Spring 2015

This seminar will focus on the postwar relations in East Asia. Myriad sources of geopolitical conflict lead many to describe the region as “ripe for rivalry” and state-to-state tensions remain high, particularly in Northeast Asia. On the other hand, historical relations in East Asia prior to Nineteenth Century colonialism and the coming of the West were largely benign. Moreover, economic links across Asia are high and interdependence is rising rapidly. Importantly, there have been no shooting wars in Northeast Asia since the Korean armistice in 1953 and Southeast Asia saw its last major war end with the pullback of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia in the Third Indochina War. These suggest a penchant for peaceful resolution of competing interests.

Despite the absence of overt warfare, however, East Asia has been grappling with a number of ongoing and emerging security problems—the rise of China; territorial disputes; historical memory and the continuation of identity-based issues; the American repositioning; and the persistence of coercive diplomacy among others.

To date many of the problems of the region have been effectively “managed” but more recently the rise of new regional institutions have helped to alleviate certain ongoing tensions. Nonetheless, hard security and defense collaboration have been far slower to develop and today many ‘hot spots’ and continued national competitions divide the region. Many states, especially in Northeast Asia, have resisted making deep institutional commitments and policy options that might limit their sovereignty or compromise existing unilateral or bilateral flexibility. This seminar will focus on this range of issues with particular attention to the various tensions between establishing closer Asian ties and the preservation of national sovereignty and the institutional efforts to reconcile these tensions.

This course examines the way that policies, politics, and the state intersect and coevolve by exploring three basic questions. First, how do advocacy groups, the media, science, and public opinion interact to produce changing demands on the state? Second, how does the state deploy new policy instruments, reform public and private institutions, and create novel governance strategies in response to these demands? And third, how do these policies, institutions, and strategies themselves become politicized and to what effect? To address these questions, the course will draw on theoretical and empirical literature from comparative public policy, institutionalism, public administration, governance theory, and political sociology. The analytical focus will be on time, comparison, and organization. By analyzing the emergence of issues and tracing their policy histories, we will explore how policies, politics, and the state coevolve over time. By comparing how different nations (or cities or regions, etc.) respond to such issues, we will explore how political and institutional context matters. And finally, by analyzing the organization and reorganization of policy and administration, we will investigate both the political and functional dimensions of state response. The course will draw on examples from a range of different policy areas, including environmental policy, public health, planning, education, health, economic policy, and social welfare. Readings will draw primarily on North American and European cases, but other regions may be included depending on the interests of students.

TBA

Opinion surveys are nearly ubiquitous in public life today.  What are surveys, how do we conduct them, what can they tell us (and fail to tell us), and what is their relevance to legal and social research?  This seminar is a skills-based workshop geared to train students to critically consume and generate survey data.  Key topics we will cover include: the history of the concept of public opinion; historical approaches to survey research methods; the role of public opinion in the courts; understanding sampling theory and questionnaire design; learning about different modes of interviewing and alternatives to opinion surveys; reading texts that discuss public opinion and use survey data; primary analysis of survey data.   Students are expected to design a survey and write a research paper for the class.

The question of how diversity within the U.S. population fits with the American liberal democratic tradition defines much of the nation’s politics. Today, it comes to a head with the dramatic emergence of Latinos, Asian Americans, and other post‐1965 immigration‐based groups; groups that challenge the enduring dialectic between white privilege and African‐American privation throughout U.S. history. The goal of this course is to consider this how racial and ethnic diversity shapes our understanding of political interests, institutions, and identities in the United States, and vice-versa. The substantive topics range from debates about the persistence of racism, the rights of citizenship, the incorporation of plural democratic interests, current debates over public policy, and the like. Course readings span multiple disciplines—most often from political science, but with forays into law, sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy. This is a graduate seminar organized around intensive weekly readings, culminating in an original research paper.
 

This course covers design and design-based inference for both surveys and randomized experiments. In covering the two domains, the course emphasizes the important and underappreciated relationship between design and analysis. The lectures go back and forth between discussing tools for surveys and experiments to highlight connections. Problem sets will emphasize both application and theory. A final project will require students to extend methods from the survey literature to the design and analysis of an experiment using real or simulated data.

The course will have an eclectic approach and rely on both qualitative readings and formal models to study themes related to state formation, conflict, the development of state capacity, the role of economic and political elites in weakly institutionalized settings, themes of political persistence, and the formation and control of public bureaucracies.

This course counts toward completion of the course-out option in Models and Politics.

Knowledge of game theory at the level of PS232A will be assumed 

NOTE: This description is from Fall 2013

This course is intended to be a seminar in which we discuss research designs which have succeeded. Few causal inferences in the social sciences are compelling. We carefully examine successful examples to see why they work. The seminar is also a forum for students to discuss the research designs and methods needed in their own work. It should be particularly helpful for students writing their prospectus or designing a major research project. The seminar will be supplemented by lectures to cover the statistical and computational material needed to understand the readings such as matching methods, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and Bayesian, maximum likelihood and robust estimation. Applications are drawn from a variety of elds including political science, statistics, economics, sociology, and public health.

TBA

Civil conflict, committed primarily by non-state actors, often results in international intervention in some form. This course, then, focuses on two themes: first, why does civil conflict occur? What motivates individuals and groups to resort to violence? What tactics do they use? How do they expect to succeed? Second, why do international actors intervene in civil conflict? What are their aims in intervening? Are they successful in those goals or in others? 

This course is designed to help you: (1) understand the causes, strategies, and outcomes of civil conflict, (2) think about the ways in which international actors intervene, (3) broaden your theoretical framework in international relations more generally, (4) engage with the existing work in the field and begin high-level research on civil conflict and international intervention.Much of the current literature on civil conflict and international intervention focuses on rationalist explanations, although it also draws in normative and psychological explanations. While some portray civil conflict as irrational, with individuals motivated primarily by fear, hatred, or revenge, for instance, much of the field adopts the perspective that civil conflict is rational. 

We will focus on this perspective in order to understand the existing work. Specifically, we will delve into the perspective (1) that civil conflict are rooted in situations in which the preferences of individuals over territory, policy, or government composition differ from those of the government and when those individuals can overcome the collective action problem to form a militant group, and (2) that fighting takes place due to information asymmetries, commitment problems, or indivisible issues that make a peaceful deal difficult. Students, however, are more than welcome to challenge and critique the rationalist perspective, along with the specific studies that we will examine. The rationalist perspective also pervades much of the literature on international intervention, which we will then explore. We will look at a variety of types of international intervention, and, because this is an even newer literature, we will empirically explore new questions on these topics.