Interview with Tom Knecht
Linda Tate

Tom Knecht is an assistant professor of political science at DU. He holds a bachelors degree in political science from Stanford University and a PhD in political science from the University of California-Santa Barbara. His research interests include American foreign policy, public opinion, and the American presidency. His book, Polling the Reins of Power, is currently under review. In Fall 2010, he will take a position as assistant professor of political science at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.

Where did you go to school?
I did my undergraduate degree at Stanford and my graduate work at the University of California-Santa Barbara. I was in political science all along. At Stanford, I was in a program cross-listed between history and political science. I saw myself as a history major until I counted and saw that I was a political science major. As an undergraduate, I didnt see a huge divide as a discipline, but in graduate school I did.

Ive always been interested in the questions political science looks at questions of war and peace, questions of how people arrive at the decisions they do. I enjoy college students and the process of teaching. Teaching is about as rewarding as you can possibly get.

What courses do you teach at DU?
I teach a bunch American Presidency, American Congress, Interest Groups, a Core course on American Public Opinion. We look at this in terms of political context and in terms of social issues sociology, psychology, public opinion, and marketing. I teach a simulation class on American Government each student plays a member of the House of Representatives for the quarter. I teach a first-year seminar titled Politics of Sports. I teach a SOCS Foundation course on Power and Justice.

What kinds of writing assignments do you incorporate in these courses?
I have a lot of varied writing assignments from traditional research papers to short reaction pieces. In my simulation class, students draft bills and write press releases. Students like these assignments. When writing a bill for this course, you have to proofread your bill and include everything from soup to nuts. You cant get the bill through the committee otherwise this simulates the committee process and the floor vote. In my first-year seminar, students work on a cooperative learning assignment. They take notes on readings and make presentations. They then write up a group response. Writing is a collaborative endeavor. This is such a hard skill to teach, and we really need it in the academy.

What are your research interests? To what degree do you have to be an active writer to accomplish your research goals?
I work as a collaborative writer in my research. Im working on a paper with Lisa Martinez [DU assistant professor of sociology and criminology] on homelessness. Lisa and I are on the same page shes great to work with. Currently, Im working with a co-author on academic tolerance this piece of writing is in the infant stages. I have also written quite a bit with students. In my Participation and Representation course, students could write a big research paper, and I would come on as co-author and try to publish it. Three students took me up on this offer. We asked, Can we predict who will vote for a third-party candidate? Weve presented this research at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting.

Whats challenging about writing collaboratively?
Deadlines people are busy. Setting a firm deadline you can both work with is challenging. Its also challenging when your co-author has different ideas than you do, but that can also be a tremendous opportunity. When you reach an impasse, it opens up enormous opportunities. You always think its going to be easier because you can divide the labor, but its actually really demanding. Someone else is truly invested and can give you feedback you wouldnt get otherwise. It enriches your writing. You have to pick and choose your partners carefully. You have to have respect for each other.

When you visited my Honors Writing class in the spring, you told them that, as an undergraduate, you were drawn to political science for the ideas you could explore but that when you got to graduate school you discovered that your research would have to focus much more fully on quantitative research. Can you say more about that?
Political science is becoming much more diverse when it comes to methodology and epistemology. My training as an undergraduate was positivist in epistemology. My graduate training was empirical. This was a big shock after coming from a program where questions of methodology were secondary. At first, I went into it kicking and screaming. I didnt understand how to apply a non-normative framework to a normative endeavor like politics. My research has been both quantitative and qualitative. My research has been in the mainstream of the discipline. Ive become very comfortable working in the empirical tradition.

Do you teach students non-normative, non-positivist approaches to DU students?
In my Public Opinion class, students actually go out and do polls for an organization. They write a survey, administer the survey, write up the results, share with the community partner. The most difficult writing youll do is survey writing. The final project is the report on the survey some of them write 50-page reports.

Tell me about Polling the Reins of Power, the book youre currently writing.
It looks at whether presidents listen to our opinions or whether they [the presidents] shape our opinions. It uses a mixed method both quantitative data and qualitative data. What motivates the study is that there is a really strong correlation between public opinion and foreign policy. This could be due to three reasons:
1) Presidents use a bully pulpit.
2) Presidents just happen to have the same opinion [as the public].
3) Presidents abandon what they want and listen to the public.
Each of the causal pathways can explain the strong correlation. Instead of preference, I look at public attention and it turns out that there are fairly predictable periods of public attention.

What advice do you have for students as they write in your courses and other political science courses?
Work on it! Writing is a skill that you really need to perfect and hone through practice, repetition, diligent study. The expectations I have for student papers and the expectations they hold are very different. The key variable is the students willingness to work at it.

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