A Real-Life Data Project for an Interdisciplinary Math and Politics Course

Abstract

We describe a non-statistics, data-based activity developed by the author for an interdisciplinary course on mathematics and politics that uses actual ballot data from the City of San Francisco, California. The assignment is appropriate for a general education audience and develops students’ ability to work with data, improves their understanding of functions and algorithms, and requires them to make (and support) choices grounded in logic and mathematics. We also provide a Mathematica notebook that makes it easy to take data from San Francisco to create such an assignment.Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of PRIMUS to view the supplemental file.

Keywords:

• Social choice
• real-life data
• politics
• liberal arts mathematics
• voting

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the anonymous referees for numerous constructive comments which greatly improved the quality of this manuscript.