Exit Polls and Voter Turnout

So much for yesterday's discussion of exit polls affecting election outcomes -- here's a Monkey Cage post reporting on some new research that uses a variety of data gathering and analysis methods to conclude that exit poll reporting doesn't drive down turnout.

Unconventional Participation

Tomorrow's topic is unconventional participation. In general, political participation refers to actions taken by citizens to influence government structures, personnel, and/or policies; forms of participation are labeled "unconventional" when they entail actions that "can lead to arrest and punishment."*

In class, we'll be focusing especially on civil disobedience (AKA "passive resistance") -- that is, the deliberate refusal to obey an unjust law so as to achieve its repeal -- and some of its critics. Civil rights activists made good use of this peaceful protest method to achieve policy reform during the 1960s. For example, the lunch-counter "sit-in" campaign that was initiated by Greensboro, NC college students in 1960 (see picture) featured blatant violations of state and local ordinances as a means for achieving the desegregation of restaurants and other public facilities.

As Smith highlights, though, unconventional participation can also take on a decidedly violent cast. This map (and accompanying discussion) illustrates the extent and effects of political violence in the United States during the 20th century. The site author notes that "the biggest peculiarity of American political violence is that there's not more of it," especially in light of the US's relatively high prevalence of non-political violence. It's an interesting observation, and of course begs the question of why it's turned out this way.

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*Raymond A. Smith, The American Anomaly: U.S. Government and Politics in Comparative Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2008) p. 163.

Global Health: How the US Stacks Up

The other day I came across this clip of a recent presentation by Hans Rosling, Swedish professor of global health:



About 11-and-a-half minutes in, he breaks down the correlation between GDP and child survival rates in OECD countries (as Rosling puts it, "the country club of the UN"). As you can see, the US is a bit of an outlier: While its per capita GDP exceeds that of any other country, its child survival rate is at the low end of the OECD set. You can take a closer look (and play around with different variables and country trends) at Rosling's interactive "Gapminder" map. To be sure, child survival in the US is quite high when compared to the world as a whole. Still, its location within the OECD constellation shows a noteworthy departure from the usually positive wealth/health correlation.

In a post last week, I mentioned that President Franklin Roosevelt proposed an "economic bill of rights" back during the Great Depression/New Deal era. One of his proposals was "the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health." His successor, Harry Truman, followed up by calling upon Congress to establish a national comprehensive health insurance program in order to "assure the right to adequate medical care and protection from the economic fears of sickness." Lobbyists for the American Medical Association (among others) worked tirelessly to oppose the initiative, though, and with the Cold War heating up, Truman's health care plan was easily branded as "socialistic" and never enacted into law. Nearly a half-century later, then-Governor Bill Clinton revived Truman's cause in his 1992 campaign for the presidency. As president, he appointed a Taskforce on National Health Care Reform to propose a comprehensive, universal healthcare plan. The Clinton health care plan was ultimately derailed by the so-called "Republican Revolution" of 1994.

In 2008, health care is a major presidential election campaign issue yet again. Do you think the 44th president will be able to achieve what Truman and Clinton strived for but ultimately failed to accomplish? What obstacles would the candidates face in implementing their respective health care plans? If implemented, how far will their plans go towards improving Americans' health?

Representative Dan Brady

Tomorrow's class will feature a visit from State Representative Dan Brady, who represents the 88th legislative district (which includes ISU) in the Illinois General Assembly. You can read up on Mr. Brady's career and legislative record on his website. You might also search local media outlets like the Pantagraph and ISU's Daily Vidette for coverage of the Representative's recent activities and statements.

Voter Turnout Resources

The source for the comparative voter turnout figures I presented in class is the International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization whose aim is to "support democracy worldwide." IDEA's voter turnout data are available here.

This New York Times "Freakonomics" column offers an interesting take on the subject of why voters vote (or don't, as is often the case) and how we might improve voter turnout in the US. Also interesting are some of the letters readers wrote to the editor in response to the article's "rationalist" explanation for voter turnout; see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Voting and Elections

While voting and elections are central to the United States' republican democracy -- they are, after all, the means through which the people choose and hold their representatives accountable -- debates over who should have the right to vote and how elections should be conducted have persisted throughout American history.

The 19th and 20th centuries witnessed considerable improvements in the "freedom and fairness" of American election practices: Most economic, racial, gender, and age restrictions were dismantled and procedural innovations (such as the Progressive Era introduction of the Australian Ballot) have greatly diminished the extent of corrpution and fraud.

Still, concerns remain as to whether the US's election practices are as democratic as they could be. For example, in addition to highlighting the potential for Electoral College failure, the 2000 presidential election fiasco also raised questions about voting machine technology (see also the cartoon posted below) and socioeconomic and racial disparities (pdf) in balloting procedures. Felony disenfranchisement is another point of concern, especially because of its racially and socioeconomically disparate impact.

Obscenity and Free Speech

The first amendment to the US Constitution stipulates that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech," a seemingly straightforward guarantee of citizens' right to say what they want without limitation.

Even this plainly worded civil liberty has been subject to interpretation by the courts, however. In the case of Schenck v. United States, 249 US 47 (1919), for example, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the presence of "clear and present danger" (such as World War I, which was going on at the time) justifies limitations on speech. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously put it in the opinion of the Court, "the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."

When it comes to "non-political speech," the Court has been even more inclined to uphold limitations on the freedom of expression. "Obscenity" is among the more prominent "unprotected speech" categories, in part because it's notoriously difficult to define in practice, as Justic Potter Stewart's concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 US 184 (1964), suggests:

...under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

In a dissenting opinion in another obscenity case, Mishkin v. New York, 383 US 502 (1966), Justice Hugo Black objected to

saddling this Court with the irksome and inevitably unpopular and unwholesome task of finally deciding by a case-by-case, sight-by-sight personal judgment of the members of this Court what pornography (whatever that means) is too hard core for people to see or read.

The Supreme Court finally established three guidelines for determining what constitutes obscenity in the case of Miller v. California, 413 US 15 (1973). One of the guidelines is the "contemporary community standards" rule: Material is considered to be obscene if "the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest."

As this recent New York Times article points out, the rise of internet technology might be adding a new twist to the "contemporary community standards" guideline. In an obscenity case going through the Florida state court system, the defense is using Google search data to establish what the relevant community standards are. If Pensacola, FL residents enter keywords like "orgy" more frequently than "apple pie," the argument goes, they're presumably unlikely to find the defendant's pornographic website objectionable. Whether it convinces the judge (who hasn't yet ruled on the admissibility of the Google search data as evidence) or jury remains to be seen ...

Civil Rights and Liberties

Monday's class will deal with the topic of civil rights and liberties -- an appropriate way to start off the week of July 4, which commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence back in 1776. As we'll discuss tomorrow, this founding document casts civil rights and liberties as the raison d'etre of government; as far as its author and signatories were concerned, government exists at the pleasure of the people for the purpose of securing their rights and liberties, and it is the people's right to reform or replace any government that doesn't fulfill that objective.

We'll take this line of thought as our starting point for discussing how and the extent to which civil rights and liberties have come to be enshrined in the American political system; in the meantime, here are some questions to mull over: How practical is the Declaration of Independence's vision of government? How well does the American political system put its ideals into practice? Have times changed enough since the late 18th century to suggest the need for a fundamental rethinking of the government's responsibility for protecting its citizens' rights and liberties? Franklin Roosevelt proposed an "economic Bill of Rights" when he was president during the 1930s-1940s -- should his proposals be given consideration as potential constitutional amendments today?

This Week's Rulings

In a post earlier this week, I mentioned the Supreme Court's Boumediene v. Bush decision, which ruled (5-4) in favor of the petitioner that the Military Commissions Act of 2006's suspension of habeas corpus is unconstitutional. Boumediene is just one of several high-profile rulings to be handed down this month, though:

• In another 5-4 ruling handed down today, the Supreme Court overturned Washington, DC's ban on handguns. This case, District of Columbia v. Heller is the first 2nd amendment case to be heard by the Supreme Court since 1939, and today's ruling could have a big impact on state gun control laws.


• Yesterday, in yet another 5-4 ruling in the case of Kennedy v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court held -- amidst much controversy -- that the death penalty is unconstitutional punishment for the rape of a child.

For more on these and other late-breaking Supreme Court developments, check out the New York Times' Supreme Court topic page,the Blog of the Legal Times, and Oyez.

Talking Bills to Death

As you saw in today's film, one of the more unique congressional practices is the Senate filibuster, or the provision that allows senators (acting individually or as a team) to obstruct legislative proceedings by speaking for as long as they're able and willing to keep at it. In 1917, the Senate implemented a "cloture rule," which provides for terminating a filibuster if 2/3 of the Senate votes to do so. Such supermajorities are very difficult to achieve, though, especially in today's day and age when congressional majorities tend to hinge on just a handful of seats.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington predates the longest individual filibuster in the U.S. Senate by nearly 20 years. In 1957, the late South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond held the floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes to (ultimately unsuccessfully) prevent passage of a civil rights bill. Thurmond's filibuster ended on his own accord once it became clear that the other southern senators weren't going to help him out (this TIME magazine article from September 1957 explains what happened). In contrast, it took a close cloture vote to end the group filibuster that was mounted to obstruct the more famous Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A couple of years ago, the filibuster was brought to the forefront of political debate once again when a bunch of Senate Democrats made use of the practice to hold up President Bush's conservative judicial appointments. The Daily Show clip below pokes fun at the showdown, but serious questions remain: Is the filibuster rule a threat to American democracy and the separation of powers system? Should it be kept as is, reformed, or done away with altogether?

Interpreting Presidential Power

Last week, Andrew wrote posted about the Supreme Court's very recent ruling on the legal rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees. Like most cases that make it to the Supreme Court, Boumediene v. Bush (pdf) carries implications for several different areas of constitutional law, the most prominent of which is the long-contested status of civil rights and liberties during wartime (in fact, the case began as a habeas corpus petition).

The extent of executive power was also at stake, though, and the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against the Bush administration's enemy-combatant policies. As this article suggests, moreover, Boumediene is only the latest in a string of recent cases that all have the same president-curbing effect.

As the New York Times reported here, Bush responded to the Boumediene ruling by saying, "[w]e’ll abide by the court’s decision — that doesn’t mean I have to agree with it" -- a far cry from his 19th-century predecessor Andrew Jackson's announcement (in response to the Supreme Court's decision in the 1832 case Worcester v. Georgia, which entitled Native American tribes to federal government protection from state government actions to curtail their sovereignty) that "[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!" Nevertheless, it does highlight one significant weakness in the judicial branch's capacity to influence public policy in the United States: While the Supreme Court holds the power of judicial review -- that is, the power to declare an action taken by the president or Congress unconstitutional -- it ultimately relies on the executive and legislative branches to enforce its rulings.

The Legislative Branch

Tomorrow's topic is Congress, the institution that is vested with the American national government's legislative power. Instead of talking about it, we'll watch Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a 1939 film that highlights (among other things) the rules-drivenness of the House and Senate chambers and the implications this has for how and when laws are passed.

In the US's bicameral Congress, the two legislative houses function as largely separate institutions -- they have separate memberships, leadership structures, and procedural rules. You can read about it all on their separate websites, one for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives. The Senate and House sites also serve as portals to the individual websites of each member of Congress (for example, here's the for Yvette Clarke, the representative for the NY district where I grew up; ISU, meanwhile, falls into IL's 11th district, represented by Jerry Weller). You might also check out the C-SPAN website, which has a wealth of multimedia resources and information on day-to-day congressional developments.

On a lighter note, here's a quiz on how you measure up as a 1930s spouse to give you a feel for the time period in which Mr. Smith was produced, and a modern-day Simpsons parody, Mr. Spritz Goes to Washington.

The Presidency

Tomorrow's topic is the presidency, which we'll divide into two parts: Before the break, we'll talk about presidential selection, including both the nomination process and the Electoral College system. After the break, we'll talk about how the modern presidency works, including how it's changed over time to become the focal point of the American political system.

In the meantime, here are some web resources on the presidency:

• The White House website has a lot of easy-to-digest information about both the history of the presidency and the current Bush administration.


• The University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs maintains an online reference source on the presidency called American President, including biographical info and primary sources for each president. It also runs high-profile presidential oral history and presidential recordings projects.


• University of California - Santa Barbara's Presidency Project has a huge assortment of documents and data pertaining to the presidency.

Finally, to follow up on today's "question time" discussion, the following is a clip of President Bush's most recent State of the Union Address (the speech itself starts several minutes in). Do you think a follow-up Q&A session would be useful?

Money and Politics

This past Thursday, the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama announced his decision to opt out of public financing for his campaign:



This is a momentous decision, in part because of the controversy it has sparked over whether Obama has reneged on an earlier promise to accept public funding, but also because it is the first time a major-party presidential candidate has opted to forego public campaign financing since provisions were made for it in the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971.

To help put the current events in context, here's an overview of the highlights of campaign finance history in the United States:

For much of the 19th century, campaigns were financed primarily through the patronage system. Parties would sponsor candidates for office; once elected, those candidates would appoint friends of their party to civil service jobs; then, the party would charge the appointees an annual fee to use for future campaigns. Once the patronage system was reformed (especially with the passage of the Pendelton Civil Service Act of 1883), this "assessment system" was no longer viable, since there were no longer enough patronage appointees to provide sufficient funds for the parties to run election campaigns. Instead, the parties turned to rich financiers -- for many years into the 20th century, political campaigns were bankrolled by wealthy individuals and corporations who provided all the funding that was needed for the parties to get out their message and mobilize voter support.

There were some early 20th-century campaign finance reform efforts, but the resulting legislation was largely ineffective. Real change came during the 1970s, especially after the Nixon Administration's Watergate scandal. The 1974 FECA amendments established strict contribution limits (on both individuals and interest groups) and disclosure requirements, restricted party spending on behalf of candidates, and established the Federal Election Commission (FEC), a federal government agency charged with administering and enforcing campaign finance laws. It also created the public funding system, which is explained here.

The 1974 legislation fundamentally changed the way money flows in and out of campaigns; it did leave one important loophole, though: while it restricted "hard money" contributions to be spent by parties on behalf of candidates' campaigns, it left "soft money" contributions, which parties could -- and did, as the graph below suggests -- use for anything that might be construed as "party building" activities.

Most recently, in 2002 Congress passed (and the President signed) the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), also known as the McCain-Feingold Act after its congressional sponsors (the two guys in the picture on the right). This latest law has several provisions, including restrictions on TV advertising during the 60-day period before an election and a "soft money" ban that closes up the loophole left open by the 1974 legislation. Nevertheless, while it closed up the "soft money" loophole, the 2002 law opened a new "527 group" loophole, which allows certain organizations -- those described in section 527 of the tax code -- to spend an unlimited amount on advertising that is not subject to the BCRA regulations as long as it doesn't advocate explicitly on behalf of a candidate.

Obama says the current campaign finance system is "broken" and susceptible to abuse. Do you agree? If so, what should be done to fix it?

Separation of Powers

On Monday we'll be discussing the second overarching structural feature of the American political system: the separation of powers within the national level of government across three largely independent branches. As Smith points out in The American Anomaly, this is even more unique to the United States than federalism, since most democratic countries -- whether they're unitary states or highly federalized -- have a parliamentary system with legislative and executive (and sometimes also judicial) branches that are inextricably intertwined.

Here, for example, is an official description of the Canadian parliamentary system. Like the United States, Canada has a decidedly federal structure. However, Canada's chief executive is not independent from the legislature the way the American president is. In this way, its government is more like that of Britain, a unitary state that keeps its governmental powers very much unseparated.

Federalism Roundup

On Monday we'll be moving on to talk in more detail about the second key structural feature of the American political system -- the separation of powers and checks and balances. I'll post more about that over the weekend. For now, here's some stuff to supplement today's discussion of federalism:

Via youtube, "Federalism and You":

The Real ID Act of 2005

Here's the text of the legislation that was passed in 2005. The Department of Homeland Security (the federal department charged with implementing the Real ID law) has some information here. You might also check out the National Conference for State Legislatures' Count Down site, which has info about the Real ID saga from the standpoint of the states. As I mentioned in class, a google search should turn up lots of opinion pieces on the law.

No Child Left Behind

More info is available from the federal government's department of education here.

Faith-Based Initiatives

Here's the website of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (WHOFBCI).

ISU and the Morrill Act

As I mentioned in class, the founding of ISU 150 years ago had to do with the politics surrounding the United States' first grant-in-aid program, namely the provision of funding for states to establish land-grant colleges by the Morrill Act of 1862. You can read about it in this paper (.doc) by Retired Distinguished History Professor John Freed.

Mississippi River Flood Relief

Something we didn't get to talk very much about today is the functioning of federalism in times of crisis. The Constitution does say something about this in Article IV:

The United States shall...protect each of them [the states] against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.

In other words, the federal government is authorized to intervene if a state is invaded by an outside force, and also if the state is facing an uprising from within its borders and its government requests federal assistance.

What happens, though, when a state needs help recovering from a natural disaster? Until the twentieth-century, disaster relief was largely left as a state/local responsibility. This began to change in 1927, when the federal government (including then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover) helped respond to major Mississippi River flooding that started in Cairo, IL.

For a sense of the extent of the damaged caused by the 1927 flood (and very early moving picture technology), check out this silent documentary created by the US Army Corps of Engineers a few years later:

As I write, the Mississippi River is flooding the states surrounding it yet again -- and the federal government is stepping in to assist in the relief effort. Here are statements from the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

The structure of the American political system

Tomorrow's class topic is the structure of the American political system, the hallmark of which is the dispersal of power -- both across levels of government (national, state, local) and across different branch institutions (Congress, presidency, courts) within the national level.

Federalist Paper #51 is James Madison's defense of this diffuse structure. Like #10, this piece offers a theoretical argument about how institutions are best designed to counteract flaws in human nature; when we read it in class tomorrow, think about how well it applies in practice to the "real world" of American politics.

While both federalism (different levels of government) and separation of powers (different branches within levels) are key elements of American political system's structure, we'll be focusing mostly on federalism tomorrow (we'll come back to the separation of powers next week). As Smith points out in The American Anomaly, federalism can prove very useful for governing very large and/or diverse countries because it promotes both effective centralized coordination and sensitivity to regional differences. But, there are potential downsides as well -- most notably inefficiency and confusion about which level of government is responsible for dealing with emergent situations.

Federalism was at the heart of the controversies leading up to the Civil War that nearly tore the United States in half during the 1860s. During the 20th century, the national government's interventions in policy areas like social service provision (e.g. social security and welfare) and civil rights brought federalism again to center stage in American politics. In recent years, federalism continues to figure prominently in political debates surrounding many policy issues. Here are just a few examples:

• Education
• Disaster relief
• Healthcare (pdf)
• ID cards

Which countries are democratic?

Here's the source for one of the maps we saw in class today -- the one with the most restrictive definition of what makes a country a democracy. As the blog author who produced it notes, it's based on data from the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2006 "Index of Democracy," available here in pdf format.

As that last link explains, the EIU index is based on 5 criteria: electoral process; functioning of government; political participation; political culture; and civil liberties. Here's how the US stacks up (all scores are out of 10):

• electoral process: 8.75
• functioning of government: 7.86
• political participation: 7.22
• political culture: 8.75
• civil liberties: 8.53
• OVERALL: 8.22

Out of 167 countries, the US ranks 17th, right around the middle of the "full democracies" pack. Sweden comes in 1st, with an overall score of 9.88. South Africa, which ranks 29th, is the most highly-ranked country classified as a "flawed democracy." Maybe unsurprisingly, it does pretty well on electoral process and civil liberties (remember that its long constitution includes a very extensive list of citizen protections) -- it ties with the US on the former and outpaces it on the latter. It loses most of its points on the functioning of its government, political participation, and political culture.

The more commonly referenced index, the annual Freedom House Survey, produces somewhat different results, as we saw in this other map:

Check out the Freedom House country report on the United States, which goes into some detail explaining the US's record on freedom. You can select from the full country report list to see why they got their scores and how they compare to each other.

The Daisy Ad

In addition to Tim Russert, another important -- albeit lesser-known -- figure in the world of media and politics died this past weekend. Tony Schwartz was a media consultant who helped design what is perhaps the most famous political campaign ad ever to be aired on American television:



The "Daisy" ad, which was created for Lyndon Johnson's 1964 reelection campaign and aired just once on September 7 of that year, has been hailed as an influential factor in Johnson's landslide victory. Whether the ad really did sway voters' opinions of the 1964 candidates is debatable (Professor John Sides of the Monkey Cage blog offers some evidence to suggest that it didn't), but there's no question that it's a highly controversial piece that has sparked considerable debate over the appropriateness of emotional appeals and negative messages in campaign politics.

Do you think an ad like this would fly today? How much impact do you think televised campaign ads have on voters' decisions about which candidates to support? If you were to design an ad for one of the 2008 candidates, what would it say?

The American Form of Government

"Form of government" is a hard term to define precisely -- you might think of it as a political system's organizing theme; for our purposes it's a label that encapsulates who (or what) ultimately lays claim to the political systems's governing authority and how she/he/it exercises that governing authority.

As we'll discuss tomorrow, the American form of government is "republican democracy" (no necessary relation to the Republican and Democratic parties), where "democracy" (from the Greek "demos" = people + "kratos" = rule) means that the people have ultimate authority to govern and "republican" indicates that the people do their governing through elected representatives.

In class, we'll take a close look at Federalist Paper #10, which is James Madison's principled defense of the American form of government. In it, he addresses the concern I raised at the end of class today: If "majority rule" is the basis for political decision-making, how do we ensure that the minority of people -- whether it's 1% or 49.9% -- who disagree don't have their rights trampled? Or, to use Madison's words, what can be done to prevent "tyranny of the majority"?

We'll read and talk about Madison's solution tomorrow; in the meantime, you might think about whether there have been any recent instances of "tyranny of the majority" in American politics, and what 21st policymakers could do to prevent "majority rule" from getting out of hand.

The Origins of the American Political System

Tomorrow's class will deal with questions about the origins of the American political system:

• What went on during the revolutionary era?
• Why was a constitutional convention held in 1787?
• What challenges did the delegates face in designing the new government?
• What are the key features of the Constitution its participants produced?
• How does it compare to the United States' first governing document, the Articles of Confederation?

To get a head start, check out this interactive timeline of early US history. It should give you a good sense of why the American colonists sought independence from Britain, how they articulated their revolutionary ideas, and the issues and controversies that dominated their political debates and discourse.

If you're feeling extra ambitious, check out James Madison's notes on the constitutional convention debates. While the language is sometimes tough to muddle through, Madison's notes (which were made public only after the last of the convention delegates had died) demonstrate well just how difficult it was for the convention delegates to arrive at any consensus.
For example, on June 1, they argued about how best to design the presidency: Should it consist of a single person or an executive council? How should the president(s) be selected? What should the relationship between the president(s) and the legislature be like? Should the president(s) have the power to make war? If you read down to the end, you'll see they didn't manage to resolve anything at all that day; in fact, many of the suggestions they made on June 1 didn't make it into the Constitution at all!

"He Made Us All Better"

Tim Russert, NBC Washington Bureau Chief and longtime moderator of "Meet the Press," died on Friday.

As the post title -- a quote from Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman's reaction to the news of Mr. Russert's death -- suggests, it was especially in the latter role that he demonstrated how the media can play a crucial role in keeping politicians accountable to the people.

This is especially important in a republican democracy like the United States. In this form of government, the people have the ultimate authority to govern themselves, but they exercise their governing authority through representatives who are elected to make policy decisions on their behalf. For this relationship to be effective, there need to be mechanisms for conveying information from the people to their representatives and vice versa. There also need to be mechanisms for making sure that the representatives don't disregard the will of the people in favor of advancing their own personal interests.

It was in that spirit that Russert conducted his "Meet the Press" interviews. Every Sunday, he'd bring high-profile politicians to the table to grill them with hard-hitting questions about their political motivations and issue stances so that the people back home could hear them out and make more informed voting decisions.Here he is in action:

Welcome to POL 106!

POL 106, US Government and Civic Practices, is a survey course on the workings of the American political system.

Summer '08 is a fun time to be taking this course: We're in the midst of one of the most exciting presidential election campaigns in American history (you can catch up on what's happened so far and keep up with new developments here), featuring two unlikely major-party candidates (Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama), unprecedented levels of youth voting, major hot-button issues (click here to see what Americans think about them), and a long string of events that have fundamentally challenged political experts' assumptions about how American elections work and opened a Pandora's Box of concerns about the American party system.

We'll be talking some about current events like the 2008 election, but the overarching goal for this course is to get some big-picture perspective on how the American political system has gotten to this point, how things might have turned out differently, how it compares to the political systems of other countries, and how it might be improved. Ideally, you'll come away from the course armed with newfound knowledge and critical sophistication that will inform your civic engagement and interpretation of political developments as they unfold into the future.

I'm looking forward to meeting you at our first class meeting on Monday, June 16 at 11 AM in 207 Schroeder Hall. In the meantime, feel free to check out the syllabus (pdf), and contact me at sgelbman@ilstu.edu if you have any questions or concerns.