Courses Taught

This course explores how the U.S. Supreme Court treats the civil liberties protected by the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Students study the holdings of the Court’s cases and, through them, come to understand how the Court works.

In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton described the federal judiciary as the “weakest of the three departments of power.” Many would now disagree. Federal courts interpret the law, but they also play a distinct political role, issuing decisions that affect policy and often make it. This course examines federal judicial processes, with a primary focus on the U.S. Supreme Court, through peer-reviewed research that uses quantitative and qualitative data.

Questions the course asks:

• Who is appointed to the Supreme Court, and what influences the nomination and confirmation process?
• How do cases reach the Supreme Court, and how do justices decide which cases to hear?
• How do justices decide a case, and why does one justice write the opinion rather than another?
• How does the Supreme Court interact with other institutions?

This course examines the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, the final interpreter of the Constitution and often the center of the nation’s most consequential political controversies. The Court’s authority has never been stable or uncontested, and its power is best understood as historically constructed rather than inevitable. Through primary source documents and landmark decisions, students trace how the Court’s power developed through conflict, crisis, and constitutional transformation.

This course introduces the logic and practice of political science research, with an emphasis on evaluating empirical claims systematically. Students learn how theories are developed, how political concepts are measured, and how hypotheses are tested with quantitative data. They also learn to read and critique published research and to spot weak evidence and misleading claims.

Students learn to:

• Analyze data in R and RStudio
• Explain how sampling shapes what data can tell us
• Use the normal distribution to draw statistical inferences
• Test relationships between variables with chi-square tests
• Estimate and interpret OLS regression models
• Distinguish correlation from causation

This course examines the political thought of the American founders and the principles of Western political theory that shaped the U.S. Constitution. Students read the founders alongside later thinkers who defended, challenged, and reinterpreted their ideas, including John C. Calhoun’s A Disquisition on Government, George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All!, and Woodrow Wilson’s “The Meaning of Democracy.”

This course uses political science theories and evidence to answer the why, how, and when of gender’s effects in politics. Students read peer-reviewed studies on public opinion, voting, candidate emergence, campaigns and media, legislative behavior, courts, and social movements, and they learn to evaluate research designs and causal arguments.

Questions the course asks:

• Why do Democratic women run for elected office at higher rates than Republican women?
• Do gendered stereotypes or media patterns change who is recruited to run for office, who is funded, and who is elected?
• Does descriptive representation ever alter policy?

This course examines Congress through peer-reviewed research on its structures, processes, and norms, and on how members both shape and are shaped by the institution. Following Kenneth Shepsle’s argument that Congress is a “they,” not an “it,” students explore the push and pull among members and their competing incentives with the other branches. They learn to explain how legislators make decisions, form coalitions, and negotiate.

Politicians and citizens readily criticize political parties, yet they rely on the benefits parties provide in a democracy. This course traces how America’s two-party system took shape and why it endures, drawing on historical realignments, realignment theory, and Duverger’s law. Students weigh the benefits of parties alongside their drawbacks and consider partisanship as a consequence of collective action that is inevitable in any democracy.

State and Local Government is far more exciting than its title suggests. State governments wield significant authority and shape citizens’ daily lives even more than the national government does. Together, the 50 states and more than 90,000 local governments make pivotal decisions on education, infrastructure, health, and more. Drawing on comparisons, current events, and examples from Arkansas, the course explores the roles and interplay of state and local governments.