In Moritz College of Law professor Steven Huefner’s Legislation class, for example, the 2016 election has brought a bumper crop of new legal issues to be kicked around by students. “One question that was on everyone’s minds recently was what would happen, as a matter of process, if Donald Trump was no longer the candidate of the Republican Party?” said Huefner. The law professor had his students examining the legal claims for Trump and the GOP party as well as sorting out practical questions like the fate of early votes already cast for Trump. 

“It’s very interesting, the students really have fun with it,” said Huefner who is co-director of the university's Democracy Studies program. “They really enjoy discussing all of these issues and batting them all around.” 

Examining the Democratic process from different angles is the idea behind the interdisciplinary Democracy Studies program, which started in 2012 with a lecture series. Open to faculty from all departments, the most active participants in the nonpartisan, collaborative Democracy Studies program have been instructors from political science, history, law, philosophy, public affairs and communications, according to Huefner.  

Along with coursework, there are a series of lectures sponsored by the Democracy Studies program, as well as grants for university researchers studying aspects of American Democracy.

“We thought it would be really meaningful to bring people together from various disciplines who were doing things relating to American government and civic participation,” Huefner said. “One of the huge benefits of being at a large university is being able to capitalize on the strengths of our colleagues.”

Meanwhile, political science professor Thomas Wood brings a campaign insider’s perspective to his Democracy Studies courses as someone who worked on the 2016 campaign of GOP hopeful Jeb Bush. As director of experiments and modeling for the Bush primary campaign, Wood tells his students first-hand tales of how voter information was closely scrutinized on the campaign trail this year. “For every voter, we had 14,000 characteristics that boiled down to the magazines you read, whether you had ever bought mail-order steaks, the number of credit cards you have,” Wood said in a recent interview with Ohio State's College of Arts and Sciences.

“The mail-order steaks piece of information is a big one. If you sent away for frozen steaks in the mail, you tended to fall into a higher socio-economic status. These funny little patterns tend to matter a lot in a primary race.” 

The Australian native has tried to keep his classes focused on some of the stark policy differences between Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republicans nominee Donald Trump, but that hasn’t always worked.  “Students are very sophisticated, but it’s been difficult to discuss the elections in class from policy perspective,” Wood said. “They are really on edge right now. What I’ve seen, though, is that both young Democrats and young Republicans are dissatisfied with modern society.”