Click here for the syllabus
Watch this space for announcements and resources.
Readings are below
Week 1. Jan 7, Introduction and overview
Part One: Theories of how people think and how policies are framed
Week 2. Jan 12, 14 Causal stories and target populations
Monday: Stone, Deborah A. 1989. Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas. Political Science Quarterly 104, 2: 281–300.
Wednesday: Schneider, Anne, and Helen Ingram. 1993. Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy. American Political Science Review 87, 2: 334–47.
From class discussion: event at the UNC law school on Jan 23
Graphing and keyword searching assignment, due Monday Jan 26: Use the library web site to go to Lexis-Nexis Academic, then pick The New York Times, then develop your own set of keywords that you believe tap into the concept of the US inflation rate. Enter your data in the spreadsheet, and save the spreadsheet while renaming it with your last name (Jones.xlsx). Email that sheet to Frankb@unc.edu on the due date (or before). Copy the figure and paste it into the word document (replacing the one in the template), make sure it looks right (e.g., not distorted, 6.5 inches wide), and revise the template to describe accurately what you did and what you think of the results. This assignment is designed to get you familiar with keyword searching, so take your time with it and play around with different versions of the searches, getting yourself comfortable with boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, W/5, W/P), parentheses, quotation marks, and wildcards (?, *) and what they do in the Lexis-Nexis environment. Also, I want you familiar with how to put a graph in a document and discuss what the trends indicate. Click here for the spreadsheet and here for the document templates. And here are your collective results.
Week 3. Jan 21 Motivated reasoning, or why it is hard to make people change their mind
No class on Monday Jan 19, Happy MLK Day!
Wednesday: Lord, Charles G., Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper. 1979. Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (11): 2098-2109.
***Note assignment due next Monday..***
Week 4. Jan 26, 28 More on motivated reasoning
Monday: Kunda, Ziva. 1990. The Case for Motivated Reasoning. Psychological Bulletin 108(3): 480-98.
Wednesday: Ditto, Peter H. and David F. Lopez. 1992. Motivated Skepticism: Use of Differential Decision Criteria for Preferred and Nonpreferred Conclusions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63 (4): 568-84.
***Monday, Jan 26. First assignment due in class and by email, as per class web site.***
Week 5. Feb 2, 4. Race
Monday: Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, Amanda Lewis, and David G. Embrick. 2004. I Did Not Get That Job Because of a Black Man...: The Story Lines and Testimonies of Color-Blind Racism. Sociological Forum 19, 4 (December): 555-81.
Wednesday: Rattan A, Levine CS, Dweck CS, Eberhardt JL. 2012. Race and the Fragility of the Legal Distinction between Juveniles and Adults. PLoS ONE 7, 5: e36680.
Eberhardt, Jennifer L., Paul G. Davies, Valerie J. Purdie-Vaughns, and Sheri Lynn Johnson. 2005/06. Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes. Psychological Science 17, 5: 383-6.
Part Two: Empirical studies of how policies are framed and why that matters
Week 6. Feb 9, 11. Why is policy hostile to children even if children are positively framed?
Gormley, William T. Jr. 2012. Voices for Children: Rhetoric and Public Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, chapters 1-2 (Monday) and 3-4 (Wednesday).
***Due on Feb 9: 2 pages (single spaced) including your term paper topic, your choice of design, 5 good citations, and the beginnings of your definition of the relevant frames surrounding the issue.***
Week 7. Feb 16, 18. More on children the consequences of framing
Gormley, chapters 5-6 (Monday) and 7-8 (Wednesday).
Week 8. Feb 23, 25. Framing the poor: a UNC senior thesis, revised
Monday: Rose, Max, and Frank R. Baumgartner. 2013. Framing the Poor: Media Coverage and US Poverty Policy, 1960–2008. Policy Studies Journal, 41, 1: 22–53.
Wednesday: Review and space for questions / lab session about your term papers. Come with practical questions about how the logisitics of your term paper projects.
Week 9. Mar 2, 4. The “Right Talk” – Free market rhetoric in politics
Smith, Mark A. 2007. The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, chapters 1-2 (Monday) and 3-4 (Wednesday)
***Monday Mar 2: Overview of your data collection and draft section explaining your keywords, frames, and data collection process due. 5 pages single spaced.***
March 7-15, spring break, have a great time. Think about studying, too.
Week 10. Mar 16, 18. Continuation with “Right Talk”
Smith, chapters 5-7(Monday) and 8-9 (Wednesday)
Week 11. Mar 23, 25. How we think about income inequality
McCall, Leslie. 2013. The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution. New York: Cambridge University Press, Introduction and chapter 1 (Monday), chapter 2 (Wednesday)
Week 12. Mar 30, April 1, TBA.
No additional readings this week; work on your papers! Outline due next week.
Week 13. Apr 6, 8. More on inequality
McCall, chapters 3-4 (Monday), chapter 5 and conclusion (Wednesday)
***Monday April 6: Full outline of your paper due. The more you have, the more I can give feedback on. Complete drafts are certainly welcome. Double-spaced.***
Week 14. Apr 13, 15. Framing clergy sex abuse in the courts and the media
Lytton, Timothy D. 2008. Holding Bishops Accountable: How Lawsuits Helped the Catholic Church Confront Clergy Sexual Abuse. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, part I (Monday) and Part II (Wednesday)
Week 15. Apr 20, 22. Finishing up on framing clergy sex abuse and getting it out of the courts and into the media
Monday: Lytton, Part III
Wednesday: Review and summary
***Wednesday Apr 22, Term papers due.***
***Final Exam: Monday May 4, 4:00-6:00pm, in the regular classroom ***