Vote Oswego: Developing and Assessing the Campaign-as-Course Model

ABSTRACT

College campuses have taken on increased responsibility for mobilizing young voters. Despite the discipline’s commitment to civic engagement, political science departments play a minimal role in this programming. This article outlines a course structure—including learning objectives, course outline, and assessments—that treats a campus-wide voter mobilization drive as the basis of an applied political science course. Transforming a campus voter mobilization program into a political science practicum offers advanced skill-building for students seeking political careers and links learning objectives to real world activities. Participants report gains in both knowledge of campaigns and grassroots campaign skills. We argue this type of course particularly benefits students attending colleges and universities in geographic areas that receive little attention from political campaigns as well as those students for whom the traditional route of gaining political experience—an unpaid, off-campus internship—is impractical or even impossible.

KEYWORDS:

• Career
• civic engagement
• curriculum
• youth vote

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Student Association, the Committee on Learning and Teaching, the Community Services Office, and the Office of the Provost at SUNY Oswego for their financial support of Vote Oswego. We also extend our thanks to Craig Warkentin, Jennifer Fredette, Hannah Walker, and participants in the Civic Engagement track at the 2017 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference for their comments on earlier drafts of this piece.

Notes

At the authors’ request, the Foundation Center (foundationcenter.org) performed a search of grant funding received by universities from 2003–2016 to support “voter education and registration.” The report showed support growing significantly from 2008 (approximately $30 million across 500 grants) to 2012 (approximately $90 million across just under 1,100 grants). The data collection for 2016 is still in progress.

The discipline’s dedication to this endeavor is exemplified in the publication of Teaching Civic Engagement: From Student to Active Citizen edited by Alison Rios Millett McCartney, Elizabeth A. Bennion, and Dick Simpson and published by the American Political Science Association in 2013 and the Political Engagement Project of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities which was assessed in “Promoting Political Competence and Engagement in College Students: An Empirical Study” by Beaumont et al. (2006).

One of the authors is an Assistant Professor of American Politics at SUNY Oswego and served as the instructor of record/campaign manager for the course described here. The second author worked on Vote Oswego as the data management intern. Author 1 began the project in August 2015 and Author 2 joined the project in April 2016. To avoid confusion, we refer to the authors as “we” throughout the piece even when work was done by one of us alone.

¹We opted to set a goal of hours to decouple student grades from voter registration forms. We feared that evaluating students on the number of forms collected might incentivize election fraud 315 as well as limiting their willingness to take important roles that did NOT contribute to the collection of forms. Students were expected to average 7 hours in the field per week.

²Adapted from guidelines presented at the Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project Training in August 2016.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Allison D. Rank

Allison D. Rank is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York at Oswego. Her research interests include youth political participation, American political development, the intersection of politics and popular culture, and political science pedagogy. Her work has appeared in PS: Political Science & Politics, Journal of Political Marketing, and Citizenship Studies.

Angela R. Tylock

Angela R. Tylock (Class of 2017) majored in Political Science and Global and International Studies at the State University of New York at Oswego. Her research interests include implementation and violations of human rights law, the American political climate, and the American courts system. Her research on the tension between economic agreements and the human right to water has appeared in the Sigma Iota Rho Journal of International Relations.