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their citations and/or bibliographies attest. Properly taught, this can make social science
studies and conclusions intelligible to a greater number of students. Journalists are also
experts at vividly describing the dimensions of various problems. This problem-based
approach provides opportunities for political science instructors to then ask their students
to use social science resources to find potential solutions to these problems. For example,
after reading Ehrenreich’s report about the various obstacles to prosperity for the working
poor, students might be asked to write a paper that clearly identifies one or more of these
obstacles and that draws on their social science course texts and other scholarly research
to suggest specific public policies that might address one or more of the obstacles.
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Fiction can also help students to get a firmer grasp on the major theories and
concepts emphasized in political science courses. In the study of political regime types,
for example, students in my comparative politics courses learn theories about the origins
and policies of different types of regimes from their core social science texts. For Latin
American politics, the Modern Latin America textbook by Thomas Skidmore and Peter
Smith presents a theoretical framework that correlates regime type (authoritarian,
populist, democratic, etc.) to major economic changes and suggests relationships between
political openness/repression and different types of economic policies.
Supplementing this primary text, a novel like Alvarez’s In the Time of the
Butterflies provides students insight on how authoritarian regimes rest on other societal
foundations (e.g. patriarchy within families); how they manage to maintain support
through the education system and other submissive institutions; what they feel like to
individuals in their daily lives; and how difficult it is to organize opposition to such
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Distinguishing between journalistic reportage and social science scholarship in class readings also helps
students to assess the usefulness and relative values of these different types of sources when they are doing
their own independent research and writing.
Convention