Instructor of record

Politics and the Media - Fall 2025 University of Illinois

This course examines the processes of mass-mediated political communication in democratic societies. Although these processes can be studied in a variety of contexts, this course will focus primarily on the interaction between news media, audiences, and strategic communicators in the United States. Emphasis will be given to the role of news media in democratic theory, the effects of media messages on audiences, the impact of new mass communication technologies, and factors shaping the construction and selection of news reports such as journalistic routines, media economics, and the strategic management of news by political actors.

Introduction to American Politics - Spring 2025 University of Illinois

This course is intended to provide students with an introduction to US government and politics and their study. We will engage with the constitutional and philosophical foundations of the US political system, explore the institutional organization and logic of US government, examine the workings of the US electoral system and the ways in which the government and electorate are connected, and interrogate the individual and group factors that shape political behavior in the US. By the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Clearly articulate the structure, function, origins, and evolution of the political institutions of the US
  • Explain the US electoral process and the basic role of citizen-government interactions in shaping electoral outcomes

  • Identify and elaborate on core factors that give rise to variation in political attitudes, shape sociopolitical identity in the US, and that influence the effectiveness of citizens as drivers of democratic process

  • Politics and the Media Fall 2025 syllabus

Introduction to Politics - Fall 2024 University of Illinois

What is power, who gets it, and why? How do American voters decide who to vote for? How do political institutions vary across countries? When do countries go to war? How can these questions be studied scientifically? These are some of the questions that you will consider during this broad overview of the discipline of political science. The course will introduce the major subfields of political science, including political theory, American politics, comparative politics, and international relations. We will also discuss the nature of social scientific research and how it can be used to inform thinking about pressing political issues. At the end of the course, you should have a working knowledge of core political science concepts and be able to apply those concepts to real-world problems.

University of Illinois-Political Science Math Camp

This session introduces foundational concepts in probability, set theory, random variables, and distributions. Students begin with sets, sample spaces, events, and basic set operations before moving to probability as a function that assigns values to events. The session then covers relative frequency, conditional probability, independence, discrete and continuous random variables, probability mass functions, cumulative distribution functions, and probability density functions.

Using examples such as coin tosses, dice rolls, binomial probabilities, and biased dice simulations, students learn how probability models connect theoretical expectations to observed data. The session concludes with the normal distribution, the Central Limit Theorem, standard errors, z-scores, and the use of R to simulate and evaluate probabilistic claims.