Creating a Political Party and Platform Activity

This is an active learning resource for lower-division introductory American government courses. In the assignment, students are asked to build a political party by thinking about the component parts of parties and then start to build the party platform by selecting key issues and suggesting solutions to deal with those issues. One of the goals of this assignment is to get the students to understand that partisanship and ideology are related to each other, yet also separate and distinct from each other.

Keywords: active learning; assignment; lower-division course; political parties