COURSE SYLLABUS US Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump
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COURSE SYLLABUS U.S. Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump Central European University Fall 2020 4 Credits (8 ECTS Credits) Co-Instructors Erin Jenne, PhD Professor, International Relations Dept. [email protected] Levente Littvay, PhD Professor, Political Science Dept. [email protected] Teaching Assistants Michael Zeller, Doctoral Candidate, Political Science Dept. [email protected] Semir Dzebo Doctoral Candidate, International Relations Dept. [email protected] Important Note About the Course Format This course is designed for online delivery. It includes pre-recorded lectures, individual and group activities, a discussion forum where all class related questions can be discussed amongst the students and with the team of instructors. There is 1 hour and 40 minutes set aside each week for synchronous group activities. For these, if necessary, students will be grouped into a European morning (11 am - 12:40 pm CET) and evening (17:20 - 19:00 pm CET) session to accommodate potential timezone issues. (Around the time of the election, we may schedule more. And forget timezones, or sleep, on November 2, 3 and 4.) This course does not meet in person, but, nonetheless, the goal is to make it useful and fun. The course is open to CEU students on-site in Vienna or scattered anywhere across the globe. We welcome MA and PhD students from any department who wish to see the political science perspective on the elections and would like to get some hands on American Politics research experience. Course Description While most courses focus on either the domestic or the foreign policy aspect of U.S. politics, our starting assumption is that it is impossible to have a sound grasp of either without also taking the other into account. By integrating domestic politics and foreign policy, the course seeks to achieve a more holistic understanding of America’s role in the world since the end of the Cold War, while plotting out potential future trajectories - with a special focus on the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. With this in mind, this course is divided into three main parts. We begin with a brief review of the different traditions or schools of thought concerning U.S. politics and foreign policy, mapping out the political institutions on the domestic level with a special focus on federalism versus states’ rights; separation of powers; sectional conflict and major Supreme Court cases that have shaped U.S. politics over the course of its history. The second part examines how U.S. politics plays out in elections and voter choice, political participation, electoral irregularities, political parties, and election campaigning. We also look at the broader context of U.S. domestic politics, including populism and nationalism; social conservatism and religion; economic inequality; race, gender, and age; and changing American demographics—examining how these features of society have changed st moving into the 21 Century. As part of the course, students will engage in extensive training in the recognition of populism, nationalism and social conservatism in US Governors’ political speeches and other texts in order to engage in original data collection and content analysis. This offers the students an invaluable opportunity for hands-on research experience, a great thing to put in their CV and a potentially rich letter of recommendation with concrete content, as part of an original data collection project from which the data will become a public resource with all the participants’ names on it. In the third part of the course, we turn to foreign policy—analyzing the backward and forward linkages between U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy and highlighting the ways in which these factors shape and are shaped by the 2020 elections. Students are encouraged to reflect on the extent to which the U.S. stands apart from previous (and future) global hegemons in its politics and foreign policy. The final seminar will be spent reflecting on what all of these elements mean for US politics and foreign policy in the age of Trump: do we see more continuity or change? Aims The course’s main aim is to provide students with a sound understanding of: 1. The main political debates that animate contemporary U.S. politics and foreign policy; 2. The main theoretical frameworks in social science used to explain U.S. politics and foreign policy; 3. How to test these competing explanations using evidence; 4. The policy ramifications of these different explanations; 5. The principal trends in U.S. politics and foreign policy. Learning Outcomes By the end of this course, students will be able to: · Make reasoned and informed arguments about events in U.S. politics and foreign policy and critically evaluate them; · Distinguish between political debates and social science debates concerning U.S. politics and foreign policy; · Identify what is unique about American politics versus what is common to all major countries or great powers; · Make an informed estimate of future trends in U.S. politics and/or foreign policy based on existing theories and evidence; · Argue convincingly for different sides of each major political debate in U.S. politics; · Identify interconnections between U.S. politics and foreign policy; · Conduct informed political analysis of U.S. elections and discuss the impact of elections on U.S. domestic and foreign policy; · Evaluate the relative effects of public opinion, demographic trends, geopolitical pressures, the media, and special interests and/or campaign finance on U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Course Requirements 1. Staying Informed and Active in the General Discussion - 10% 2. Reflection on Readings (Perusall) - 30% 3. Presentations - 20% 4. Peer feedback - 10% 5. Speech coding - 30% 1. As the course is heavily grounded in current events that relate to U.S. politics and foreign policy, with a particular focus on the upcoming presidential election in November, the students are expected to stay informed and actively discuss US Politics on our course forum. Potential information sources include online newspapers so as to keep up with current events Good sources include The New York Times, Financial Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Independent, and others. Additional sources (including both right and left) include Harper’s, Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic, The American Spectator, The American Prospect, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Policy Review, The Cato Journal, The Washington Times, and The Weekly Standard. (V/B)logs include The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, The Red State, Newsmax, Crooks and Liars, Democracy Now, and Media Matters. See OpenSecrets.org and Source Watch for information on campaign finance and lobby dollars. FactCheck.org is particularly useful in assessing the truth of claims by politicians and pundits on either side of the aisle. Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight website offers invaluable polling data on upcoming elections. (10%) 2. Readings are posted to Perusall, a community reading forum where students can comment and discuss all course readings. Your engagement in the discussion is a necessity as a substitute to in person meetings to make the social component of the reading and learning a reality. (30%) 3. and 4. A group of students will be responsible for researching a swing state about the local issues driving electoral politics. The research and predictions about the outcomes will be presented to the whole class (20%), in the form of a 10-12 minute video lecture close before the election. At the subsequent peer review and discussion about the presentation everyone is expected to be active (10%). 5. One of the goals of the class is to produce a resource based on original research, a dataset of Governor’s populism, nationalism and conservativism. We are going to train everyone in the class how to assess the level of populism, nationalism and conservatism of a political speech. Together with students at Brigham Young University we aim to code four speeches per each 4 year governance cycle by each governor going back to at least 2014 (two cycles), where two people will independently code every speech. To make this activity successful, we will need to find governor’s speeches based on a strict set of criteria (10%) and code their level of nationalism, conservatism and populism (20%). Once we are done with this activity, we will publish the dataset as a free resource to the general research community with credit given to all the coders. This exercise will offer invaluable research and data collection experience to all students involved. (Also, for anyone who did a good job which I expect everyone will, we can confidently offer everyone a solid letter of recommendation based on all this, in case it would ever be needed. It will not read like “the person took our course; they got a B+.”) Important note CEU is an American university that applies American standards of academic honesty. This means that beyond de jure stipulations in the University’s regulations, academic honesty standards are also, de facto applied. This is also graduate school where we are in the business of creating new knowledge. It is my personal firm conviction that knowledge creation cannot be based on theft or other inappropriate conduct. For these reasons, complete academic honesty is expected of everyone. Failure to comply with this requirement will result in automatic failure in this course and additional disciplinary action on higher levels. All assignments are to be done individually unless otherwise specified. This means, you may talk about how to do it. If this conversation takes place online, I recommend you use the course’s public forum for the benefit of everyone. But none of the actual work can be done in a group.