SYLLABUS

Political Science 419 (Introduction to Public Administration, fall 2015)

Instructor:  Craig Curtis (Bradley Hall 486, 677-2492, e-mail: rcc@fsmail.bradley.edu) 

Texts: Shafritz, Jay W., E.W. Russell, and Christopher Borick, 2013. Introducing Public Administration (8^th ed.). Pearson Longman (ISBN: 9780205855896, Please note that there is an e-book option).

Class Meeting Information: Tuesday and Thursday: 3:00 to 4:150 pm, Br 220
Instructor's Office Hours: Monday: 8 to 10 am; 2 to 3 pm, Tuesday: 8 to 10 am, Wednesday, 2 to 3 pm, Thursday: 1:30 to 3 pm.

Description: This course is designed to introduce you to the basic principles and topics in Public Administration.  Here, as in many, but not all, universities, PA is part of the political science department.  Therefore, we will consider PA as a subdiscipline of political science.  This is not a practically oriented course of study.  Our purpose is not to explicitly prepare you to work in the public sector.  Rather, our purpose is to learn about the bureaucracy as a way of understanding government and society.  After taking this course, you should be better able to assimilate new information about government agencies and about the administrative problems that face the nation and its constituent governments.

Grading: The final Grade will be based on the following:
 1) 1 take home exam given during the course of the semester, worth 25% of the final grade.

2) Class participation, worth 20% of the grade.
 3) A research paper, worth 25% of the final grade.
 4) A comprehensive take home final exam, due on Saturday, December 12, at or before 4:30 pm, worth 30% of the final grade.

The final letter grade will be assigned according to the following scale:

A  90-100%	D  60-69%
B  80-89%	F  below 60%
C  70-79%

Class policies

1. All students are assumed to have read this syllabus
2. All students are required to use Sakai, and to regularly check their e-mail for the address listed in Sakai.  Lecture notes will be regularly deposited in Sakai in the form of PowerPoint files. Announcements and notice of the posting of take home assignments will be sent to the e-mail address you list on Sakai.
3. All students are expected to come to class prepared to discuss the reading material assigned for that day.  There is no bad time to ask a question, and there are no stupid questions.  If you have any questions about the reading material, or something you read about or heard about in the news, I would appreciate it if you would ask at the beginning of class.  Very frequently, this is a good way to begin to cover the material at hand.
4. During the course of this class, I will certainly introduce concepts and use words with which you are not familiar.  I will try to anticipate these occasions and provide explanations; however, it is virtually inevitable that I will assume that you know something that you do not.  Stop me when I do this and ask for any explanation!  Others are likely in the same situation, and you will help them as well as yourself.
5. In many of the class sessions, we will be applying the lessons learned from the readings and my lectures by doing small group exercises or engaging in class discussions. We will work on those assignments in class, so you must be present to earn credit. Occasionally, I will have assign you to read something posted in Sakai prior to a class for use in a discussion or class exercise.
6. The test dates and the due dates for your paper that are listed in this syllabus are firm unless the needs of the class so indicate; any changes will be made by the instructor in consultation with the class. The final exam must be submitted on time; no exceptions can be made pursuant to university rules that do not permit individual variation in final examination times.

Course Outline

Week I  (Th 8-27) Introduction and Housekeeping Chores, What is PA? Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Ch. 1

Week II  (Tu 9-1) The Political Context of PA, Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Ch. 2. (Visit from the Career Center on Thurssday)

Week III (Tu 9-8) The Structure of the Bureaucracy, Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Ch. 3.

Week IV (Tu 9-15) Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations, Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Ch. 4.

Week V (Tu 9-22) Ethics, Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Ch. 5.

Week VI (Tu 9-29) Internal Workings of Bureaucracy: An Introduction to Organization Theory, Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Ch. 6. The exam will be posted on Friday, 10-2.

Week VII (Tu 10-6) More on Organization Theory.

First take home exam due on Friday, 10-9, at 5 pm.

Fall Break -- no class on Monday the 12th

Week VIII (Th 10-15) Organization Behavior and Personnel Administration, Shafritz, Russell and Borick, Ch. 7.

Week IX (Tu 10-20) Collective Bargaining. Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Ch. 11. Collective Bargaining simulation on Thursday -- I will need to know who will be absent ahead of time since I will assign bargaining teams on Monday.

Week X (Tu 10-27) The Budgeting Process, Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Chapter 13.

Proposed abstract and outline of term paper, due on Friday, 10-30, by 5 pm.

Week XI (Tu 11-3) Performance Management, Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Ch. 8.

Week XII (Tu 11-10) Policy Analysis and Implementation, Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Chs. 9 & 14.

Week XIII (Tu 11-17) The Regulatory State.

Rough Drafts of Term paper due on 11-20, by 5 pm

Week XIV (Tu 11-24) Leadership, Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Ch. 10.

Thanksgiving Break

Week XV (Tu 12-1) Social Equity, Shafritz, Russell, and Borick, Ch 12.

Week XVI (Tu 12-8) Catch-up, Wrap-up, and Review for Final.  The final exam will be posted on or before 5:00 pm, Friday 12-4.
Term paper due by Tuesday, 12-8, 11:59 pm.

The Final Exam is due on or before Saturday, December 12, 2015, at 4:30 pm.

Summary of Due Dates

First Take Home Exam due on 10-9, at 5 pm

Proposed abstract and outline of Term Paper due 10-30

Proposed Drafts of Term Paper due on 11-20

Final version of Research Paper due on 12-8

Final Take Home Exam due on Thursday, 12-10, at 4:30 pm.  No late essays will be accepted!

Guidelines for the Term Paper

Every student in the class is expected to write a thoughtful paper on the following topic:

Background: The budgeting process at both the federal and state levels seems to be fundamentally flawed. The State of Illinois went without a budget at the beginning of the fiscal year as Governor Rauner and the Democratic leaders of the General Assembly were at impasse. The federal government has partially shut down several times since 1990, with the Republicans in Congress demanding concessions from President Obama that they know he will not accept. Rarely does the Congress actually submit a budget to the President for signature prior to the beginning of the fiscal year. Continuing resolutions are the norm.

Your task: Conduct a literature review of the scholarly and popular literature on some aspect of budgeting and write a paper containing the following sections: 1) description of the problem; 2) underlying causes of the problem; and, 3) proposed solutions. You will need to focus on either the state, local, or national process, and that choice should be made explicit at the beginning of the paper

In order to respond to this assignment prompt, you will need to access the scholarly and popular literature on budgeting. Most of the main political science journals, such as the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, American Journal of Political Science, and Political Research Quarterly, occasionally publish articles on budgeting, but journals such as Congressional Quarterly Researcher, American Review of Public Administration, and Public Administration Review more frequently publish articles on the budgeting process. Additionally, well respected journals such as the Economist are not scholarly, but provide excellent and detailed information on budgeting issues at the national level.

Most college students do not know how to tell what is, and what is not, a “scholarly” journal. Scholarly journals, like Public Administration Review and American Journal of Political Science, only publish articles after the paper has been subjected to anonymous review by experts in the field, sometimes called “peer reviews.” Anonymous” review means that the reviewers do not know the names of the authors and the authors do not know the names of the reviewers. Anyone may submit a manuscript, but only the very best are accepted for publication because the peer review process is very rigorous. Such journals are called “refereed journals,” and some reject more than 98% of submitted manuscripts. If you are not certain whether a journal is refereed, look for the submission guidelines for that journal to see whether it includes a peer review process. The submission guidelines for PAR can be found online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/%28ISSN%291540-6210/asset/homepages/PUAR_subguidelines_Mar2013.pdf?v=1&s=d9b3f762561ff13a28bfb39542cba7b73848b55c&isAguDoi=false.

This is not an opportunity to exercise your partisan chops. I do not want polemics from either the left or the right sides of the political spectrum. I want your best effort at rational, non-partisan description of the problem, the root causes of the problem, and a set of practical solutions that will improve the budgeting function. You will need to be very up front about your underlying assumptions and admit the limits of those assumptions.

You are required to use the American Political Science Association citation format.  I have posted a pdf file of the 2006 version of the American Political Science Association Style Manual under resources in Sakai. Failure to faithfully follow the appropriate citation format will result in a one letter grade deduction.

The paper should be 2,000 to 4,000 words, but that is not a hard and fast limit. It is merely intended to provide guidance on the proper length and scope of your papers. All paper submissions are to be turned in as a single computer file, using the assignments function in Sakai. I will be using the Turnitin service in Sakai, which requires that everything be submitted as a single document. Any student that attempts to submit their list of references as a separate file will not be able to successfully submit their paper. Some of you will be wondering, how many sources must I cite? The answer is, “enough to do the job.” I do not want to set a fixed number, but you should look at the list of references in the articles you cite for guidance. If in any doubt about whether you have done a thorough job of research, find more sources.

We are in the process of implementing the new Bradley Core Curriculum. Part of that curriculum mandates that all departments have writing intensive courses as a key part of the major. Writing intensive sources involve lengthy assignments in which the instructor provides feedback at several stages of the process. To that end, It is required that you submit a proposed abstract and outline of the paper on or before October 30. I will review these and make suggestions for you within a week.   You are also required to submit a proposed final draft (I do not like the term "rough" draft) by November 20. These papers must be complete enough for me to provide feedback.  This means no partial papers. It also means that I will not read any rough draft that does not contain a full list of references.  I will make detailed written comments to assist you, returning your papers to you as soon as I can.  The final draft is due before midnight of the last day of class. All parts of the assignment must be submitted using the assignments function in Sakai.

I will be using Turnitin for this assignment. The purpose is not to catch you in errors of citation. The purpose is to allow you to catch errors of citation before you turn in an assignment. To that end, two submissions of assignments will be allowed so that you can see your turnitin report before finalizing the submission.

There is a grading rubric posted in Sakai for this assignment. Please use it. It lists the criteria that I will use to assign a grade to your paper. As such, it is vital information for you. As the grading rubric shows, the outline and proposed final drafts will make up a portion of your final grade on this assignment.

I am not an English professor; however, obvious errors of grammar or usage will result in a deduction from your grade  Obvious errors include, among others, misspelled words, subject-verb disagreement, sentence fragments or run-on sentences, misuse of homophones, failure to use the apostrophe to signify the possessive, ending of sentences with a preposition, failure to use proper punctuation (e.g., failure to place a question mark at the end of an interrogatory sentence, or failure to properly use quotation marks), and use of the four letters "A," "L," "O," and "T" taken together as a word.  Because anyone may overlook a typographical error or two, the first three errors do not count.  I do this because, in the real world, such errors do reduce the value of your work.  Please take the time to edit your work and use a spell check.

Testing Policies

The midterm and the final exams will be take home exams. The final exam will be cumulative.  You will have choices of questions.  For example, on the first exam you will likely be given a list of 4 or more questions from which you will choose two.  The final exam will follow a similar format.  Because these questions will require you to solve real world problems, you will need to do a bit of background research to respond to most of the items. Please make sure that you appropriately cite all sources used in the essays. Never directly quote language without full citation. I would prefer that you use APSA style for purpose of making your citations, but will accept Chicago or APA style for the take home exams.

Each assignment will require you to write two essays, each of two to four pages in length.  All essays are to be turned in as Microsoft word files, using the assignments function in Sakai. Do not turn in separate files for each essay and do not turn in a separate file containing your references. The midterm must be turned in as one file, as must the final take home.  I will be using Turnitin for these assignments and it will not work if you submit multiple files. As with the term paper, I will use grading rubrics for the take home tests. Please refer to these documents so that there is no confusion as to what is expected.

It is my firm belief that anyone of average intelligence can memorize details.  What separates the good students from the ordinary ones, and those who are successful in later life from those who merely survive, is the ability to manipulate knowledge of concepts in creative ways to solve complex problems.  Thus, merely listing concepts learned in a section of the course in response to an essay question may get you a few points, but will not earn a passing grade.  In order to earn a passing grade, you must use the concepts to solve the problem set out in the test item.  You are required to apply concepts to meet the goals of political science, which is to describe, explain and predict human behavior in the political arena.

Your opinion and analysis are not equivalent.  Political science is based on rational, dispassionate analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, informed by theory.  I want your opinions to be informed by rational political science analysis, but experience has taught me that they are not always so informed.  Your opinion is what you feel.  It is informed by emotion as well as by rational analysis.  Your opinion is important to me as a citizen.  It is irrelevant to me when I grade your work.  What matters is the quality of your analysis.

As a glance at my old tests will reveal (and I will gladly share last year’s assignments if you want them), my test items are a bit unusual at times.  Please pay careful attention to the call of the question and to the grading rubric.  I may ask you to play a role or respond to a hypothetical situation in a test item.  It is your task to play the role as realistically as you can.  If dialogue is required, write it.  If a letter or memo is required, write it.  If a particular ideological point of view is required, you must assume that point of view for the purposes of answering the question.  Believe it or not, the best students rather enjoy the opportunity to be creative, and find the test itself to be a learning experience.

Length of the essays is largely irrelevant beyond a certain minimum, and the correlation between length and grades is not very strong.  In fact, the total length of each essay should not exceed 1000 words.  The way that the assignments function in Sakai works means that once the deadline time is reached, you will no longer be able to submit the assignment via that method, so you should use the drop box. Late assignments will be penalized at the rate of 10% for each business day they are late. Because these exams are to be take home exams, I expect a polished document.  Typographical errors and errors of usage and grammar will result in deductions from the grade.  I do this because, in the real world, such errors do reduce the value of your work.  Edit your essays carefully.

 If you have a documented learning disability that requires alternative testing arrangements, please let me know well before the first exam

Academic Dishonesty Policy

Any instance of academic dishonesty, e.g., cheating on exams or plagiarism of term papers, will be dealt with as severely as university rules allow.

Any attempt to secure the exclusive use of library resources, i.e., hiding or removing from the library any books or journals, or intentional destruction of library materials, i.e., cutting out articles, will be punished severely.  You will receive zero credit for the assignment, and the matter will be reported to the library and to the Executive Director of Housing, Residential Life and Student Judicial System.  You will be held liable for repair or replacement of the materials.

You are expected to do your own work on all assignments.  Plagiarism will be punished as severely as university rules allow, i.e., a zero for the paper will be awarded and the matter will be reported to the Chair of Political Science and the Executive Director of Housing, Residential Life and Student Judicial System. 

Plagiarism, according to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (unabridged edition), means "appropriation or imitation of the language, ideas and thoughts of another author, and representation of them as one's own work."  Any of the following examples of academic dishonesty constitutes plagiarism:

1. Directly copying a phrase, sentence, passage or paragraph from another author and presenting it as one's own (i.e., without proper quotation marks and full citation -- you are assumed to know how to properly use quotation marks and citations) is plagiarism.  Cutting and pasting text from the internet without proper use of quotations and appropriate citation is plagiarism.

2. Paraphrasing a sentence, passage or paragraph from another author without so indicating by proper citation to authority.  When in doubt, cite!

3. Knowingly presenting, as one's own, a thought, idea, analytical framework, or theory advanced by another author.  Turning in a term paper you did not write, e.g., one you bought, copied, or downloaded off of the internet, is plagiarism.

Note:  Turning in the same paper to more than one professor (using the same paper to fulfill more than one assignment), without preclearance from both professors, is considered to be an instance of academic dishonesty. I have access to services that allows for the rapid checking of student work against virtually the entire body of web content. Cutting and pasting obscure web content into an essay will be detected by this service. When in doubt about what is academically honest, come to see me. If that is not practical, then quote nothing and cite everything.