Resources for Students
Resources for Political Science Instructors
Erika K. Masaki, Ph.D.
Can You Make Democracy Happen?
This game is designed to simulate top-down and bottom-up regime transition. I use this in my Introduction to Comparative Politics course to help students remember key terms, while demonstrating the sometimes random nature of regime transition. The terms used in this activity are adapted from Clark, Golder, and Golder's Principles of Comparative Politics. To facilitate the activity you will need to download the worksheet and will need a six-sided die (one per group or person).
Identifying Scholarly Sources and Generating APSA Citations
This worksheet is designed to help students begin thinking about scholarly research in political science. I break them into groups and provide them with copies of different types of sources. They must first identify whether the resource is scholarly. They, they should identify how the source may be useful in political science research. For example, newspapers may help them report on news events (background context) or used for content analysis, but generally are not cited in literature reviews as scholarly research. The second page allows students to fill in the blank for sources I provide to them so they can familiarize themselves with the APSA citation manual.
Annotated Bibliography Template
This worksheet is designed to help students understand the difference between annotated bibliographies and summaries and provides a template for helping them to extract the necessary information from an article that can be used to formulate an annotation in paragraph form.