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Teaching comparative electoral systems with a U.S. example

Would you like a more engaging way to teach students about electoral systems? The answer might be “yes” if you’ve been doing it with lecture slides. Compensation seats? Here’s a table of results from New Zealand. D’Hondt versus Sainte-Laguë divisors? Here’s the Belgian Parliament with either.

What if the lesson used an example students care about? What if it were interactive?

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How to fix a short paper

If you are a college student, this post is for you.

Is your paper longer than the word limit? Is your thesis statement just a list of points you plan to cover in the body paragraphs (i.e., “listy”)? Do you have a gut sense that the paper’s structure might be “off”?

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More ‘pure’ independents than we thought?

I have a new paper with Josh Dyck in Public Opinion Quarterly:

How should we measure “pure” or “true” independents? For years, the respective item required a respondent to volunteer that answer. Recent surveys have moved toward presenting it explicitly. Those that do produce estimates of pure independents that are much larger than in past surveys. We present evidence of this phenomenon across multiple surveys and ask: Are self-administered surveys overcounting independents, or are traditional live-interviewer surveys undercounting independents? We answer that question by comparing live-interview and self-administered samples from the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies, by undertaking tests to rule out mode effects (including an experiment), and by seeing which question wording correlates more strongly with measures of latent ideology, vote choice, and ratings of the parties. Our findings suggest that surveys that include an explicit response option, allowing Americans to self-identify easily as “(pure) independent,” offer a more precise measurement of the concept of party identification. This has implications for the study of independents, as well as for discussions about polarization and party-system dealignment.

How to get better thesis statements from students

Giving feedback on student writing is an opportunity to think about teaching. One issue I see often is a weak thesis statement. This usually takes the form of a list of concepts rather than a straightforward answer to the question in a prompt. Students get here by writing body paragraphs in author-by-author fashion, “wrapping” these in listy thesis statements, then thinking the job is done. In short, students are writing body paragraphs to arrive at their theses — all while worrying about meeting some word count. I want to suggest the idea of a “definitions paragraph” as a way to break these habits. I think it can do so by getting students to think about the readings’ main points in an integrative way.

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