What is the Canon in American Politics? Analyses of Core Graduate Syllabi

ABSTRACT

Many core graduate-level seminars claim to expose students to their discipline’s “canon.” The contents of this canon, however, can and do differ across departments and instructors. This project employs a survey of core American politics PhD seminar syllabi at highly ranked universities to construct a systematic account of the American politics canon. Our results offer valuable insights into the topics and literature that political scientists consider important and on which future scholars base their work. Our article breaks down the literature into a comprehensive list of topics and subtopics, which allows us to identify both an overall field canon and one for each topic, to assess whether some topics receive more attention than others, and to identify which topics are most clearly defined. We explore the extent to which diverse perspectives and methods are (or are not) taught to young scholars, and, although we identify sets of frequently assigned readings and authors within each topic, we also find considerable variation between seminars.

KEYWORDS:

• American politics
• canon literature
• graduate instruction

Acknowledgments

We thank Jamie Druckman for his valuable guidance on this project, as well as the instructors who graciously provided us with their syllabi. We also thank Sally Friedman, Chloe Thurston, Thomas C. Walker, attendees at the 2015 American Political Science Association annual meeting, participants in the Northwestern American politics graduate student workshop, and the anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback.

Notes

Our use of U.S. News rankings is bolstered by the work of Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld (2007a). They show school-based variables of interest—such as faculty membership in the Political Science 400, a school’s placement record of their PhDs, and professional success of these past students—closely predict U.S. News rankings.

We additionally considered that differently ranked departments might yield somewhat different topic breakdowns, perhaps resulting from different levels of emphasis on teaching in their graduate instruction. However, separate pie charts for the top third, middle third, and bottom third of departments in our dataset appear virtually identical, suggesting that, if there is a difference, it at least does not show up in the core American politics curriculum.

In some cases, both a single author and a combination of authors including that author appear in the same top 10. When this occurs, the listed frequency for a single author subsumes the frequency for the team of authors, but the number for the author team indicates only the frequency of that specific combination of authors. For example, under “Public Opinion,” Benjamin I. Page appears 38 times as an author in our data, and this total includes the 31 times he appears as part of the author team Page and Shapiro. After much discussion, we determined that this procedure best reflects the contributions of the authors in the data.

For ease of presentation, we place the left bound of our horizontal axis at 1940, omitting the small minority of readings published before that date.

The remaining readings come from books (2,584), chapters in edited volumes (375), and other (109), which includes working papers, conference papers, newspapers, magazines, blogs, speeches, think-tank reports, and online-only content.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sean M. Diament

Sean Diament is a PhD candidate in political science at Northwestern University. His teaching and research interests are in American politics, specifically Congressional development and political representation.

Adam J. Howat

Adam Howat is a PhD candidate in political science at Northwestern University. His teaching and research interests are in American politics, particularly public opinion and political psychology.

Matthew J. Lacombe

Matthew Lacombe is a PhD candidate in political science at Northwestern University. His teaching and research interests are in American politics, particularly U.S. political institutions.