Twitter

What do Texas A&M University, Rick Perry, The New York Times, Barack Obama, and Joe Ura all have in common? We are all on Twitter.

Twitter is a social networking website. Users may post updates or "tweets" of up to 140 characters, which are delivered to followers and included in a web-searchable index of all tweets. As a user, you can, of course, follow your friends and use the website to deliver messages to one another. More importantly, though, you can follow publications, public figures, and other people and institutions, which will allow you to connect to a world of interesting ideas and information that is customized to your interests. In other words, you can use Twitter to help content you are likely to use or enjoy find you rather than you're having to find content.

You can create an account here. You are not required to do so for the class, nor is there any kind of credit (extra or otherwise) available for doing so. This is just a thing you might find useful.

I should caution you, though, that anything you post on Twitter may be made available to others online. As with all other social networking websites, including Facebook, you should take some time to adjust your account's privacy settings to meet your own needs and exercise careful judgment about what you post online.

SI Facebook Group

Here is a link to this semester's (Spring 2012) SI Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/175876615853944/

SI Times

SI sessions for both of my sections of POLS 206 will be held on:

Sunday   7-8  BLOC 105
Wednesday   7-8  BLOC 106
Thursday 7-8  BLOC 105

Your SI leader, Abigail, has also set up a Facebook group for students in the class. She tells me you can find it just by searching "Ura POLS 206." You must make a request to join, but she promises to add folks promptly.

Rules and Social Choice in the Republican Party Nomination Process

This article describes some the arcane rules used in various states to select delegates through caucuses and other "non-primaries" for the Republican National Convention and Ron Paul's efforts to take advantage of those rules to maximize the number of delegates he will lead to the Convention this summer. The article emphasizes the importance of rules or institutions. In this case, the article illustrates how the Republican Party's nomination process is very much influenced by the rules used in the states to select delegates and the rules governing how those delegates may vote at the Republican national Convention.

Put more generally, the same group of people might end up making very different choices in response to the same question under different rules. This is one of the most basic and important insights of modern political science.

Life Lesson: E-Mailing Professors and Other Professional Contacts

Here are a handful of useful primers from:

1. Chris Blattman (Professor of Political Science and Economics, Yale University)
2. Michael Leddy (Professor of English, Eastern Illinois University)
3. The Wellesley College Social Media Project

The key point of all of these is that an e-mail sent to your professor (advisor, employer, prospective employer, etc.) is a professional communication. You should treat it as such. Be thoughtful, be polite, and be concise.

If nothing else, these are good habits to develop. You will be writing to people to people for help, advice, information, appointments, and jobs, among other things, for the rest of your life. Beginning to develop good habits as a correspondent now will pay dividends for a very long time to come.

Dimensions and Understanding

Today in class I discussed the primary conceptual "dimensions" of democracy, which I represented as axes on a plane. I will make frequent use of this kind of geometric or spatial representation of concepts or preferences over the course of the semester. However, you should be aware that there are many critiques of using a geometric model to represent abstract phenomena. Not least of which, many people believe that reducing complex concepts, like political ideologies, to points, lines, and planes, leaves out a lot of important information and nuance. Saying that Rick Santorum is a 9 on a social conservatism index, for example, doesn't tell us what social policy positions he holds exactly, why he holds them, why he has different views than Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, or whether his views are good or bad (or at least better than those of other candidates).

This is essentially the idea Robin Williams's character in Dead Poets Society shares with his students as he gleefully assaults an essay proposing a geometric representation of poetic "greatness" by J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D.



The scene is great, and it appeals to an easy intuition that the social world--which is to say the world of people and our decisions and actions--is hopelessly subjective and disorganized.

If our goal is appreciation or self-discovery, the Dead Poets' intuition might be right on. If we are studying literature, history, politics, or philosophy for aesthetic purposes, to help us discover what we like or what we find inspiring in some way, then scaling poems or politicians on a Cartesian plane may not be so useful. In the movie, the Dead Poets read a lot of great poems and use them as inspiration to discover and pursue their hidden passions. Awesome.

They never really learn much, systematically, about poetry, though. They might have read Byron and Shakespeare, and they might appreciate the fact that they react more strongly to one than the other, but never stop to ask the question, why? Why is Shakespeare better than Byron? Even if we are able to recognize greatness, what makes a poem great and what does that tell us about ourselves?

Categorizing, ranking, scoring, and scaling are not obviously romantic or important things. And yet, making comparisons between things, differentiating between things of different quality and value, is a first step toward being able to understand what makes things and ideas valuable or not, good or bad.

The Dead Poets just want you to be able to say, "I like Shakespeare better than Byron," or, moving to politics, that, "I am a conservative, not a liberal."

This class asks more of you.

I, of course, want you to have opinions about the ideas described in assigned readings and lectures, and I definitely want you to have opinions about current events and contemporary debates. I also want you to know why you like the things you like and to understand why you believe the things that you do. These deeper goals of the class require us to do more than just feel our way through politics. We will have to think systematically about politics, and that means that we will have to describe, compare, and measure things that seem to defy easy description, apt comparison, or careful measurement--like democracy.

The process may not be as much fun as some of the alternatives, but the result will be a much more fulfilling for those of you who put the work in.

Welcome

You have successfully found the class website for Professor Ura's sections of Introduction to American Politics. You may find links to the syllabus and lecture slides as the semester progresses along the right sidebar.