Classroom as Reality: Demonstrating Campaign Effects Through Live Simulation

Scholastic research has demonstrated that when conducted properly, active learning exercises are successful at increasing student awareness, student interest, and knowledge retention. Face-to-face simulations, in particular, have been demonstrated to add positively to classrooms focusing on comparative politics, international relations, public administration, the lawmaking process, and political campaigns. While important in regards to engaging students in the practice of politics, such hands-on, active learning opportunities are even more important in an applied politics classroom, where students range from ambivalent to hostile towards theoretical arguments and academics. In this article, we assess the utilization of a campaign simulation conducted within the classroom of an applied politics program, where students enter with previous experience on how to best run campaigns and the ultimate effects on learning for undergraduate students that serve as voters in their mock elections. We find that the live simulation increased student engagement. The simulation also served to link the theoretical and practical aspects of the class as we successfully replicated the conditions of a real campaign. Finally, there appear to be important spillover effects, in that increased student engagement in the simulation was associated with increases in students' factual knowledge about politics. Keywords: active learningcampaign effectspolitical campaignssimulations Notes N = 115. N = 98. Note: Includes data from students who did not vote or donate. N = 115. Note: Mean for Correct Placement represents mean with 1 = correct placement and 0 = incorrect placement and number of observations in parentheses. Knowledge represents average correct percentage based on battery of three questions in September and four questions in November. Engagement questions based on responses in post-mock-election survey in November. Observations differ across waves because fewer students took the September survey. We did not track student race, but the class is fairly representative of the university. For the university, the racial breakdown is 11.9% African American, 1.9% Asian American, 1.1% Hispanic American, and 0.2% Native American. Our study of voters in the state electorate confirms a wide contact disparity between the McCain and Obama campaigns indicating that the student assessment of the information environment was valid. After the election, we asked students about their interest in and attention paid to the mock election, but the ideological and knowledge questions were asked in both September and November. The September factual questions were: (1) Who is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? (2) Who is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve? (3) Which party holds the majority of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives? In the November survey, the questions were: (1) Who is the Treasury Secretary, (2) Who is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; (3) Which party holds the majority of seats in the U.S. Senate? (4) Since 1996, has turnout in presidential elections gone up, down, or stayed the same? Unfortunately, we do not have a control introductory course to compare these results to because the professor teaches only one introductory course per year.