Overview
Follow all directions. Only use information from the course materials. No plagiarism or Ai. Use information I provided.
Instructions from Syllabus:
- Each week, a set of open-ended questions that cover the course material will be due. Each set will contain between five and ten separate questions, each asking you to discuss and reflect upon the course material from the prior week of material.
- These are open to all course materials, and you may discuss the content with me or your classmates. However, you must independently write your own answers, and your responses will be fed through Turnitin. The use of generative AI is not permitted in any form, and outside materials should not be consulted.
- Each question in each set will be graded on a coarse 0-5 scale, and all questions will be weighted together for this portion of your grade, meaning that each set may count slightly more or less than the others depending on the number of questions. Each question in each set should require no more than several hundred words of response maximum.
Overview Video for Week 4Links to an external site. (contains some further explanation of the questions)
Questions
- What are two benefits of having a federal system? What two drawbacks? Explain why. In addition to these logical arguments, provide an example of federalism being beneficial, and an example of it being problematic. Drawing on these arguments, do you think a unitary system would be better or worse? (Be clear about what you mean by “better” or “worse” and why)
- The role of the national government (relative to state/local governments) is (somewhat) clear in the constitution. Why has the national government expanded over our nation’s history? Make sure and draw on both historical and logical reasons, and describe particular pieces of the constitution that have aided in this expansion.
- What are the four stages of the policy process and what do they involve? Walk through an example of each stage, noting why it might be hard for a policy to make it past that stage. Given what we know about governmental process, is it more common for public policy to stay the same or change quickly? Why? Highlight some reasons for this under both divided and unified government.
- What is the submerged state? Why does this complicate our understanding of the size of the American welfare state relative to other nations? Why do policies like this complicate our understanding of representation? Why do policymakers often pursue tax expenditures rather than direct expenditures?
- For one of the five issues we talk about in the last video this week, take a deeper dive on the issue. For this question you are welcome to use outside sources if you wish to, and please link to them / cite them if you do. Discuss whether you believe the status quo policy to be ideal, and why or why not. Would a unitary system offer a better policy solution? Why or why not? Do you believe other countries have arrived at better policy outcomes than what we see in the US? Why? How have they done so?