.). Westport, CT: Praeger. Timothy Snyder. 2017. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York, NY: Tim Duggan Press. Cass R. Sunstein, 2017. #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Darrell M. West. 2017. Air Wars: Television Advertising and Social Media in Election Campaigns 1952-2016 (7th ed.). Washington, DC: CQ Press. William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White. 1995. The Elements of Style (3rd ed.). New York: Allyn and Bacon. Robert’s Rules (a guide to writing), to be posted online. On the Campaign Trail (a manual to the simulation that also contains a great deal of information about real-world campaigns), to be available from Paradigm, . NB: I strongly urge you to purchase your textbooks online, being sure to get the most recent edition (except for Strunk and White, of which I am assigning the 3rd edition), as listed above. The least expensive option, in many cases, may be to buy the Kindle edition on Amazon, from which you can also download the free Kindle reader app. Outline and Readings I The Electorate A. Learning about the Public: The Mechanics of Surveys Erikson and Tedin, ch. 2. Asher, chs. 3-5, 8. Flanigan et al., appendix. B. What Do People “Know”? Knowledge, Ignorance, and Misinformation Erikson and Tedin, pp. 57-69 Asher, ch. 2. Hochschild and Einstein, chs. 1-2. C. What Do People Want? Public Opinion Flanigan et al., ch. 5. Erikson and Tedin, pp. 71-80, chs. 4, 7. 4 D. Who Votes? How Many? Flanigan et al., ch. 3. E. Why Do People Vote the Way They Do? Erikson and Tedin, ch. 9. Flanigan et al., ch. 8. II Political Parties: Partisanship, Realignment, and Polarization Erikson and Tedin, pp. 81-89. Flanigan et al., ch. 4. III The Media: Coverage of Politics and Elections and Its Effects Erikson and Tedin, ch. 8 excepting pp. 244-246. Asher, chs. 1, 6-8. Flanigan et al., ch. 7. West, ch. 5. Burton, Miller, and Shea, ch. 9. Sunstein, ch. 1, 3-5. IV Election Campaigns A. Organization, Research, and Strategy Burton, Miller, and Shea, chs. 1-6. Flanigan et al., ch. 2. B. Fund-Raising Burton, Miller, and Shea, ch. 7. C. Advertising and Other Messaging West, chs. 1-4, 6-9. Burton, Miller, and Shea, ch. 8. Erikson and Tedin, pp. 244-246. D. Getting Out the Vote Burton, Miller, and Shea, ch. 10. V Current Issues A. So That Happened: The Elections of 2016 Sabato, entire. David French. 2017. Don’t Let the Left Define Conservative Opposition to Trump. National Review (August 1, 2017). 5 B. Election Integrity: Fraudulent Voting, Voter Suppression, and Miscounting Norris, entire. C. Truth in Politics: Lying, Fake News, and Knowledge Resistance Hochschild and Einstein, chs. 3-6. David Leonhadt and Stuart A. Thompson. Trump’s Lies. New York Times, June 23, 2017 (updated July 21, 2017). D. Foreign Meddling Nance, entire Craig Unger. 2017. Trump’s Russian Laundromat. The New Republic, July 13, 2017.