This guest post is by Francesco Navarrini, who teaches Introduction to Political Science and European Union Negotiation at the bachelor’s level in European Studies at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. He also lectures on Professional Skills in the Master’s program for European Studies at the same university and at the LLM in Global Food Law program at the University of Parma. Additionally, he is a tutor and project supervisor for the Master’s program in Technology and Public Policy at the International Labour Organization’s Training Centre in Turin, Italy. His research interests focus on the intersection of technology and political science, particularly how Generative Intelligence influences the way users retrieve political information and how this, in turn, may inform their political decisions. Francesco has completed GPTZero’s course on Teaching Responsibly with AI. If you would like to reach out to Francesco, you can find him on his LinkedIn page.
I love using literature to explore political science and explain concepts that might otherwise seem too technical or abstract. For example, last week we discussed cleavages (social divisions), and I introduced Rokkan’s classic theory: how cleavages form, how they become entrenched, and how parties historically exploit them by asking voters to align along overlapping divisions.
We arrived at this topic after an exercise on electoral systems, where I asked the class to split into groups and analyze the pros and cons of different systems. We imagined a country called Pluravia, marked by multiple social fractures (class, ethnic, religious, and so on), where an electoral reform was ongoing. Students were divided into groups and each one should advocate for a different electoral system (proportional, plurality or majority) as the best for this situation. Since many students found the historical explanation of cleavage formation too theoretical, I decided to design an active learning exercise to help them see, in practice, how politicians exploit cleavages to sway voters in their favor, and how this later intersects with sincere or strategic voting, a key lesson from studying electoral systems.
I drew inspiration from Hugh Howey’s Silo trilogy (and the series on Apple TV) to create this exercise. After a brief five-minute introduction (explaining the Silo’s rules and its main social divisions), I divided the class of 40 into four groups of 10. Each group represented one of the Silo’s social classes: Up Top, Mid Rangers, Lower Mids, and Down Deep.
