The topic of Gerrymandering can be a difficult one to teach and get students to understand. This lesson includes several options, along with additional resources and information for the new teacher or a teacher who like many Americans may have trouble grasping and explaining gerrymandering and congressional redistricting. The lesson options include having students engage in a Debate and/or activity where they draw or redraw the boundaries of a state or congressional district.

This graduate-level course focuses on mass political behavior within the American political system. The goal of this course is to give an introduction to some of the major questions in the study of American political behavior, and how people have gone about answering them. The background goal is to help students practice reading work critically, and thinking through the difficulties of social science research, in preparation for individual research projects. The course examines political ideology, public opinion, voting behavior, media effects, racial attitudes, mass-elite relations, and opinion-policy linkages.

This graduate seminar provides an examination of mass and elite political behavior in the United States, with an emphasis on political participation, political inequality, elections, voting behavior, and political organizations.

This activity is designed to be part of a unit on the U.S. Constitution, as it focuses on U.S. voting trends. Students will analyze bar and line graphs showing the percentages of people (by race, age, sex, region, and education) who voted in elections between 1964 and 2014. Students will use these data to respond to the question “Who votes in American elections?”

We hear a lot about the “women’s vote” these days, although most young people take universal suffrage for granted and the fight for women’s right to vote is usually given scant attention in the classroom. Since the late 20th century, women have constituted the majority of the voting public. The number of female voters has exceeded the number of male voters in every presidential election since 1964. In this module we offer resources, information and ideas for examining the role of women in politics as voters and the history of their increased participation in the political sphere.

The goal of this module is to provide resources and information about the history of the women’s vote in the U.S. Looking at the women’s suffrage movement provides a framework for exploring the changing role of women in politics and society in the 19th and 20th centuries. The history of suffrage offers an opportunity to examine women’s roles at critical points in the nation’s history, and to think about the impact of women’s voting behavior on politics in our time.