War and Peace in International Relations Theory: A Classroom Simulation

Simulations are increasingly common pedagogical tools in political science and international relations courses. This article develops a classroom simulation that aims to facilitate students’ theoretical understanding of the topic of war and peace in international relations, and accomplishes this by incorporating important theoretical concepts about the causes of war found in international relations theory into the design and implementation of the simulation. In addition to sharing a successful classroom simulation with other international relations instructors, the article makes two important contributions to the pedagogical literature on simulations. First, it shows how simulation design can be usefully based on the theoretical concepts and/or substantive problems that course instructors aim to impart to their students. Second, it demonstrates that it is possible to achieve important learning objectives with low-intensity simulations that do not require a big investment of time, energy, and resources.     

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Methods? Methodological Games and Role Play

In terms of gamification within political science, some fields—particularly international relations and American politics—have received more attention than others. One of the most underserved parts of the discipline is research methods; a course that, coincidentally, is frequently cited as one that instructors hate to teach and students hate to take. Given the well-documented merits of games in promoting student engagement and the key role of methods as a building block to student understanding of political science, this article attempts to rectify this oversight by introducing three games—Zendo, Murder Mystery, and the Archeologist’s Quandary— geared at teaching key concepts and approaches in research methods.     

DIFFERENCES IN LEARNING PRACTICES AND VALUES IN NORTH–SOUTH CITY PARTNERSHIPS: TOWARDS A BROADER UNDERSTANDING OF MUTUALITY

This article addresses twinning between local governments in North and South, contributing to the past decade's discourse on institutional twinning in this journal. Local governments have increasingly become recognised as relevant actors in international development cooperation through city‐to‐city cooperation structures, which have been praised as an effective mechanism for local government capacity building. This article discusses the learning practices and the extent to which new knowledge is valued and adopted by twinning participants in both North and South and moreover whether learning benefits are mutual. In a study of three partnerships between Dutch municipalities and partner cities in Peru, South Africa and Nicaragua, 36 participants were interviewed. The findings reveal that learning in city‐to‐city partnerships is not mutual between North and South and that the benefits of ‘shared learning’—a rhetoric commonly used in the twinning discourse—are limited. Instead, other opportunities for mutuality arise for Northern municipalities from political and strategic benefits, such as staff loyalty and motivation. Mutuality in twinning hence deserves a broader interpretation than learning alone so that twinning benefits can be identified and maximised for both North and South, keeping cities interested and motivated. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Governing Under Pressure: German Policy Making During the Coronavirus Crisis

The global threat of the coronavirus pandemic has forced policy makers to react quickly with totally new policy-making approaches under conditions of uncertainty. This article focuses on such crisis-driven policy learning, examining how the experiences of China and South Korea as early responder states influenced the subsequent coronavirus crisis management in Germany. The first reaction of the German core executive was the quick concentration of decision-making power at the top of the political hierarchy. Asserting the prerogatives of the executive included the radical simplification of the relationship between politics, law and science. State actors took emergency measures by recourse to a single piece of legislation—the ‘infection protection law’ (Infektionsschutzgesetz)—overriding other elements of the legal order. They also limited the government’s use of scientific expertise to a small number of advisors, thereby cutting short debates about the appropriateness or otherwise of the government’s crisis measures. Finally, German actors failed to understand that some of the earlier Chinese and Korean responses required a precondition—namely public willingness to sacrifice privacy for public health—that is absent in the German case.     

Beyond Polls: Using Science and Student Data to Stimulate Learning

In an effort to promote learning in classrooms, political science instructors are increasingly turning to interactive teaching strategies — experiments, simulations, etc. — that supplement traditional lecture formats. In this article, I advocate the use of student-generated data as a powerful teaching tool that can be used in a variety of ways to support learning. The “data-driven classroom” is one in which original student data are collected via survey at the beginning of the course and the results presented throughout the term. Examples and case studies across multiple courses and classroom settings are used to illustrate how the method may be applied in practice. Feedback from student assessment surveys reveals strong support for the method, even among nonmajors. The article concludes with recommendations for instructors interested in creating more data-driven classrooms.     

Using Experimental Research to Test Instructional Effectiveness: A Case Study

Cross-cultural competence is now regarded as a critical student learning outcome by many U.S. higher educational institutions. It requires in part that students be able to empathize with people whose ethno-cultural, economic, political, and/or geographic backgrounds are different from their own—a quality that we are labeling global empathy. Yet colleges and universities frequently find it difficult to develop global empathy among their students. We conducted an experiment to investigate whether different instructional techniques—traditional lecture, video news reports, and an online game—or undergraduate students’ academic majors are associated with variations in indicators of global empathy. Statistically significant variations in survey data were found only among students majoring in psychology and in responses to two survey questions. Two behavioral measures did not reveal any statistically significant variation. A larger sample, longer exposure to treatment condition, or other changes to the experimental design might elucidate stronger evidence that instructional method or undergraduate academic major affects the development of global empathy, but this type of research may not be feasible at colleges and universities where enrollments are small and faculty lack necessary resources.     

Vote Oswego: Developing and Assessing the Campaign-as-Course Model

College campuses have taken on increased responsibility for mobilizing young voters. Despite the discipline’s commitment to civic engagement, political science departments play a minimal role in this programming. This article outlines a course structure—including learning objectives, course outline, and assessments—that treats a campus-wide voter mobilization drive as the basis of an applied political science course. Transforming a campus voter mobilization program into a political science practicum offers advanced skill-building for students seeking political careers and links learning objectives to real world activities. Participants report gains in both knowledge of campaigns and grassroots campaign skills. We argue this type of course particularly benefits students attending colleges and universities in geographic areas that receive little attention from political campaigns as well as those students for whom the traditional route of gaining political experience—an unpaid, off-campus internship—is impractical or even impossible.     

Vietnam,McNamara, and the fog of history

ABSTRACT

Scholars are increasingly exploring the links between the other worlds of science fiction and theorizations of our own reality. This article extends the scope of political science fiction studies by focusing on the Chinese author Liu Cixin's Three-Body novels, thus incorporating a key non-Western work. I interrogate the Three-Body series through the lens of Kenneth N. Waltz's three images of international relations, recovering the abundant homologies across the texts. Both writers represent human nature as malevolent, are skeptical of the importance of domestic politics, and place most weight on the logic of survival perpetuated by an international/interstellar system. They share meta-theoretical commitments too, each stating that global/galactic politics must be interpreted rather than observed. Yet the final pages of Liu's text destabilize the apparently copacetic relationship with Waltzian thought. Liu reveals his interstellar system to be created rather than given, and subject to positive transformation through the acts of agents. Liu's final move calls into question statist, positivist, and zero-sum premises about our contemporary world order by suggesting that they, too, are created by powerful actors rather than being scientific givens. The implications for our practice of politics are clear.     

Realized Publicness at Public and Private Research Universities

Although research‐extensive universities in the United States produce similar outcomes—research, teaching, and service—they vary substantially in terms of the publicness of their environments. In this article, the authors adopt a public values framework to examine how regulative, normative/associative, and cultural cognitive components affect realized public outcomes by faculty. Using survey data from a random sample of faculty scientists in six fields of science and engineering at Carnegie Research I universities, findings show that organizational and individual public values components are associated predictably with different realized individual public outcomes. For example, individual support from federal resources and affiliation with a federal lab (associative) are related to increased research outcomes, while tuition and fee levels (regulative) explain teaching outcomes, and perceived level of influence in the workplace (cultural cognitive) explains teaching and service outcomes.     

The Forgotten Educator: Experiential Learning’s Internship Supervisor

Past studies have addressed the role of the university, student interns and, the faculty advisor; here, we attempt to fill in a missing piece of the experiential-learning process by examining the role and importance of the often overlooked internship supervisor. A survey was developed and distributed to 343 recent internship supervisors. Their responses show that many of these supervisors view internships as an important professional and educational experience. We argue here that the internship supervisor can maximize one’s effectiveness when operating within a strong college or university educational infrastructure facilitated by an engaged and competent faculty advisor. Our recommendations were discussed and confirmed by a focus group of experienced faculty advisors.     

Generation, Age, and Time: The Dynamics of Political Learning during Russia's Transformation

When the Soviet Union collapsed, most Russians had lived their entire lives in a quintessentially authoritarian culture. Having been socialized in this environment, how could citizens acquire the attitudes and behaviors necessary to support a new, more pluralistic regime? Cultural theories of political learning emphasize the primacy of childhood socialization and hold that altering initial attitudes is a decades‐long process that depends on generational replacement. Institutional theories emphasize adult relearning in response to changing circumstances regardless of socialization. Lifetime learning integrates the competing perspectives. Multilevel models using New Russia Barometer data from 1992 to 2005 confirm the persistence of some generational differences in Russian political attitudes but demonstrate even larger effects resulting from adult relearning. Lifetime learning provides the most comprehensive account and suggests that Russians would quickly acquire the attitudes and behaviors appropriate to democracy—if Russian elites supply more authentic democratic institutions.     

Does Reacting to the Past Increase Student Engagement? An Empirical Evaluation of the Use of Historical Simulations in Teaching Political Theory

Within the teaching of political theory, an assumption is emerging that Reacting to the Past simulations are an effective tool because they encourage greater student engagement with ideas and history. While previous studies have assessed the advantages of simulations in other political science subfields or offered anecdotal evidence of their effectiveness in political theory courses, less attention has been paid to the empirical assessment of simulations in political theory. This study uses data — in the form of presimulation and postsimulation surveys, as well as focus groups — collected from two political theory courses in order to gauge levels of student engagement inside and outside of the classroom. We ask if students’ levels of engagement increase during the simulation in their political theory courses. We also explore the mechanisms involved in driving higher levels of student engagement during the simulation. We conclude by arguing that it is the liminal nature of the Reacting to the Past simulations that most likely explains increased levels of student engagement.     

How to Teach Political Advice: Bringing the Daily Life of the Minister Into the Classroom

During four intensive summer weeks, 28 students were exposed to the daily life of top political leaders (ministers and city mayors), acting as their political advisors. Real-life assignments were planned in cooperation with liaisons from the personal offices of these political leaders. The cases brought the hectic, complicated and uncertain life of political leaders into the classroom, and exposed students to the real world to an extent that they had never before experienced in a classroom. They were highly stimulated, were forced to cooperate, learned a great deal, and were reactivated as committed students of political science.

The course was based on a mix of pedagogical elements to enhance student learning such as learning by doing, problem solving, critical reflection, student collaboration, prompt feedback, time on task and active learning and applies many of the recommendations of action-based and experiential learning theory.     

Diversity,Trust, and Social Learning in Collaborative Governance

Scholarship on collaborative governance identifies several structural and procedural factors that consistently influence governance outcomes. A promising next step for collaborative governance research is to explore how these factors interact. Focusing on two dimensions of social learning—relational and cognitive—as outcomes of collaboration, this article examines potential interacting effects of participant diversity and trust. The empirical setting entails 10 collaborative partnerships in the United States that provide advice on marine aquaculture policy. The findings indicate that diversity in beliefs among participants is positively related to relational learning, whereas diversity in participants' affiliations is negatively related to relational learning, and high trust bolsters the positive effects of belief diversity on both relational and cognitive learning. In addition, high trust dampens the negative effects of affiliation diversity on relational learning. A more nuanced understanding of diversity in collaborative governance has practical implications for the design and facilitation of diverse stakeholder groups.     

Strengthening the Experimenter’s Toolbox: Statistical Estimation of Internal Validity

Experiments have become an increasingly common tool for political science researchers over the last decade, particularly laboratory experiments performed on small convenience samples. We argue that the standard normal theory statistical paradigm used in political science fails to meet the needs of these experimenters and outline an alternative approach to statistical inference based on randomization of the treatment. The randomization inference approach not only provides direct estimation of the experimenter’s quantity of interest—the certainty of the causal inference about the observed units—but also helps to deal with other challenges of small samples. We offer an introduction to the logic of randomization inference, a brief overview of its technical details, and guidance for political science experimenters about making analytic choices within the randomization inference framework. Finally, we reanalyze data from two political science experiments using randomization tests to illustrate the inferential differences that choosing a randomization inference approach can make.     

Transforming Bloom’s Taxonomy into Classroom Practice: A Practical Yet Comprehensive Approach to Promote Critical Reading and Student Participation

This article presents the Critical Reading Topics approach, a pedagogical method employed to promote deep thinking in a variety of politics courses. Derived from principles articulated in active learning, critical thinking, backward design, and flipped classroom literature, this method utilizes Bloom’s Taxonomy as the scaffolding for students to create and evaluate pointed and relevant discussion topics written by themselves and their peers. By utilizing this method, faculty can increase students’ contemplation of the course texts, enhance students’ classroom contributions and quickly gauge the extent to which students understand the readings’ main ideas. This approach also enables students to gain authorship of the material, and it gives them additional in-class time to process the complex information they encounter. Evidence collected from six different political science courses is provided to document the approach’s effectiveness. Key findings include an improvement in the quality of relevant and focused discussion topics, a high percentage of students completing reading assignments with corresponding high quiz grades, and significant participation and recognition for all students, even those who are traditionally quiet in class.     

The ends justify the means: A global research agenda for political marketing and public affairs

Political marketing has developed into an increasingly mainstream discipline in universities globally over the last decade. There are many schools of political marketing with different approaches, such as the North American approach, the Western and Eastern European perspectives, and the Asian position. The study and application of political marketing has been categorised with different perspectives, such as electoral, governmental, and international aspects. It is becoming increasingly evident that political marketing needs further classification like any matured and established discipline. A close analysis of political marketing practices and academic research leads one to perceive two distinct areas of political exchanges in two different markets: the intranational market and the international market. The first deals with political marketing at a local, district, municipal, state/provincial, and national levels. The second deals with political marketing across national borders. As in the case of commercial marketing, international marketing became a major study field when marketing grew into a matured mainstream discipline in the 1980s.     

Creating Student-Scholar-Activists: Discourse Instruction and Social Justice in Political Science Classrooms

This article advocates the use of discourse instruction as a means of integrating issues of social justice into the classroom and transcending the debate over politicization in academia. The field of political science is at an uncomfortable juncture; it is faced with an obligation to ourselves and our communities to critically engage and push back against the more toxic components of the political moment, staying relevant and accurate and providing students with the tools they need to process the political world; while, also resisting the dual pressures to either stay apolitical/non-partisan, or to become a current events class, ceding class time to deciphering the day’s political events. We argue that discourse instruction can be used to teach the skills of social justice in political science classrooms. In addition, the infusion of diversity into the classroom through discourse instruction is both a means of enhancing student learning by engaging in high-impact practices of teaching and learning and political activism.     

Dialectics and the Megamachine: A Critique of Ersatz Education

This article proposes that the learning environment matters, and that there are qualitative differences in online versus face-to-face classes. While online education provides some benefits, they also narrow the opportunities for dialectical conflict that thoroughly challenge student thinking, an interaction more likely to be found in real-time conversations. In person, there is more opportunity for an instructor to challenge the reasoning of students in real time, and for students to ask probing and follow-up questions. The article considers the structure of educational dialectic suggested by important thinkers including Galtung, Habermas, and Buber. Online education is then situated as a technology that interferes with human relations and dialectical reasoning and fits within the notion of technics and the megamachine advanced by Lewis Mumford, which dehumanizes personal interactions with instrumental processes for growth and efficiency. Students follow suit by focusing more on the instrumental absorption of course content to pass the course, instead of higher order critique. Of particular interest to political science education is that if conversational dialectics are weakened in universities, and therefore polities—and the technics are simply considered a natural replacement for in-person conversation—the opportunities to teach critical reasoning required for critique of complex political phenomena are also narrowed. We might temper the dangers of the megamachine by reflexively discussing the political economy of online teaching itself with our students and by starting to expect synchronous conversation, which will open dialectical opportunities.     

The Politics of Foreign Direct Investment into Developing Countries: Increasing FDI through International Trade Agreements?

The flow of foreign direct investment into developing countries varies greatly across countries and over time. The political factors that affect these flows are not well understood. Focusing on the relationship between trade and investment, we argue that international trade agreements—GATT/WTO and preferential trade agreements (PTAs)—provide mechanisms for making commitments to foreign investors about the treatment of their assets, thus reassuring investors and increasing investment. These international commitments are more credible than domestic policy choices, because reneging on them is more costly. Statistical analyses for 122 developing countries from 1970 to 2000 support this argument. Developing countries that belong to the WTO and participate in more PTAs experience greater FDI inflows than otherwise, controlling for many factors including domestic policy preferences and taking into account possible endogeneity. Joining international trade agreements allows developing countries to attract more FDI and thus increase economic growth.