Undergraduate Courses

  • POS 2041 American Federal Government
    • What is democracy, and how democratic are American political institutions?  How do political institutions help societies solve classical political questions? What is political power, and how concentrated is it in the United States relative to other democracies? How resistant to change is the United States Constitution, relative to other national constitutions?  Are American political parties relatively strong or weak, and what difference does that make? Why are we have an Electoral College, and who benefits from it? Can Congress effectively represent and effectively legislate at the same time?  What is the role of an unelected judiciary in a democracy? Are federal bureacrats responsive to political institutions?
  • POS 4734 Research Methods in Political Science
    • Why do we call our discipline “political science“? What kinds of research do political scientists do, and how do they communicate that knowledge to one another? How do we know what we think we know? How do we measure political phenomena? How would we know if a new public policy “worked”?  How do we analyze data, and what are good data to analyze? Are ethics as hard to define in “political science” as they are in “politics”? This course is open to all Political Science majors, and is required for students in the Department Honors Program.
  • IDS 4930 People and Data
    • The course introduces students to the uses of big data in the social sciences. This UF Signature Core course examines the human implications of the big data revolution: how algorithms and massive data sets enable your social network and improve society while exposing your private life to strangers and reshaping the social compact. This course is team taught with faculty from the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Education, Journalism and Communications, and Agriculture and Life Sciences.
  • POS 3204 Political Behavior
    • How much do ordinary citizens know about politics, and does it matter if some people don’t know very much? Why do some people participate a lot in politics, and other people never even bother to vote? Does political participation really matter, and if so, what could be done to encourage more people to participate? How similar is Americans’ political behavior to that of citizens in other western democracies?