 Political Process Matters
UC Santa Barbara professors Gerhard Peters and John Wooley have compiled a dataset of all presidential vetoes.
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| 1. How are the number of presidential vetoes and partisanship of Congress related?
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| 2. Which presidents in the modern era used the most vetoes? Whose vetoes were least likely to be overridden by Congress? |
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 POLITICS IS EVERYWHERE
Spend some time looking at the New York Times’election map. Adjust the bar on the left hand side to toggle between state winners, county winners, county bubbles and voting shifts. |
| 3. How do different levels of analysis provide different ways of interpreting the results of the 2008 election? Be sure to also compare the 2008 election to elections in other years. |
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| 4. In what parts of the country did Barack Obama do considerably better than John Kerry did? Are there any places where he did worse? |
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 POLITICS IS CONFLICTUAL
Presidential approval ratings are important because they capture how the American public feels about how the president responds to conflicts in politics. Using the Wall Street Journal’s Presidential Approval resource, spend some time analyzing how various presidents have fared in the public eye.
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| 5. Which conflicts seem to increase presidential approval? Which conflicts seem to undermine presidential approval? |
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