POL SCI 141E
Electoral Politics: Elections, Media, and Strategy
Description: Lecture, three or four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Requisite: course 30. Designed for juniors/seniors. Analysis of elections and media, including game-theoretic analysis, Downs spatial model of elections, valence characteristics in elections, campaign finance, endogeneity problems in social sciences, liberal bias in media, industrial organization of news industry, and effects of media on voter decisions. May be applied toward Field III or V. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2022 - I enjoyed taking this course with Professor Ajax. His courses always seem to be organized and manageable. I would recommend taking his courses for this class and Congress. If he was teaching other courses at UCLA, I would also take them. This class required a polling group assignment, which was fun to complete with a team and present our research and findings. He is a caring professor and will answer in a timely manner to emails and will go out of his way to schedule office hours with students that are unable to come to his regular office hours. His guidance and answering questions have always been helpful. I recommend taking this course!
Spring 2022 - I enjoyed taking this course with Professor Ajax. His courses always seem to be organized and manageable. I would recommend taking his courses for this class and Congress. If he was teaching other courses at UCLA, I would also take them. This class required a polling group assignment, which was fun to complete with a team and present our research and findings. He is a caring professor and will answer in a timely manner to emails and will go out of his way to schedule office hours with students that are unable to come to his regular office hours. His guidance and answering questions have always been helpful. I recommend taking this course!
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2021 - This is by far the most engaging, interesting, and pertinent political science class I've taken at UCLA. "Professor" Sherrer is exceptionally talented and gives engaging and clear lectures (it's amazing to have a professor that actually speaks like a normal human being and not a robot programmed to spew out overcomplicated academic jargon, as do 90% of the tenured faculty here). The readings for this class are fairly light and the vast majority of them were actually very interesting. I think there may have been only two or three that were boring (the majority were Washington Post or NYT articles, excerpts from a very recent/engaging book, and super cool voter psychology studies). None of the readings felt like filler or irrelevant to the course (again, credit to Sherrer for planning the class so well). Grading is fair and is based on a midterm (30% of grade, was super easy), a short writing assignment (20%), an infographic (10%), and a final (40% of grade, very fair but marginally harder than the midterm). Sherrer is very organized and uses very clear slides. He also recorded lecture and did not require attendance. I highly, highly recommend this class and Prof. Sherrer in general. I wish UCLA's political science department offered more classes related to this topic.
Fall 2021 - This is by far the most engaging, interesting, and pertinent political science class I've taken at UCLA. "Professor" Sherrer is exceptionally talented and gives engaging and clear lectures (it's amazing to have a professor that actually speaks like a normal human being and not a robot programmed to spew out overcomplicated academic jargon, as do 90% of the tenured faculty here). The readings for this class are fairly light and the vast majority of them were actually very interesting. I think there may have been only two or three that were boring (the majority were Washington Post or NYT articles, excerpts from a very recent/engaging book, and super cool voter psychology studies). None of the readings felt like filler or irrelevant to the course (again, credit to Sherrer for planning the class so well). Grading is fair and is based on a midterm (30% of grade, was super easy), a short writing assignment (20%), an infographic (10%), and a final (40% of grade, very fair but marginally harder than the midterm). Sherrer is very organized and uses very clear slides. He also recorded lecture and did not require attendance. I highly, highly recommend this class and Prof. Sherrer in general. I wish UCLA's political science department offered more classes related to this topic.
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