You’ll have noticed that we’ve not posted about the result of the US Presidential election, despite four-fifths of us being American and all of us being political scientists. Let’s put that down to this being a blog about Learning & Teaching, rather than anything else.
However, as with Brexit (here and here), this elections opens up a huge opportunity to explore and investigate much political science. With that in mind, here are a couple of things to toy with.
Most obviously, the impending arrival of the Trump administration means that policy is going to change. Eight years ago, I ran a simulation with my UK students, formulating a new foreign policy doctrine for the incoming Obama administration, with groups representing the major arms of federal government and Congressional committees. This culminated in a three day final session, which produced a document just before Christmas 2008.
This works because of the necessary gap betweeen election and inauguration, so if you were to do this, then you’d have to get moving, as the premise collapses somewhat as you move into February. There’s lots of materials available, not least media coverage, so its not hard for students to pull together a brief. Indeed, my main challenge was that my students thought all Americans agree with each other (ha!) and struggled to get fully into the tensions between State and Defense (for example). I’ll take a bit of a leap here and assume that would be less of an issue this time around.
Obviously, such a simulation also works for domestic policy, either collectively or more singularly. One might imagine a game working on Obamacare reform/dismantling, to produce a proposal for the new President, which would require careful consideration of legal instruments and executive authority.
If all that is too much to bear, then the other big area of work concerns the discipline of political science as a whole. Whether for a freshman class trying to get to grips with it all, or a more advanced group, there have been some great pieces in the past week that invite class discussion about the nature and future of PoliSci. To take just four examples, Duck of Minerva has a very thoughtful discussion, the Atlantic has an overview piece, as does Politico and Will Jennings and Martin Lodge here in the UK consider how this relates to Brexit. Lots in these to get balls rolling.
So there you go; lots of learning moments. Not to mention a very graphic demonstration of the importance of fall-back positions, both in the classroom and outside.