PLSC 083S.1, First-Year Seminar: Power in America, Fall 2007
- click here to read the syllabus
- click here for The
Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence (for weeks
10 through 13)
- Note: During the last two weeks of class we'll be making use of a huge web site Prof. Baumgartner is involved in; on the right of this page, click on "Lobbying and Advocacy Project" to see it. The following two papers are actually chapters of a book that is almost done. We're trying to explain whether wealthy lobbyists typically get what they want in Washington. The results suggest they sometimes do but much less often than you might imagine.
- Note for Wednesday December 5: Special guest, Alan Janesch, Director of the Penn State Grassroots Network, will discuss the alumni association's efforts to lobby for Penn State. Check out the following URLs:
- -- Penn State Grassroots Network official website, see: http://www.alumni.psu.edu/grassroots/.
- -- Penn State Grassroots Network group on Facebook; go to www.facebook.com, log in, go to "Groups" and do a search on Penn State Grassroots Network
- -- "Rooting for Penn State," the Grassroots Network blog on the Centre Daily Times website; go to www.centredaily.com, scroll all the way down. Under the Opinions heading, click on the "Blogs" link. "Rooting for Penn State" is the second on the list.
- click here for instructions
for your first paper including a template for what your
papers should look like.
- click here for your second paper assignment.
- click here for your third paper assignment.
- click here to take the first quiz.
- click here to review that great third quiz, which had all the grammar reminders
- click here for the fourth paper assignment, due Oct 29
- click here for the 3 New York Times stories for paper # 4 in case the links don't work.
- click here to see historical election return data for US President and Congress
- click here to see some amazingly low numbers for how many people vote in municipal elections here in Centre County, PA.
- click here to see your dismal results from the factual survey about information concerning capital punishment.
- click here to see the slides from the November 12 2007 lecture.
- click here for the fifth paper assignment, due Monday December 3, 2007.
- click here for the optional sixth paper assignment, due Wed. Dec 12.
- go here for information about Political Science formatting
and citation questions. (This is from the University of
Wisconsin writing center.)
- Need help on your writing? Think Baumgartner is a grammar ogre? Go here for information about the Penn State Undergraduate Writing Center, where you can make an appointment to get help in writing papers.
- watch this space for further announcements!