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Government 317: Campaigns and Elections
Fall 1996
Tuesday and Thursday 1:25-2:40 (MG 165) plus optional sections TBA
Professor: Walter R. Mebane, Jr.
Office: 123 McGraw Hall (255-3868); email [email protected]
Office hours: Tuesday 3-4, Wednesday 2-4 or other times by appointment.
TA: Jonathan Wand
TA's Office: McGraw B20 (the ``tempter room'')
TA's Office hours: by appt, e-mail to [email protected]
Assignment Due Dates
due date description weight
September 12 Web paper 10%
October 29 midterm exam (or survey work) 25%
November 5 final paper proposal 5%
December 6 final paper 25%
December 18 (9am) final exam 35%

Reading Availability

The following books have been ordered through the usual bookstores. Almost all the books are to be read in their entirety, or otherwise heavily used, so you probably want to buy them if you can. But the books should also (eventually) be on reserve at Uris library.

Abramson, Paul R., John H. Aldrich, David W. Rohde. 1995. Change and Continuity in the 1992 Elections. Revised edition. Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly.
Aldrich, John H., and Forrest D. Nelson. 1984. Linear Probability, Logit, and Probit Models. Sage Publications.
Alesina, Alberto, and Howard Rosenthal. 1995. Partisan Politics, Divided Government, and the Economy. Cambridge UP.
Anonymous. 1996. Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics. Random House.
Fiorina, Morris P. 1989. Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment. Second edition. New Haven: Yale UP.
Fiorina, Morris P. 1995. Divided Government. Second edition. Allyn and Bacon.
Grofman, Bernard, and Chandler Davidson, eds. 1994. Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990. Princeton UP.
Rosenstone, Steven J., and John Mark Hansen. 1993. Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America . New York: Macmillan.
Rosenstone, Steven J., Roy L. Behr and Edward H. Lazarus. 1996. Third Parties in America: Citizen Response to Major Party Failure. Expanded Revised ed. Princeton University Press.
SAS Institute Inc. SAS Language and Procedures: Introduction, Version 6. Cary, NC: SAS Institute Inc.
Tufte, Edward R. 1978. Political Control of the Economy. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Weisberg, Herbert F., Jon A. Krosnick and Bruce D. Bowen. 1996. An Introduction to Survey Research, Polling, and Data Analysis. 3rd ed. Sage Publications.

Class meeting and reading schedule

Items with a bullet (tex2html_wrap_inline160 ) are required. Others are supplementary.

  1. Recent and Current American Elections (Aug 29-Sept 3)
    2. Abramson, Paul R., John H. Aldrich, David W. Rohde. 1983 [1987, 1991]. Change and Continuity in the 1980 [1984, 1988] Elections. Rev. ed. Washington DC: CQ.
    Polsby, Nelson W., and Aaron Wildavsky. 1988. Presidential Elections: Contemporary Strategies of American Electoral Politics. Eighth edition. New York: Macmillan, The Free Press.
    White, Theodore H. 1961 [1965, 1969, 1973]. The Making of the President, 1960 [1964, 1968, 1972]. New York: Atheneum.
    McGinniss, Joe. 1970. The Selling of the President, 1968. New York: Pocket Books.
    Witcover, Jules. 1977. Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1972-1976. New York: Viking Press.
    Aldrich, John H. 1980. Before the Convention: Strategies and Choices in Presidential Nomination Campaigns. Chicago: U of Chicago.
    Bartels, Larry. Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice. Princeton: Princeton UP.
    Brams, Steven. 1978. The Presidential Election Game. New Haven: Yale UP.
    Gurian, Paul-Henri. 1987. Resource allocation strategies in presidential nomination campaigns. American Journal of Political Science, 31:802-821.
    Kelley, Stanley Jr. 1983. Interpreting Elections. Princeton: Princeton UP.
  2. Polling and Public Opinion (Sept 5-Sept 10)
    3. Asher, Herbert. 1988. Polling and the Public: What Every Citizen Should Know. Washington, DC: CQ Press.
    Converse, Philip E. 1964. The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In David E. Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent. New York: Free Press, pp. 206-261.
    Crespi, Irving. 1989. Public Opinion, Polls, and Democracy. Boulder, CO: Westview.
    Edelman, Murray. 1964. The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
    Ginsberg, Benjamin. 1986. The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State Power. New York: Basic Books.
    Key, V. O., Jr. 1961. Public Opinion and American Democracy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
    Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder. 1987. News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    Zaller, John. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. New York: Cambridge UP.
  3. Parties, Third Parties and Coalition Politics (Sept 12-Sept 24)
    4. Beck, Paul Allen, and Frank J. Sorauf. 1992. Party Politics in America. New York: HarperCollins.
    Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row. Chapters 7 and 8.
    Duverger, Maurice. 1959. Political Parties. New York: Wiley.
    Lijphart, Arend. 1990. The political consequences of election laws, 1945-85. American Political Science Review, 84:481-496.
    Mayhew, David R. 1986. Placing Parties in American Politics. Princeton: Princeton UP.
    Rae, Douglas W. 1967. The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws. New Haven: Yale UP.
    Riker, William H. 1962. The Theory of Political Coalitions. New Haven: Yale UP.
    Riker, William H. 1982. The two-party system and Duverger's Law: an essay on the history of political science. American Political Science Review 76:753-766.
    Riker, William H., and Peter C. Ordeshook. 1973. Introduction to Positive Political Theory. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
    Schattschneider, E. E. 1942. Party Government. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.
    Shepsle, Kenneth A. 1991. Models of Multiparty Electoral Competition. New York: Harwood Academic.
    Sundquist, James L. 1973. Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States. Washington, DC: Brookings.
  4. Congressional ``Elections'' (Sept 26-Oct 8)
    5. Fenno, Richard R. Jr. 1978. Home Style: House Members in Their Districts. Boston: Little, Brown.
    Jacobson, Gary C. 1990. The Electoral Origins of Divided Government: Competition in U.S.\ House Elections, 1946-1988. Boulder: Westview.
    Jacobson, Gary C. 1980. Money in Congressional Elections. New Haven: Yale UP.
    Jacobson, Gary C. and Samuel Kernell. 1983. Strategy and Choice in Congressional Elections. Second edition. New Haven: Yale UP.
    Mayhew, David R. 1974. Congress: The Electoral Connection. New Haven: Yale UP.
    Alexander, Herbert E. 1984. Financing Politics: Money, Elections, and Political Reform. Washington, DC: CQ.
    Alexander, Herbert E., and Brian A. Haggerty. 1987. Financing the 1984 Election. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
    Alexander, Herbert E., and Monica Bauer. 1991. Financing the 1988 Election. Boulder: Westview.
    Sabato, Larry. 1989. Paying for Elections: The Campaign Finance Thicket. New York: Priority Press Publications.
    Westlye, Mark Christopher. 1991. Senate Elections and Campaign Intensity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
  5. How Voters Choose (Oct 10-Oct 24)
    6. Abramowitz, Alan. 1992. Senate Elections. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan.
    Berelson, Bernard R., et al. 1954. Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign. Chicago: U of Chicago.
    Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes. 1960. The American Voter. New York: Wiley.
    Enelow, James M., and Melvin J. Hinich. 1984. The Spatial Theory of Voting: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge UP.
    Enelow, James M., and Melvin J. Hinich, eds. 1990. Advances in the Spatial Theory of Voting. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
    Fiorina, Morris P. 1981. Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. New Haven: Yale UP.
    Kiewiet, D. Roderick. 1983. Macroeconomics and Micropolitics: The Electoral Effects of Economic Issues. Chicago: U of Chicago.
    Kramer, Gerald H. 1983. The ecological fallacy revisited: aggregate versus individual-level findings on economics and elections, and sociotropic voting. American Political Science Review, 77:92-111.
    Nie, Norman H., Sidney Verba and John R. Petrocik. 1979. The Changing American Voter. 2d ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
  6. MIDTERM EXAM (Oct 29)
  7. Statistics and Data Overview (Oct 31-Nov 5)
    8. Achen, Christopher H. 1982. Interpreting and Using Regression. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
    Gujarati, Damodar N. 1988. Basic Econometrics. 2d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
    Wonnacott, Thomas H., and Ronald J. Wonnacott. 1990. Introductory Statistics. 5th edition. New York: Wiley.
  8. Elections and Economic Policy (Nov 7-Nov 19)
    9. Alt, James E., and K. Alec Chrystal. 1983. Political Economics. Berkeley: U of California.
    Hibbs, Douglas A. 1987. The American Political Economy: Macroeconomics and Electoral Politics. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
    Kramer, Gerald H. 1971. Short-term fluctuations in U.S. voting behavior, 1896-1964. American Political Science Review, 65:131-143.
    Nordhaus, William D. 1989. Alternative approaches to the political business cycle (with discussion). Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2:1-68.
    Palmer, John L., and Isabel V. Sawhill, eds. 1984. The Reagan Record: An Assessment of America's Changing Domestic Priorities. Cambridge: Ballinger.
    Tobin, James, and Murray Weidenbaum. 1988. Two Revolutions in Economic Policy: The First Economic Reports of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
  9. Electoral Participation (Nov 21-Dec 5)
    10. Burnham, Walter Dean. 1982. The appearance and disappearance of the American voter. Chapter 4 in The Current Crisis in American Politics. Oxford: Oxford UP.
    Garrow, David J. 1978. Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. New Haven: Yale UP.
    Gurko, Miriam. 1974. The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Women's Rights Movement. New York: Schocken Books.
    Palfrey, Thomas R., and Howard Rosenthal. 1985. Voter participation and strategic uncertainty. American Political Science Review 79:62-79.
    Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. 1988. Why Americans Don't Vote. New York: Pantheon Books.
    Powell, G. Bingham Jr. 1986. American voter turnout in comparative perspective. American Political Science Review, 80:17-43.
    Riker, William H., and Peter C. Ordeshook. 1973. An Introduction to Positive Political Theory. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
    Verba, Sidney, and Norman H. Nie. 1972. Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality. New York: Harper and Row.
    Wolfinger, Raymond E., and Steven J. Rosenstone. 1980. Who Votes? New Haven: Yale UP.


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Walter Mebane
Tue Sep 3 04:44:58 EDT 1996