Mike Hamper Presents Paper on Lobbying

Last weekend, Mike Hamper attended the 70^th Annual Meeting of the Ohio Association of Economists and Political Scientists to present his paper “Everyone’s got a mortgage to pay”: Lobbying in American Pop Culture. Hamper wrote the paper for Dr. Alexander’s Parties and Interest Groups class last year. At the conference, Hamper presented with two other students, one from Northern Kentucky University and the other from Baldwin-Wallace College.

Hamper commented “The presentation went well, and I received good constructive criticism about how to improve my paper. The judges on the panel really enjoyed my presentation. Because I did my paper on the movie “Thank You for Smoking”, which also has a book, everyone at my presentation readily understood my examples and thesis very well. My thesis for the paper is that American pop culture portrays lobbying as overwhelmingly negative without showing any benefits. My paper asserts that lobbying has a very real benefit to Americans and is a form of direct democracy where an extremely small minority take on the responsibility of representing many people’s views.”

This is the sort of activity that we like to see our students undertaking. Moving outside of the comfort zone of campus and classroom gives students nice real-world experience that will help them as they move to the next step in their lives, whether that include graduate school, or the start of a career.

Well done Mike!