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Curricular Design, American Political Development, and the Future of the Undergraduate Political Science Major

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Title: Curricular Design, American Political Development, and the Future of the Undergraduate Political Science Major
Language: English
Authors: Joshua Plencner (ORCID 0000-0003-0113-8012), Allison Rank
Source: Journal of Political Science Education. 2025 21(1):67-83.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 17
Publication Date: 2025
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education
Postsecondary Education
Descriptors: Curriculum Design, Political Science, Undergraduate Study, Majors (Students), Political Issues, Democracy, Core Curriculum, Sequential Learning, Change Strategies, Intellectual Disciplines, Expertise, Specialization, Universities, Barriers
Geographic Terms: New York
DOI: 10.1080/15512169.2024.2353694
ISSN: 1551-2169
1551-2177
Abstract: Structural questions about the undergraduate political science major have spurred debates in the field for more than thirty years. Today, resurgent growth of unusually sharp threats to American democracy fuel familiar curricular questions with new urgency. However, the combined effects of inertia, bureaucratic hurdles, and resource constraints often limit the ability of departments to respond with meaningful programmatic changes. In this article, we describe our experience creating a "loosely sequenced" core curriculum within one subfield -- implemented without making any changes in official major requirements and with the support of only two faculty members -- and provide a model for how interested faculty might design a cohesive curriculum that leverages extant local expertise and disciplinary specializations to offer students rigorous, timely tools for interpreting the contemporary political world. We explore the benefits and limitations of this approach through a case study highlighting our core curriculum in the subfield of American Political Development.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2025
Accession Number: EJ1458817
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0182438166;[15ub]01jan.25;2025Jan29.00:32;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0182438166-1">Curricular Design, American Political Development, and the Future of the Undergraduate Political Science Major </title> <p>Structural questions about the undergraduate political science major have spurred debates in the field for more than thirty years. Today, resurgent growth of unusually sharp threats to American democracy fuel familiar curricular questions with new urgency. However, the combined effects of inertia, bureaucratic hurdles, and resource constraints often limit the ability of departments to respond with meaningful programmatic changes. In this article, we describe our experience creating a "loosely sequenced" core curriculum within one subfield – implemented without making any changes in official major requirements and with the support of only two faculty members – and provide a model for how interested faculty might design a cohesive curriculum that leverages extant local expertise and disciplinary specializations to offer students rigorous, timely tools for interpreting the contemporary political world. We explore the benefits and limitations of this approach through a case study highlighting our core curriculum in the subfield of American Political Development.</p> <p>Keywords: Undergraduate curriculum; American political development; political history</p> <hd id="AN0182438166-2">Introduction</hd> <p>On June 20th, 2020, President Trump's general reelection campaign launched at a 19,000 seat arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the days before the rally, staffers boasted that more than 800,000 ticket-requests had been processed on the campaign's official website (Swan [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref1">32</reflink>]). Actual rally attendance was anemic, however, and the highly-touted spectacle fizzled. Some media pundits were delighted by one explanation for Trump's embarrassing miscalculation: so-called "TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans" who, in an entirely predictable viral trolling effort, flooded the campaign's ticket registration system with false reservations (Lorenz, Browning, and Frenkel [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref2">16</reflink>]).</p> <p>Were these TikTok'ers and other seemingly always-already online youth at the political vanguard in Tulsa, advantageously monkeywrenching against a plodding Trump campaign? Reflecting on media coverage of the Trump rally that wasn't, <emph>New York Times</emph> opinion columnist Charlie Warzel ([<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref3">35</reflink>]) cautioned against too-easy Gen Z savior narratives. Drawing on survey data, Warzel painted a portrait of a generation for whom political "alienation is not a feature" but "the overarching context." Activity with political implications, he warns us, is not necessarily the same as political activity. Expanding the point further as teachers, we think that Warzel's op-ed also gestures at the precarious position of political science as a field of study: why dedicate energy to studying a system designed against you?</p> <p>In seeking to answer this question for ourselves, we – two American politics faculty members at SUNY Oswego, a mid-sized comprehensive public university in Central New York State – took a hard look at our own curriculum, institutional constraints, and expertise. Through collaboration, we discovered significantly more leeway than expected to develop and implement a curriculum that leverages our disciplinary expertise to deepen students' understanding of contemporary political problems. Of course, we are not alone in questioning how we might better structure an undergraduate program within the current constraints of higher education. This article outlines a framework for a loosely structured core curriculum that small faculty collaborations in a range of department types can build upon.</p> <p>We begin by reviewing questions raised perennially about the structure of the political science major before recounting how these challenges manifest within our program. We offer an overview of our collaborative approach to creating a focused core curriculum within one subfield – implemented without changes in official major requirements that might impact those working in other subfields – to provide a framework other faculty might leverage to design a cohesive curriculum. We then turn to describing our structured, loosely sequenced model of upper division American politics coursework that emphasizes our particular local strength in the subfield of American Political Development (APD) to demonstrate how these changes work in practice, followed by observations regarding the strengths and limitations of this approach. We conclude with recommendations for the future of undergraduate political science education based on our experience.</p> <hd id="AN0182438166-3">The contemporary context of undergraduate political science education</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0182438166-4">Disciplinary context</hd> <p>Today it seems a chorus of voices argue that we are living through an era of unusually sharp threats to American democracy. Such threats have variously honed their respective edges, but came to an aggressive point on January 6th, 2021, specifically, and more generally in the Republican Party's wide, ongoing embrace of the "Big Lie" that buffeted an insurrection at the US Capitol Building and continues to support more than 40% of Americans' belief that President Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election (Yang [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref4">38</reflink>]).</p> <p>Addressing this question of threats to democracy, scholars have built a warren of analyses dedicated to the origin, nature, and consequence of such threats (see: MacLean [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref5">17</reflink>]; Ziblatt and Levitsky [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref6">39</reflink>]; Mettler and Lieberman [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref7">22</reflink>]; Levitsky and Ziblatt [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref8">15</reflink>]). Recently, HoSang and Lowndes ([<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref9">11</reflink>], 10) characterized this sprawling "end of democracy" literature "as something of a horror genre where extant institutions are brutally violated and civic ideals savaged as monsters emerge to tear the body politic limb from limb, leaving it in red and blue pieces that may never be reattached." While HoSang and Lowndes argue that current threats to democracy are less "novel" than they are constitutive of the "mainsprings of American political culture" (<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref10">11</reflink>), we agree with their critical summary of this literature: in the mainline view, American-style liberal democracy today confronts a constellation of crises – a "monstrous" hydra of threats reshaping the ground of collective civic life.</p> <p>If the recent foment of the "end of democracy" literature suggests disjunctive breakdowns and irruptive hauntings, the history of reformist efforts studying the purpose and composition of the undergraduate political science major (UPSM) are more patterned – periodically circulating within the discipline and capturing attention of organizational leadership (Ishiyama, Breuning, and Lopez [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref11">12</reflink>]). For instance, in 1991 a major discipline-wide report on the UPSM was published by former American Political Science Association (APSA) President Lucian Pye's "Task Force on the Political Science Major." Titled "Liberal Learning and the Political Science Major: A Report to the Profession," and more commonly referred to as the "Wahlke Report" after Task Force chair and lead author John C. Wahlke, the report draws on extensive survey data covering 200 campuses of varied sizes and institution types to assess the state of liberal learning as well as, more pointedly, provide evidence on common structural design choices of the major that may promote or inhibit key tenets of liberal learning (Wahlke [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref12">36</reflink>]).</p> <p>The Wahlke Report issues a dim view of the state of the UPSM. "Admittedly," Wahlke writes, "undergraduate political science programs today collectively present a picture of disparate and unstructured practices" (1991, 50). The report specifically critiques the degree to which departments abandon what it sees as the second principle of liberal learning: an emphasis on sequential development through coherent curricula that itself is based on "clear conceptions of the character of the discipline" (<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref13">49</reflink>).</p> <p>The Wahlke Report describes a common curricular model where departments trade students' potential deep knowledge for the inertial advantages and bureaucratic conveniences of a broad roster of course offerings which delivers disciplinary content through a "distribution" of program requirements across various political science subfields, often requiring both introductory and upper-division courses spread across those subfields (50–51). The Wahlke Report's identification of the "distribution model" of curriculum design represents an important advance in understanding how political science education often works on the ground as departments allow students to "skip around through a disconnected jumble of individual courses" rather than following "an integrated and sequential course of study" (Ishiyama, Breuning, and Lopez [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref14">12</reflink>], 660). Among other recommendations, the Wahlke Report strongly advises that programs "provide for sequential learning," insisting in "Recommendation 9" that students:</p> <p>should utilize and build upon concepts, information, and skills that they have learned earlier in other courses and in other fields and in each course itself. How this can be done will vary greatly among institutions, depending on size of faculty, number of majors, teaching loads, and other local factors. But merely requiring lower-numbered courses in a field as prerequisites for higher-numbered courses is unlikely to accomplish it. (Wahlke [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref15">36</reflink>], 55)</p> <p>More recent scholarship on curriculum design notes that few changes have occurred in response to longstanding concerns (Ishiyama, Breuning, and Lopez [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref16">12</reflink>]). The ongoing and combined effects of bureaucratic inertia (Wahlke [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref17">36</reflink>]), resource constraints (McClellan [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref18">18</reflink>]), varied institutional contexts (Gentry, Lawrence, and Richards [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref19">8</reflink>]), and the difficult prospects of developing faculty buy-in for sometimes significant changes to teaching responsibilities (Downey et al. [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref20">3</reflink>]) routinely frustrate curricular redesign efforts.</p> <p>In a 2021 <emph>PS: Political Science and Politics</emph> symposium organized and collected alongside then-ongoing work of recent-past APSA President John Ishiyama's "Rethinking Political Science Education" Task Force, authors reflect on the status of the undergraduate major in the 30 years since the Wahlke Report's original publication. They discover a path not only largely untaken but to some degree foreclosed by the evolving context of higher education. For instance, while inertia once explained curricular continuity, today the distribution model remains a prominent structural form of the UPSM due to a lack of credible forums for investigating alternative curricular designs (McClellan [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref21">19</reflink>]). And, while the Wahlke Report may have "offered a blueprint for a comprehensive political science major in an era of relative stability in higher education," that era is long since gone, replaced by "a vastly altered institutional and social landscape" (Smith and McConaughey [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref22">31</reflink>], 359). As new public problems arise, continued curricular dissonance contributes to a discipline-wide need to articulate clear goals for the kind of political science education that equips students with "the knowledge and skills they need to succeed as twenty-first century thinkers, problem solvers, and citizens" (Feeley and Van Vechten [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref23">4</reflink>], 366).</p> <p>In March 2024, APSA published <emph>Rethinking Political Science Education.</emph> Its analysis paints a picture of tectonic shift in higher education. Student populations are changing; they are enrolling in degree programs differently – and for different reasons; they are increasingly ethnically diverse; they are more likely to be women; they are increasingly likely to be of nontraditional college age; and they are more career-focused than ever (<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref24">9</reflink>). Altogether, this means that today the "discipline faces challenges that did not exist" previously, prompting reflection on – and substantive revision of – the fundamental structure of the UPSM to better respond to these challenges (<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref25">10</reflink>).</p> <p>Compared to the Wahlke Report, <emph>Rethinking Political Science Education</emph> offers more explicit recommendations about content, skill, and value learning objectives. Noting the significant differences in the educational environment since the Wahlke Report, the authors offer recommendations that are "less prescriptive and sufficiently flexible" such that a range of programs can incorporate them (<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref26">14</reflink>). Subsequently, the report includes little guidance on how – given the continued structural challenges to major revisions – faculty who want to follow through on the Task Force's recommendations can do so. At the same time, however, one of the recommended best practices includes the recommendation that departments "sequence or 'scaffold' students' learning" while also noting that "flexibility will be necessary" (<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref27">25</reflink>). Our loosely sequenced model, described in the following section, provides a way forward that might benefit small groups of faculty looking to adjust the structure of their curriculum within local constraints.</p> <hd id="AN0182438166-5">Campus context</hd> <p>The SUNY Oswego Department of Politics profiles as a small program in a midsize undergraduate-serving public comprehensive university. Currently, the department has six tenured or tenure-track faculty. Of those six tenured or tenure-track faculty, three teach Global Politics courses (International Relations and Comparative Politics), two teach American Politics courses, and one teaches Political Theory and Gender Studies courses. The department is self-consciously eclectic in style, substance, and approach to studying politics. Our faculty are generally uninterested in policing disciplinary boundaries and have demonstrated this in our curriculum by collapsing the traditional subfields of International Relations and Comparative Politics into a single Global Politics track. Likewise, our faculty are very active in supporting interdisciplinary programs across campus, regularly teaching courses and taking on programmatic responsibilities in Global Studies, Sustainability Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, American Studies, and the Honors Program. Methodologically we are qualitatively-focused and specialize in critical, historical, and interpretive research methodologies.</p> <p>The current structure of our politics major (POL) fits squarely within those criticisms offered by the Wahlke Report thirty years ago and recently reinvigorated by Ishiyama's Task Force, particularly in its use of the distribution model. Students majoring in POL are required to complete three introductory courses in each of our program's three major subfields (American Politics, Global Politics, and Political Theory); at least one upper-division course in each subfield; as well as a capstone research seminar course. Our program does not have an introduction to the discipline course nor does it have a required methods course. And while we usually attempt to seat students in introductory courses during their first year in the major, this is not technically necessary because the only requirement for most upper-division courses is three credit hours (or a single course) in POL. With our program requirements structured this way, the distribution model has offered both faculty and students maximal flexibility with minimal limitations; faculty enjoy significant latitude to teach an expansive list of courses on an ad hoc basis, and students enjoy the freedom to choose coursework that speaks to their interests and provides a relatively open path toward degree completion.</p> <p>But with department-level enrollment stability concerns, shifting institutional priorities and budget austerity pressures across campus, as well as a lived understanding of the significantly different context for higher education we currently face, we are no longer confident that the distribution model adequately serves the interests of our department or our students. Responding to the content, skill, and value learning objectives outlined by the recent Task Force within this model – which continues to be used by most departments (McClellan, Kopko, and Hafler [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref28">20</reflink>]) – is a challenge. Maximal flexibility combined with tightening resources in the context of increasingly complex public problems is a recipe for disintegration, not clarity.</p> <p>To confront these concerns and create a path forward for ourselves and our students, we recently designed and structured a "loosely sequenced" set of upper-division American Politics courses that mirror our specialist training in APD. Our goal was to create a curricular model that enhances predictability and cohesion across our course offerings while intentionally deepening student learning in the process. Given our relatively small department size and comparative local resource constraints distinguishing us from other institutions, it is important to describe what we mean by "loosely sequenced" curriculum. By design, our non-required rotation of upper-division American politics courses share conceptual footing but are not officially linked in our program materials or part of a rigidly scaffolded pre-requisite sequence. Instead, we designed them to offer complimentary standpoints within a shared conversation. By taking advantage of the flexibility to teach the kinds of courses we prefer – a freedom many, but not necessarily all, faculty members enjoy as a condition of the dominant distribution model – we were able to develop this curriculum without involving external oversight processes or requiring official program changes.</p> <p>Most importantly, our approach to loose sequencing is a strategic, faculty-driven choice that leaves open the possibility for future change. In pursuing this model, we build on our shared specialization to construct an effective program without locking in new burdensome requirements that may limit our students, ourselves, or our colleagues teaching in other subfields. Following the Wahlke Report's emphasis on developing curricula that speaks to an "institution's needs" as well as the "resources, talents, and conceptions" of liberal education it has to offer (1991, 57), our model represents our commitment to transparently teaching the field of American politics as we know it. We also believe it allows us to emphasize a rich variety of ways students can grow as readers, thinkers, and writers, with our curriculum encouraging a kind of vital political creativity that connects our classrooms to urgent public problems. By describing the specialist motivation for our program in detail below, we don't mean to imply that this design choice will work for all faculty, in all departments, on all campuses. Instead, we offer a case study of our local approach to designing and implementing a curriculum that highlights our particular "resources, talents, and conceptions" of what a cohesive, rigorous, and structured UPSM could look like. We make no claim that adopting an APD focus, alone, creates a more structured curriculum; instead, we show how we use an APD-focused curriculum to achieve this end.</p> <p>In the following sections we outline APD, emphasizing its overall approach and interdisciplinary scope, before describing the specific loosely sequenced curriculum we developed to highlight specific APD concepts and skills that help create a cohesive, structured program. Through this discussion we encourage readers to consider what common training and orientations they share with colleagues that is similarly positioned to help students build a cohesive set of skills and knowledge needed for engaging with and understanding the contemporary political world.</p> <hd id="AN0182438166-6">American political development</hd> <p>As a scholarly subfield, APD is dedicated to the "theoretical precept [that] because a polity in all its different parts is constructed historically, over time, the nature and prospects of any single part will be best understood within the long course of political formation" (Orren and Skowronek [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref29">24</reflink>], 1). Organized around this precept, an APD curricular approach enables us to pitch our major as the place where students can gain practical insight on the historical construction of seemingly given political conditions. Crucially, APD's characteristic "wide-angle lens" equips students with the ability to think holistically through periods of contingency and struggle (Mettler and Valelly [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref30">21</reflink>], 2–4), or how citizens have challenged and rebuilt their political conditions over time, and may do so yet again. And because it focuses on politics first, rather than the traditional disciplinary commitments of political science, we see APD as especially valuable for a model of undergraduate education that understands study and action as necessarily linked.</p> <p>One of APD's greatest strengths is that it bridges formerly distinct areas of study into a cohesive, rigorous program. As one expression of the interdisciplinary historical-institutionalist turn that first drew substantive and methodological links between sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, history, and law in the 1970s and 1980s, John Gerring ([<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref31">9</reflink>]) notes that APD has been:</p> <p>an agent of many changes within the discipline of political science. It has been a leading force in the rediscovery of institutions; it has bolstered a comparative approach to American politics; it has helped to draw attention to previously neglected issues such as race, class, and gender; and it deserves primary responsibility for bringing the temporal dimension of politics into consideration. (<reflink idref="bib82" id="ref32">82</reflink>)</p> <p>In a similar vein, Daniel Galvin ([<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref33">6</reflink>], 485) argues that APD offers a distinctive "substantive and theoretical exploration of American politics" on its own terms, employing "multiple methodologies and analytical approaches, as appropriate"; however, because APD freely crosses disciplinary boundaries and moves adeptly between "macro" and "micro" levels of political analysis, it has also eluded the definitional strictures of a "well-bounded subfield" (Gerring [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref34">9</reflink>], 82, note 2). Through this ranging style of study, scholars have developed an array of concepts and metaphors to describe "the complex coexistence of institutional dynamism and durability" (Sheingate [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref35">28</reflink>], 462). Here, in this section, we take a broader view to explain our overall approach to curriculum design. We argue APD offers four distinct strengths that position it to meet the undergraduate curricular challenges of our current political context. In the following section, we describe our current courses and identify the specific concepts we highlight in our APD-focused curriculum.</p> <p>First, we appreciate the subfield's heterodox history and location within the discipline of political science, which continues to foment an important "critical edge" in the very best APD scholarship (Mettler and Valelly [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref36">21</reflink>], 1–2). In its original articulation, APD coalesced as an incipient sub-disciplinary challenge to mainstream quantitative behaviorist political science, and its collective voice fueled important normative debates about how and why we ought to do politics research (see: Monroe [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref37">23</reflink>]). Today, APD remains an illuminating and capacious approach, especially in its "relentless preoccupation with the substantive problems that shape American politics" (Galvin and Thurston [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref38">7</reflink>], 158). It follows important problems where they lead, not where disciplinary prescriptions demand, and in that way represents an important model of politically grounded thinking for undergraduate students.</p> <p>Second, we believe that APD's application of theory-rich concepts and metaphors to meaningful political problems allows it to speak intelligibly across temporal distance and multiple levels of analysis, linking present concerns – both motivating to and vexing for our students – to earlier formative moments (Orren and Skowronek [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref39">24</reflink>], 6). Mechanisms and processes of change are central subjects of APD scholarship, and Adam Sheingate ([<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref40">28</reflink>]) categorizes influential APD concepts with three "analytic metaphors" to help quickly cut through a complex body of work. According to Sheingate, concepts like "regimes, orders, and intercurrence" function with a "geologic metaphor of cumulative change"; research on "path dependence and feedback processes" as well as "gradual processes such as layering, conversion, and drift" function with "an evolutionary metaphor of incremental change"; while work on "actor-centered accounts of innovation and entrepreneurship" function with a "syncretic metaphor of combinatorial change" (<reflink idref="bib462" id="ref41">462</reflink>). Ultimately for us, such concepts are most important when they link our understanding of the patchwork present to specific examples, case studies, and substantive content explaining its making. In other words, an APD-focused undergraduate curriculum is well suited to helping students grapple with big questions about how we got here, and what we might need to do to make something new.</p> <p>Third, common components of APD's wide-ranging analytic toolkit invite careful reflection on process, durability, and change between formative political moments. As Richard Valelly ([<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref42">34</reflink>]) explains, considering the processes and pathways that make the political present invites us toward meta-examination of intellectual "tools" available to researchers and teachers in the field. "A basic part of the APD toolkit," he writes:</p> <p>is the concept of "political construction." The idea is to trace how and why both highly salient and apparently obvious (but nonetheless puzzling) features of the political present or past were consciously and unconsciously made over time - whether entrepreneurially, collectively, as a byproduct of other actions, or unintentionally (<reflink idref="bib319" id="ref43">319</reflink>).</p> <p>From the individual to the crowd, and from purposive decision-making to mere accident, present conditions arrive through this interpretive lens not as predetermined or inevitable outcomes, but as things struggled (or even <emph>tripped</emph>) over in the course of doing the everyday stuff of politics (see: Berk, Galvan, and Hattam [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref44">2</reflink>]). This constitutive APD "tool" thus presents an opportunity for students of American politics to think about their own role(s) and political lives, their capacity for individual and collective action, and the various pathways through which political decisions have – and may yet again – lead to more desirable outcomes for the polity.</p> <p>Fourth, through its cultivation of "sensitivity to context," APD is specially situated to encourage much needed vitality in politics education. In an important early review of graduate and undergraduate APD syllabi from 2000–03, Rogan Kersh ([<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref45">13</reflink>]) recognized this promise of APD in the classroom. "Students in APD courses," he writes:</p> <p>will gain above all a sensitivity to context, especially the multiple influences and traditions that shape American politics, and an awareness of the potent possibilities of political engagement. They will also recognize that an animating force of political development is <emph>politics</emph> ... [which] in turn can foster a heightened understanding of the duties and opportunities of citizenship (<reflink idref="bib337" id="ref46">337</reflink>).</p> <p>We see this "sensitivity to context" as an especially promising aspect of APD for undergraduate curriculum. As we understand it, "sensitivity" is a practical skill (or "tool") much like Valelly's definition of political construction in that it, through application, can help reveal the substantive textures of political order and change.</p> <p>Although like many others we believe APD excels in equipping its students to carefully assess and explain the connections between past and present, we also believe it can support a thoughtful future-orientation to politics. Recently, Kryder and LaRochelle ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref47">14</reflink>]) have similarly argued that APD is well positioned to engage in what they call a "scholarship of foresight." For instance, Kryder and LaRochelle argue that analyzing policy feedback processes, or "the interaction of structure and agency, seeking the factors that enable entrepreneurs to overcome constraints," scholarship on social movements and their interaction with the "sprawling and fragmented" state, as well as a general attention to recurrent patterns and cycles, might be "reconfigured and repurposed" for a more explicit engagement with future implications (<reflink idref="bib164" id="ref48">164</reflink>). Such a reconfigured approach would better allow APD scholarship to speak to political movements in real time. Moreover, Kryder and LaRochelle argue that teaching APD will be important ground for testing and tuning their "scholarship of foresight" as it provides a space to engage "real-world problems" and "provide students with the knowledge, skills, and frameworks that will help them develop solutions to those problems" (<reflink idref="bib166" id="ref49">166</reflink>).</p> <hd id="AN0182438166-7">"Loose sequencing" and the SUNY Oswego APD curriculum</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0182438166-8">Approach and overview</hd> <p>Over the last four years we have developed and implemented a focused, upper-division American politics curriculum that balances our unique faculty strength in APD with the resource constraints of a small department at an undergraduate-serving comprehensive public university. Our specific approach to curriculum design may be provocative, but our goal is simple. We aim to provide students with the tools necessary for sharp interrogation and deep understanding of political context – both of the past events that structure the present moment, as well as the possibilities for change woven through the present. In other words, alongside the foment of the "end of democracy" literature, Ishiyama's "Rethinking Political Science Education" Task Force, and Kryder and LaRochelle's call for increased "foresight" in our work as APD teachers and scholars, we mean for this curriculum to develop the specifically <emph>political</emph> thinking necessary for our students to address contemporary challenges on their campuses, in their communities, and beyond.</p> <p>Drawing on and expanding the interdisciplinary roots of the subfield, our APD curriculum is structured around five loosely sequenced upper-division courses offered on rotation as an optional concentration in American politics. As we define it, loose sequencing builds shared conceptual footing and complimentary standpoints across our curriculum. In our particular case, this means supporting students in tackling their questions about the current political moment while providing a common vocabulary – conceptually and methodologically – for interpreting and assessing politics. At the same time, we avoid practical degree progress problems, like bottlenecking, more typical in rigidly sequenced course tracks. Through this loosely sequenced approach, students can freely choose to move into (and out of) that conversation as they pursue their degree.</p> <p>Freedom to choose coursework carries forward a sense of topical breadth available under the distribution model; however, given our defined framework and conceptual emphasis on APD, each course builds toward three shared learning goals. First, students will read and interpret both secondary and primary documents. Second, students will build an understanding of the function of power in American politics, including how it manifests and political struggles to secure it, through a focus on the intersections of and subsequent feedback loops among ideas, institutions, and interests. Third, students will practice their own interventions into contemporary politics that are grounded in APD concepts and orientations.</p> <p>Programmatically, this curricular design helps us mitigate some current department-level enrollment concerns; we cannot afford elaborate restrictions on which students can take our courses and when, so our complimentary, conversational design is meant to welcome all comers. It also reflects real material constraints; we are only two faculty, and we can only stretch our teaching so far. Under these circumstances, we believe more rigid course sequencing would prove too brittle and ultimately counterproductive for our students' paths to degree completion.</p> <p>While we developed this curriculum to meet our local goals, the fact that our model operates without official changes to major requirements – and with the support of only two faculty – suggests it has promise to work in a range of programs of varying sizes and constraints. Regardless of circumstance, we acknowledge the need to balance tradeoffs. For example, if you work in a similarly profiled program and are interested in designing an APD-style curriculum locally, our model demonstrates that you only need minimal additional faculty buy-in to deploy a focused curriculum to better structure and sequence student learning. The clear tradeoff for building focus in small programs is potential loss of curricular breadth. Alternatively, if you work in a large program, our model demonstrates how a small group of colleagues might develop an optional APD-specific pathway within your major – perhaps without similar loss of curriculur breadth, depending on faculty composition and interests. And, while distinct from the model we're proposing here, the interdisciplinary nature of APD means a lone political science faculty member seeking to establish an APD-focused program might find eager collaborators in programs such as History and Philosophy.</p> <p>Of course our discussion here necessarily focuses on our own curriculum design, described in detail in the following section, but our model's emphasis on increased internal coherence and sequencing has promise for faculty who have other commitments they see as germane for undergraduates' ability to meaningfully engage contemporary political questions. For example, a small number of faculty interested in critical globalization studies might similarly collaborate to structure a subset of their comparative politics and/or international relations curriculum to consistently and intentionally feature this specialization as a sequence. After discussing our curriculum design, we consider the limitations of our approach and offer recommendations.</p> <hd id="AN0182438166-9">Curricular design</hd> <p>Our structured, loosely sequenced APD curriculum is outlined in Table 1 below. This table identifies the official course title, prerequisite restrictions, whether or not it emphasizes research methods training, whether or not it foregrounds primary texts, and whether or not it incorporates major research and/or writing as part of the course requirements.</p> <p>Table 1. SUNY Oswego American political development curriculum.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td>Course Title</td><td>Pre-Requisites/Restrictions</td><td>Methods Training</td><td>Primary Sources</td><td>Research Focus</td></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td>Power & Institutions</td><td>Intro Am. Politics</td><td>Yes</td><td /><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>African-American Political Thought</td><td>Intro Am. Politics</td><td /><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>American Political Thought</td><td>Intro Theory, Intro Am. Politics</td><td /><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>American Political Movements</td><td>Any 3 POL credits</td><td /><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>American Political Development</td><td>Any 3 POL credits</td><td>Yes</td><td /><td>Yes</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>"Power & Institutions" plays an important role in our design and serves as an unofficial gateway into our course sequence. Collaboratively designed between us as a mapkey to frameworks and concepts transportable across our upper-division American politics courses, "Power & Institutions" deepens students' critical reading and writing skills as well as provides hands-on introduction to historical-archival methods typical for APD-style research projects. Our assigned readings and assessments are not identical, but we share a core reading list and course outcomes (See Supplementary Material for an example syllabus). The course begins with a unit introducing students to the classic "faces of power" literature. Students then apply theories of American power to historical cases while learning both physical and digital archival research skills in SUNY Oswego Penfield Library's Archives and Special Collections. Then, through a selection of touchstone articles, chapters, and monograph excerpts, students are introduced to influential concepts in APD research, including: institutional orders (Mettler and Valelly [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref50">21</reflink>]), increasing returns and path dependence (Pierson [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref51">25</reflink>]), state formation and state capacity (Skowronek [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref52">29</reflink>]), and the role of race and empire in political development (Rubin [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref53">27</reflink>]; Henning [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref54">10</reflink>]), among others. The course culminates with scaffolded writing project where students design their own APD-style research questions around a shared topic or public problem. By rooting the craft of writing research questions in fundamental APD concepts, students learn to think about politics historically and ask questions that link their own extemporaneous political ideas and interests with earlier formative moments.</p> <p>Building on "Power & Institutions," we offer a rotating set of content- and context-specific courses where students expand their APD-style analytic toolkits. In "African-American Political Thought" and "American Political Thought" students practice close reading, contextualized debate, and written engagement with primary historical texts to better understand the constitutive power of ideas and culture in American political development (Smith [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref55">30</reflink>]; Rogers and Turner [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref56">26</reflink>]). In "American Political Movements" students are introduced to case studies of political movements – from the early 19th century through the present – to learn why movements emerge, how they develop, and how the cultures and mechanisms of collective agency can transform seemingly durable political systems (Tarrow [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref57">33</reflink>]; Woodly [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref58">37</reflink>]); the most fundamentally creative of our offerings, in this course students practice vital communication skills common in movements, constructing physical pamphlets, zines, and infosheets after surveying and discussing archived examples of each. Like Orren and Skowronek, we value APD's conceptual approach grounded in material histories and recognizable public problems; and like Kersh, we see primary documents and "detailed studies" as critical for teaching APD at the undergraduate level. For these reasons, including coursework in political thought within the APD curriculum is essential to our goals, while coursework on movements grounds meaningful political ideas in tangible examples of struggle over power.</p> <p>Lastly, our "American Political Development" course serves as a kind of topical capstone to the rotation, further emphasizing relevant methods that support student research. As a summative offering, we intend this to be the most flexible course in the curriculum. It offers space to address major scholarly works in the field, focused reading of recently published scholarship, timely responses to public problems, or specific faculty interest, while supporting deep student learning.</p> <p>This overall curricular design allows us to offer our loosely structured sequence on approximately a four-semester rotation. We originally planned to offer one section of "Power & Institutions" every semester for two academic school years to help onboard students, as well as take simple measures of enrollment over time to gauge response to the new organizing framework. Given our context, we are sensitive to the fact that word travels quickly among students in a small department on a rural residential campus; student "flight" or "exit" from our optional coursework is a real risk. If something was wrong or concerning to students looking for classes to fill their schedules, we should be able to track that concern via enrollment over time. Table 2 below reports our "Power & Institutions" enrollment numbers, respective section caps (or total seats available), and fill rate percentage per section along with the fill rate percentage for all other upper division electives offered in our program per semester. Gladly, we show no evidence of flight or student concerns expressed through enrollment decline since introducing "Power & Institutions" in Fall 2020. Even when we can't draw strong conclusions from this data, consistently high enrollment in this "unofficial gateway" course to our upper-division APD sequence suggests that students will be well prepared to build on shared concepts and succeed in other American politics courses we offer.</p> <p>Table 2. SUNY Oswego Power & Institutions Enrollment Data (2020–2023).</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td>Term</td><td>Total students enrolled</td><td>Course cap</td><td>% Filled</td><td>Department (upper-division) comparison % filled</td></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td>Fall 2020</td><td>24</td><td>25</td><td>96</td><td>77</td></tr><tr><td>Spring 2021</td><td>22</td><td>25</td><td>88</td><td>84</td></tr><tr><td>Fall 2021</td><td>18</td><td>19</td><td>95</td><td>76</td></tr><tr><td>Fall 2022</td><td>23</td><td>25</td><td>92</td><td>80</td></tr><tr><td>Fall 2023</td><td>24</td><td>25</td><td>96</td><td>88</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <hd id="AN0182438166-10">Reflection on limitations</hd> <p>While we see great promise for our structured, loosely sequenced undergraduate American politics curriculum at SUNY Oswego, and we believe this focus could be useful for sympathetic cadres of teacher-scholars elsewhere, there are some clear limitations to what our APD-focused model can accomplish. Our curriculum design cannot be all things for all people. Most obviously, many will note conspicuous absences in our shared approach to upper-division American politics coursework – particularly in traditional areas of American political science research such as quantitative political behavior. In other words, our APD-focused curriculum highlights part of the field, but not the field in its entirety.</p> <p>Yet if we understand this ostensible partiality as an artifact of APD's characteristic focus on institutional orders, systems, and regime-level questions (Mettler and Valelly [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref59">21</reflink>], 4) – and with explicit acknowledgement that APD scholarship often tracks specific actors' behavior within and against institutional dynamics or ideational constraints, meaning that it does not abandon behavioral questions but rather asks different kinds of questions about agency, advocacy, and activism (Sheingate [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref60">28</reflink>]; Francis [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref61">5</reflink>]) – this is a curricular choice we embrace and celebrate as we link our upper-division coursework together. Given our research specialties, teaching interests, and available institutional resources, we aim to provide our students with deep, rigorous training in historical-developmental thinking for the sake of building their analytical toolkits and ultimately doing the future-oriented work of politics, not merely providing our students with field coverage for the sake of recapitulating the discipline of political science. That is, where some might see a limitation of breadth, we see focus.</p> <p>More narrowly, others might note limitations of our curricular framing of APD for undergraduate students, which cannot – and we believe should not – mirror similar curricula at the graduate level. For instance, our courses do not explicitly segment the study of political institutions despite intensive APD literatures on Congress, the Presidency, the Courts, the federal bureaucracy, and political parties, among others. Nor do they exclusively concentrate on particular aspects of historical-institutional development, such as shifting dynamics of federalism or policymaking. Instead of this segmented approach typical of graduate education, our curriculum cultivates ways of thinking about politics historically that reframes the strengths of APD to leaven undergraduate students' practical ambitions and political goals. We believe this more cohesive, holistic curricular approach, which calls attention to big questions and emphasizes synthesis across traditional disciplinary dividing lines, offers a compelling model for the broader remapping of undergraduate political science education in light of shifting contextual pressures and student goals.</p> <hd id="AN0182438166-11">Recommendations</hd> <p>All curricular design – particularly within small programs – involves making decisions about what core disciplinary mainstays and subdisciplinary specialties students will be exposed to. Our ability to design and implement a loosely sequenced undergraduate curriculum focused tightly on APD benefits from a number of specific conditions. These include a reasonably flexible program as well as two faculty who are trained in the same disciplinary approach and share a desire to support students in grappling with big questions bedeviling contemporary politics. Our case demonstrates, at its core, a fundamentally collaborative project harnessing what we perceive as the strengths of our subfield to better structure our major program, and it only works as a result of explicit discussions regarding what this curricular design offers students within the context of our major. So while our experience designing and implementing this curriculum is particular, as a result of this experience we offer two recommendations for programs looking to rethink their own approaches to the political science major.</p> <p>First, we recommend that faculty fundamentally shift their view of curriculum redesign away from externally driven, top-down, disciplinary projects to internally driven, bottom-up, locally creative projects. Specifically, we encourage faculty to consider what leeway they have to develop a collaborative, structured curriculum without making formal changes to major or minor requirements. Our development of an APD-focused American politics curriculum has required neither permission from our department nor making changes to the structure of program requirements overseen by university administration. Instead, in the simplest terms, it relies on a commitment between two colleagues to collaborate in planning our upper-division course rotations such that we know how our shared curriculum will be covered while ensuring our subfield remains responsive to department needs. This combination of mutual collaboration and lack of formal program requirements, applied in other contexts, may open up a number of possible focuses, themes, conceptual frameworks, and grounded curricular approaches that can be integrated into and carried through a cohesive set of courses.</p> <p>Second, based on our initial experience with this curriculum, we recommend that faculty seriously consider the role of APD in the undergraduate American political science major. While APD is an increasingly common component of graduate American politics training (Kersh [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref62">13</reflink>]), today undergraduate students join our classrooms with vexing constitutive questions about political life that an APD framework is especially well equipped to address. We are currently engaged in a multi-year data collection and assessment project studying this curriculum change, and we look forward to reporting the results of that assessment. In the meantime, anecdotally, we believe APD's characteristic lens on the political past offers a promising means for students' charting the political future.</p> <hd id="AN0182438166-12">Conclusion</hd> <p>This article outlines our response to fundamental challenges confronting the UPSM, and some acute challenges we face at our institution specifically. We describe our recently designed, loosely sequenced curricular model, implemented without changes to major requirements, that focuses undergraduate American politics students on the analytic strengths, conceptual rigor, and constitutive future orientation of the subfield of APD. As we make clear, an APD-focused curriculum is no panacea; rather, it provides a rigorous, cohesively organized, and locally generated pathway for our students as they study American politics and deepen their understanding of "big questions" and urgent public problems. By describing our structured, loosely sequenced curriculum that leverages our unique departmental strength in APD, we offer a combined design approach and case-study model for faculty to provide their own students with the experiences and tools necessary to make the world they want to live in.</p> <hd id="AN0182438166-13">Acknowledgments</hd> <p>The authors would like to recognize the participants from the 2023 APSA Teaching & Learning Conference track on Rethinking the Political Science Education for their questions and feedback on an early draft of this article. We'd also like to thank Julie Novkov and Daniel Lake for insightful comments provided as part of our recent program review, as well as editors Charity Butcher, Maia Hallward, and four anonymous reviewers at the <emph>Journal of Political Science Education</emph> for their engaging and constructive comments on our manuscript.</p> <hd id="AN0182438166-14">Disclosure statement</hd> <p>The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.</p> <ref id="AN0182438166-15"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2024.2353694.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <ref id="AN0182438166-16"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibtext> APSA Presidential Task Force on Rethinking Political Science Education. 2024. Rethinking Political Science Education. American Political Science Association. 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Accessed January 25, 2023. https://<ulink href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-biden-election-2020-poll-victory">www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-biden-election-2020-poll-victory</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ziblatt, Steven, and Daniel Levitsky. 2018. How Democracies Die. New York : Broadway Books.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Joshua Plencner and Allison Rank</p> <p>Reported by Author; Author</p> <p></p> <p>Joshua Plencner , Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Politics at SUNY Oswego, where he teaches courses focusing on American political history, identity, and culture. His research agenda is interested in material processes of political identity formation in popular American visual culture, with special interest in comics studies, race and racism, political and cultural theory, and American Political Development. His work is published in scholarly and popular outlets, including New Political Science , HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics at Bard College , Black Perspectives , Artists Against Police Brutality , The Middle Spaces , and the University Press of Mississippi.</p> <p>Allison Rank , Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Politics at SUNY Oswego, where she teaches courses in American politics with a focus on American political history, political communication, race, and gender. In addition to traditional political science courses, she serves as the campaign manager for the campus-wide voter mobilization program Vote Oswego. In this capacity she oversees an internship program and runs a politics practicum course focused on grassroots organizing. Her research agenda focuses on the role of youth in American politics, civic engagement, and political science pedagogy. Her work has appeared in New Political Science , PS: Political Science & Politics , Journal of Political Science Education , and Citizenship Studies.</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib32" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref2"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib35" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib38" firstref="ref4"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref5"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib39" firstref="ref6"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref7"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref8"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref9"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib36" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib49" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref18"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref21"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib31" firstref="ref22"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref25"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref26"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl18" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref27"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl19" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref28"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl20" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref29"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl21" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref30"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl22" bibid="bib82" firstref="ref32"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl23" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref35"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl24" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref37"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl25" bibid="bib462" firstref="ref41"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl26" bibid="bib34" firstref="ref42"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl27" bibid="bib319" firstref="ref43"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl28" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref45"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl29" bibid="bib337" firstref="ref46"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl30" bibid="bib164" firstref="ref48"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl31" bibid="bib166" firstref="ref49"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl32" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref52"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl33" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref53"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl34" bibid="bib30" firstref="ref55"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl35" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref56"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl36" bibid="bib33" firstref="ref57"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl37" bibid="bib37" firstref="ref58"></nolink>
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  Data: Curricular Design, American Political Development, and the Future of the Undergraduate Political Science Major
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Joshua+Plencner%22">Joshua Plencner</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0113-8012">0000-0003-0113-8012</externalLink>)<br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Allison+Rank%22">Allison Rank</searchLink>
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Journal+of+Political+Science+Education%22"><i>Journal of Political Science Education</i></searchLink>. 2025 21(1):67-83.
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  Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
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  Data: Y
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  Data: 17
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  Label: Publication Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2025
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  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Descriptive
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Higher+Education%22">Higher Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Postsecondary+Education%22">Postsecondary Education</searchLink>
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Curriculum+Design%22">Curriculum Design</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Political+Science%22">Political Science</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Undergraduate+Study%22">Undergraduate Study</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Majors+%28Students%29%22">Majors (Students)</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Political+Issues%22">Political Issues</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Democracy%22">Democracy</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Core+Curriculum%22">Core Curriculum</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Sequential+Learning%22">Sequential Learning</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Change+Strategies%22">Change Strategies</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Intellectual+Disciplines%22">Intellectual Disciplines</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Expertise%22">Expertise</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Specialization%22">Specialization</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Universities%22">Universities</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Barriers%22">Barriers</searchLink>
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  Data: 10.1080/15512169.2024.2353694
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  Data: 1551-2169<br />1551-2177
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  Data: Structural questions about the undergraduate political science major have spurred debates in the field for more than thirty years. Today, resurgent growth of unusually sharp threats to American democracy fuel familiar curricular questions with new urgency. However, the combined effects of inertia, bureaucratic hurdles, and resource constraints often limit the ability of departments to respond with meaningful programmatic changes. In this article, we describe our experience creating a "loosely sequenced" core curriculum within one subfield -- implemented without making any changes in official major requirements and with the support of only two faculty members -- and provide a model for how interested faculty might design a cohesive curriculum that leverages extant local expertise and disciplinary specializations to offer students rigorous, timely tools for interpreting the contemporary political world. We explore the benefits and limitations of this approach through a case study highlighting our core curriculum in the subfield of American Political Development.
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