POLSC 201-Cerritos

Please print out, read, and bring with you to class:

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann

The Massless Media by William Powers

Language and Politics by George Orwell

Final Exam Schedule

Long Beach City College (Final Exam Schedule):

• Class #73689 (T/Th 10:30-11:45 AM) POLSC 1
• Paper Due: December 9, 2010
• Final Exam: Friday, December 17, 2010, 10:40-1:15 PM
• Class #70100 (Th 4:00-6:50 PM) POLSC 1
• Paper Due: December 9, 2010
• Final Exam, Thursday, December 16, 2010, 4:00-6:50 PM
• Class #72159 (T/Th 12:30-1:45 PM) POLSC 11
• Paper Due: December 9, 2010
• Final Exam: Friday, December 17, 2010, 1:20-3:50 PM

Cerritos College (Final Exam Schedule):

• Class #20592 (T/Th 8:00-9:30 AM) POL 101
• Paper Due: December 9, 2010
• Final Exam: Thursday, December 16, 2010, 8:00-10:00 AM
• Class #20989 (M/W 12:30-2:00 PM) POL 201
• Paper Due, December 8, 2010
• Final Exam: Wednesday, December 15, 2010, 12:00-2:00 PM

Isarithmic History of the Two Party Vote

Isarithimc history of the two-party vote by David B. Sparks.

Research Paper Prompt

Research Paper Prompt
Fall, 2010
Adjunct Instructor Frederick M. Hemker IV

Political science, as a social scientific discipline, uses facts to evaluate theories.  One theory, borrowed from David R. Mayhew’s Congress: The Electoral Connection, is that politicians are primarily self-interested seekers of re-election.  What this means is that that re-election seeking behavior is the most effective means of evaluating a politician’s past behavior and predicting their future behavior.  According to Mayhew, if you want to know why a politician votes the way she votes, takes the positions she takes, or makes the statements she makes, all you have to do is determine whether she thinks that doing so will help or harm her chances at re-election.

Your assignment is to do a case study, 10 to 15 pages in length, evaluating whether political behavior is in fact best explained by self-interested, vote-seeking behavior.  You may look at a single politician, multiple politicians, and/or single or multiple issues.

A case study is a kind of research project, so you are expected to use multiple sources.  Please cite your sources appropriately (I use the Chicago Manual of Style).  Plagiarism will result in an automatic failing grade.  Please see http://lib.lbcc.edu/handouts/writing.html for more information.

"Clarity, Simplicity, Brevity, and Humanity."

Please read "Writing English as a Second Language" by William Zinsser at AmericanScholar.org.

Zinsser writes,

So what is good English—the language we’re here today to wrestle with? It’s not as musical as Spanish, or Italian, or French, or as ornamental as Arabic, or as vibrant as some of your native languages. But I’m hopelessly in love with English because it’s plain and it’s strong. It has a huge vocabulary of words that have precise shades of meaning; there’s no subject, however technical or complex, that can’t be made clear to any reader in good English—if it’s used right. Unfortunately, there are many ways of using it wrong. Those are the damaging habits I want to warn you about today.