Doug Roscoe's Web Page
My Classes
For Fall 2008:
PSC 101: Introduction to American Politics
This course covers, in brief, just about all the major topics in American politics. We study the founding and Constitution, political organizations, campaigns and elections, public opinion and the media, the major institutions like Congress and the president, civil rights and liberties, and public policy. There is a lot of nuts-and-bolts material (e.g., how a bill becomes a law), but I also try to introduce some theoretical tools and mental models to use when thinking about American politics.
PSC 301: The Presidency
The President of the United States of America is the most powerful person in the world, right? The answer is complex and is one of the major themes of this course. Presidents are powerful, of course, but their power is limited in many important ways and varies by context and role. This class explores these limitations, contexts and roles. In addition, there is an extended focus on the process of presidential selection. If a selection system favors certain kinds of traits and characteristics in candidates, then those are the traits and characteristics that our presidents will have when the govern. So, a key issue to be explored in this course is the extent to which presidential elections produce the right kind of leaders in the Oval Office.
PSC 349: Research Methods in Political Science
Yes, this course involves some math. No, it's not too hard. Really, research methods is about critical thinking. If we want to draw good conclusions about what political systems are like, what causes what, how things operate, etc., we should be critical about the way we reach our conclusions. Casual, loose, unsystematic thought is likely to give us a flawed picture of the very things we seek to understand clearly. So, it's important to have careful methods for observing political phenomena, analyzing patterns in our observations, and reaching conclusions about causation. Careful methods involve lots of things, such as defining concepts clearly, but it usually includes having a large enough number of observations to draw credible conclusions about how things really are. With many observations we inevitably need a system to summarize and organize the data for us, and thus we turn to statistics. This course uses a hands-on approach to these statistics, including learning how to use SPSS statistical software. After the course, you should feel comfortable reading much of the primary political science research published in academic books and journals.
Course Websites:
All course websites are accessed through myCourses. Here is the link:
http://dartmouth.umassonline.net/
My Teaching Interests
In general, I teach classes in American politics, including courses on Congress, the presidency, political parties and interest groups. I also teach our research methods course.
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Last Updated On: 6/23/08
