POLC65 Political campaign service learning experience; Fall 2018

Diary Content
Describe what you did and why. To answer why, please ask the candidate or a member of his/her staff. If you have a chance to converse with the candidate or a member of his/her staff, relate what they say.
Assess whether you think the activities you participated in helped realize the campaign’s goals.
Chronicle how you felt while working with the campaign. For instance, did you feel uncomfortable speaking to voters, or was it exhilarating? Did you feel like you were doing something important, or pointless? Were you ever bored or nervous?
Interpret how people you encounter (voters/contributors, other staff/volunteers) respond to you, your actions, or the campaign messaging? What might explain their behaviour?
Speculate as to whether there are any broader lessons to be learned about political strategy from your experiences. Did your experience tie into anything we’ve discussed in class so far?

Diary Format
Date every entry, including the times you volunteered and the time and date you wrote your journal entry. After the initial composition of each entry, you are strongly encouraged to edit your entry for typos and grammatical mistakes. You have great flexibility in the style of writing you choose, as you could write a letter to yourself or your instructor, maintain a single narrative throughout an entry, or record several unrelated, unlinked thoughts. Additional reflections or re-considerations can always be added at a later date (for additional credit).

If necessary, you may handwrite; otherwise please be ready to submit to Quercus in a format that is readable by Ouriginal before the deadline. Do not submit anything in the Apple Pages format (you can easily export to PDF before submission).
Post-campaign evaluations and reactions
Carefully organize your thoughts in order to be both clear and concise (brevity in this section is better than being long-winded!). Some of these questions are personal, some involve details about the campaign that you will often be able to infer through your experiences or general observations. However, you may want to interview the candidate or a member of his/her staff for insights to help answer these questions while volunteering or in a follow-up interview after the campaign concludes.

Personal reactions
There are no right or wrong answers in this section. The best grades will be given to those who did the best job articulating and evaluating their experiences – good, bad and indifferent. While some students tend to be loquacious, especially in response to the first question, most answers range between 100 and 350 words.
Name three things that stuck in your mind about your service experience; what bored, surprised, shocked, appalled, intrigued, amused or interested you? What was the best/worst/most challenging thing that happened in your volunteer placement?
What was your primary responsibility during the campaign? Evaluate the worthiness of your work or the specific campaign activities you participated in. Did your efforts seem to make a difference? Why or why not?
Would you ever want to volunteer for this candidate – or another candidate- ever again? Why or why not?

Campaign Activities, Strategy and Success Questions
The first questions on this list are primarily descriptive questions but may require some inference. Later questions provide you with an opportunity to make some [speculative] evaluations. Respond to each of the following questions as short-answers ranging from 100 words to no more than 700 words.
What did the candidate communicate to voters or contributors to gain their support? How would you describe the main theme of the candidate’s messaging? Did the candidate focus on a particular message? Were these messages any different than the party leader’s messaging? Did the messaging change over the course of the campaign? Could you tell if this message was adapted for different audiences, venues or channels? If so, how was it adapted?
Why did s/he choose these messaging strategies? Did s/he choose these messages based on party (or leadership) instructions, personal strengths, previous campaign experiences or on advice from professional strategists? Did the messaging respond to voter feedback, his/her opponents’ messaging strategy, or something else?
Did the campaign specifically target any particular group of voters – in general or when you were actively engaged in the campaign? Why was this target chosen? Was this target special to your candidate’s ward, area of town, or were similar voters targeted all across or elsewhere in the GTA?
How did people in the target group respond to the message/campaign? Consider your own experiences with the campaign, but also consider the election returns to gauge whether the messaging strategy succeeded.
Did the candidate win? Was s/he expected to win by others? By campaign staff? Did s/he do better or worse than expected? Did s/he do better or worse than the candidate from the same party in the last provincial/federal elections? Did s/he do better or worse than candidates from the same party in neighboring ridings?
Why do you think s/he did better/worse than expected? Why did s/he do better/worse than other recent candidates with similar backgrounds, political experience or partisan affiliation?
Do you think there is anything the local candidate and his/her campaign could have done better/differently? Why? Do you think the candidate or his/her staff might have opposed your idea?

Personal reflections
Answer each of the following two questions by composing a short essay. Be thoughtful, introspective and focused on your personal volunteer experience. Apply class concepts where relevant. Each essay should be 400-1200 words (1 – 3 pages) in length, single or 1.5 space, 12 point font. The sub-questions may guide your responses, but you are not required to answer all of them. Similarly, it is up to your discretion as to whether you follow the order of the sub-questions in organizing your thoughts.

What did you learn about yourself? Do you think you could run for office one day? Do you think you “have what it takes” to run for office? Are there particular traits or qualities that you think is important for candidates “on the campaign trail” or staff to have? Do you think you have these traits or qualities? Do you think you might have these traits or qualities in the future?

When you reflect upon your experience, what did you learn about campaigning, politics or political strategy?
Did you, or the campaign, seemingly apply any lessons from the course while volunteering?
Was there anything you learned in the course that could have helped the campaign or increased the likelihood of success of particular activities you engaged in?
Did your experiences highlight or refute anything about politics and political strategy you learned in this class or previous classes?
Based on your experiences, how do personal characteristics like gender, race, age or ethnicity affect campaigns and people’s judgements of candidates?

Extra Credit
On the assumption that the more you volunteer, the wider range of experiences you will have and/or the more responsibility you will be given, additional hours volunteering will also enrich your journal and evaluations, indirectly raising your grade. You will receive extra-credit for up to 12 additional hours spent volunteering on the campaign as long as you continue to maintain your journal. Each additional 3 hours will result in roughly ¼ grade increase (or 1.5 marks) up to an 81 (A-). For example: If your journal and post-campaign reflections and reactions earn you a grade of a 74 (B), three additional hours of volunteering will raise your grade to a 75.5, and three more hours will raise the grade to a B+ (77). Once you earn an 81, no extra credit will be awarded (but hopefully, you will enjoy and benefit from the extra experience).