Gov 2020: The Hidden Curriculum
Offered next: Fall 2026 · Mondays 3–5pm · CGIS 354N
- Syllabus
- Consolidated View of entire class, or direct links:◦ For Instructors (preview for students): Classes, Lectures, Sections◦ For Students: Assignments, Canvas
The Two Components of Gov2020.
- A popular semester-long project where students learn how to write and publish an article in a scholarly journal, beginning with an article replication. This assignment, an early version of which was described in the article “Publication, Publication,” has resulted in many students’ first publications, conference presentations, dissertations, and awards.*
- A collection of projects designed to teach how science (and the profession) works — optimizing the use of, and teaching the skills not yet subsumed by, AI. It includes what a big idea is in our field; developing defensible answers; co-authoring; writing for impact; effective presentations; solving problems by changing the question; going beyond publication to impact; managing the transition academics undergo from private to public figure; leveraging universities, startups, industry, and government for research; and more.
The Essential Role of the Hidden Curriculum. A considerable body of wisdom about how to succeed in our profession accumulates informally as each PhD cohort learns, improves, and passes knowledge on to its successors. Most of this “hidden curriculum” is not taught in formal classes, but is essential to making the most of graduate school, producing high quality research, and securing the best jobs. Unfortunately, the 2020 pandemic severed the connection between cohorts, leaving individual students to try to piece together this knowledge on their own. We formalize much of this informal wisdom to provide 20/20 vision (remember the course number yet?) into the hidden curriculum and go well beyond what had been possible even before the pandemic, and increase the chances of success in graduate school and the profession.
What’s different from a methods class. The biggest impact methodologists make when asked for advice is rarely the answers to technical questions. Instead, it is providing the big picture and reorienting research directions. Many often pose what they think is a technical question (and sometimes sounds like “Someone told me I have a problem called ‘endogeneity’. Where is the button in SPSS to fix it?”), but which has no answer, isn’t a coherent question, or doesn’t matter even if it could be answered. When we get them to tell us about their project, we may learn that they have unsolvable methodological problems (such as impossible identification issues, 85% missing data, theory and data with little correspondence, or research questions that no one would care about even if they could be answered, etc.). When successful, we work out the bigger picture with them and reframe the research question into one that other scholars will care about and which can be answered without impossible-to-defend technical assumptions. Completion, fencing with anonymous reviewers, and publication become far easier too. This is by far the most common important impact good methodologists have on those around them. This material isn’t covered in technical classes (which you should also take), but it is far more impactful.
* This assignment was previously part of Gov2001. A new version of Gov 2001, excluding this replication exercise, is now offered by others. Materials from when I taught Gov 2001 remain available, including the book Unifying Political Methodology; my class lectures; an app 2k1-in-silico: An Interactive Methods Non-Textbook and related paper “Statistical Intuition Without Coding (or Teachers)”; and the course website.