The Scholarship on education and practice has recently encouraged the inclusion of writing assignments in the classroom. Writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) programmes have been implemented across universities and colleges, promoting structured writing assignments outside of language-based programmes and courses. The collective knowledge on the subject highlights the effectiveness of frequent short assignments as being better for achieving learning goals, in comparison with more traditional, longer term papers often assigned in upper-division and graduate political science courses. This paper outlines our efforts to revise the curriculum in two of the courses in our policy-focused master’s program. In particular, we focus on two types of policy writing, policy memos and infographics. In this paper, we discuss the background of the program and courses, our choices of assignments, and their design and implementation. Further, we present evidence of how these assignments contributed to student learning in the courses.

This article examines how human rights international non-governmental organizations (hereafter HROs) can increase the level of political protest in neighboring states. Previous research suggests local activities of HROs help to generate mobilization for protests against governments. This article shows that the presence of HROs in neighboring states can be a substitute for domestic HROs; if domestic HROs are already flourishing, there will be less of a ‘neighbor’ effect. At sufficiently high levels of domestic HRO prevalence within a state, neighboring HROs help domestic HROs use institutionalized substitutes for protest mobilization strategies. Spatial econometric methods are used to test the implications of this theory. These results illuminate the role that non-governmental organizations play in these domestic political processes, and demonstrate the transnational nature of their activities.