Assignment:
Create a 3-5 page essay (double-spaced, 12 point font) on Theme 3, "Political Linkage in America". Please see me if you have trouble accessing a computer to type your essay. The prompt for the essay is as follows:
Choose ONE political linkage topics (Political Parties, Elections and Voting, Interest Groups, Social Movements, The News, Public Opinion) from theme 3 in the syllabus. In your essay, you must address both of the following two parts.
Part 1: Identify a personal (real world) experience that you have with your chosen political linkage topic, and analyze how your personal (real world) experience compares to what you have read in the assigned readings for that topic. For example, let's say you choose Elections and Voting as your political linkage topic from theme 3. You will then describe in detail your own personal, real-world experience with voting in an election. You will then compare that personal experience to what the assigned readings on Elections and Voting say about this topic. Is your personal real-world experience the same or different from what is presented in the assigned readings? Explain. That is just one example.
Part 2: Discuss in detail how you would use your overall knowledge about your chosen political linkage topic gained from this class to respond to a specific political issue/event in the news right now. For example, let's say you choose Elections and Voting as your political linkage topic from theme 3. Identify a specific political issue/problem that is currently highlighted in the news right now, and use everything that you have learned about Elections and Voting in this class to create detailed strategies for taking action to respond to (or even solve) that political issue/problem.
You are required to include specific ideas from the assigned readings relating to your chosen political linkage topic. When doing so, you must include citations to the assigned readings. (Having no citations to the assigned readings for your topic will result in point deductions.) Regarding citations, wherever you write about something from the textbooks, you must immediately add a parenthetic citation at the end of the sentence. The parenthetic citation should be in the following format:
(last name of author(s) and year of book, page numbers)
Example: An idea from page 159 in the 2015 edition of the Ginsberg textbook:
Economic growth and climate change are two important issues in many countries around the world (Ginsberg et al. 2015, 159).
If citing from any of the online links, for the purposes of this class, simply place the title of the link within parentheses, for example (Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail).
Your points will be based on how well you really, really explain your thoughts and examples, how well you integrate specific ideas from the assigned readings (with appropriate citations), and how well you write your essay to have no spelling/grammatical errors and/or readability issues. The more that you explain your arguments and can support them with specific ideas and examples from both your personal experience AND the assigned readings from this class, the better you will do on this essay.