Spring 2016

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

This course examines the growth and development of American political institutions over time. We will be concerned with analyzing, explaining, and understanding key transformative sequences in American politics, tracing the implications of these transformations for later American politics, and considering alternative possible paths of development. Key questions include: in what sense has the American political system “developed”? What is the role of America’s liberal political culture in shaping American political institutions? What is the relationship between changes in the economy and changes in state and party organization?

Note: This description is from Spring 2012.

This course is a graduate field seminar in International Politics.  We will survey and assess foundational theoretical perspectives, issues, and research programs in IR, placing each in historical perspective.  What kinds of questions does modern IR theory ask (and not ask) and about what kinds of problems?  What methods are used to seek answers?  What is the value of the answers?  Who uses them and for what?  Where is this field headed and where do we think it should be headed?  Through intensive reading and discussion as well as some small writing assignments, we will build a foundation for more advanced courses in International Relations as well as research agendas that can elaborate, refine, and extend contemporary debates in academic IR.  

Please note that this description is from Spring 2014.

A weekly seminar on political thought in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Modern political theorists, typically including Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, and Weber.

Please note that this description is from Fall 2011.

This course provides an introduction to research design in comparative politics; it is the second semester of the two-semester introductory graduate sequence for the comparative sub-field.  We will focus on various topics relevant to doing research, such as how to formulate research questions; develop concepts and measures; bolster the validity of descriptive and causal inferences; and use various qualitative and quantitative methods in the service of diverse substantive agenda.  Developing the ability to critique research is one important objective.  However, the primary goal of the course is to provide a first foundation for actually doing research.

Note: This description is from Spring 2015

The term “dysfunctional politics” has become a commonplace in our public dialogue, one used almost instinctively to characterize any of a multitude of shortcomings in the workings of American democracy.  Yet behind this widespread dismay if not outright contempt for the contemporary state of American politics and governance lie glaring differences, often passionately held, over just what is wrong, who is responsible, and whether anything can and should be done to fix it.  The seminar is designed to clarify and assess these differences.We will probe the fit, historically and contemporaneously, between Madison’s constitutional design and the party system that while not mentioned in the Constitution quickly became a central and essential instrument for linking popular elections and representative government.   Topics meriting special attention will include the ideological polarization of the parties; strategic oppositional politics within the governing process; affective partisanship; the contributions of ordinary citizens, activists, and political elites; the demonization and denial of legitimacy of one party by the other; increasing legislative gridlock during periods of divided party government; the impact of hyperpartisanship on the courts and the executive branch; the nationalization of politics in a federalized system; the changing coalitional bases of the parties; partisan manipulation of electoral rules, the impact of money; the role of the media, old and new; and the substance and politics of political reform.

This seminar will feature not lectures and exams but presentations by and discussions among  students, guided by the instructor and based on a set of required readings, student blogs, and a research paper.  It will be comprehensive and challenging, drawing on scholarly research to shed light on issues of major public import.

The Junior Seminars are intense writing seminars which focus on the research area of the faculty member teaching the course. The seminars provide an opportunity for students to have direct intellectual interactions with faculty members while also giving the students an understanding for faculty research.

Junior seminars fulfill upper division requirements for the major.

Subfield:   American Politics

Instructor: Thomas Mann

Description: 

This junior seminar in political theory seeks to investigate the concept of tyranny in the history of political thought.  Major topics for study in this seminar will include the proper scope of political obligation, the permissibility of resistance and disobedience, and principles of constitutional design.  We will begin with a study of the classical origins of the concept of tyranny in Greek and Roman antiquity, in such writers as Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Tacitus.  With this background, we shall then proceed to investigate the usage of the classical analysis of tyranny in medieval and early modern thought, such as Aquinas, Bartolus, Machiavelli, and Calvin.  The seminar will pay special attention to radical theories of resistance and tyrannicide, which emerged in close connection with the French Wars of Religion and the English Civil War, such as the French Monarchomachs and English republicans.  The course concludes by exploring the place of tyranny in modern constitutional thought, such as Montesquieu, Madison, and Tocqueville.

The Junior Seminars are intense writing seminars which focus on the research area of the faculty member teaching the course. The seminars provide an opportunity for students to have direct intellectual interactions with faculty members while also giving the students an understanding for faculty research.

Junior seminars fulfill upper division requirements for the major.

Subfield:   Political Theory

Several countries in East Asia have been categorized as ‘developmental states,’ astonishing the political world by their governments’ ability to orchestrate economic changes as well as stunning the economic world by their rapid transformations into sophisticated industrial democracies. Most typically noted as examples are Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. For long periods in the 1970s-1990s their political economies resembled one another in many ways: continuity of conservative political leadership, close ties between business and politics, strong bureaucratic powers, tight domestic monopolies over finance, limited social welfare state provisions, a focus on exports, and rapid industrial transformation and high growth. Less well examined is what has happened to these three in the face of two big external changes that challenged prior political and economic arrangements, most notably an end to East Asian security bipolarity and the challenge to national financial insulation by global capital movements.

This seminar will examine both development and its (possible) dismantling. Concentrating on the three cases of Japan, Korea and Taiwan, the seminar will engage a series of integrated readings on several key topics on both facets. Each student will be expected to write 4-5 high quality 6-8 page papers dealing with various week’s readings.

The Junior Seminars are intense writing seminars which focus on the research area of the faculty member teaching the course. The seminars provide an opportunity for students to have direct intellectual interactions with faculty members while also giving the students an understanding for faculty research.

Junior seminars fulfill upper division requirements for the major.

Subfield:   Comparative Politics

We are currently experiencing a global expansion of judicial power. In stable democracies, transitional societies and even autocracies, courts have become central actors in national politics and policymaking. Today, major political controversies often end up in court and are decided by judges, rather than by elected legislators serving in national parliaments. How do we explain this tremendous growth of judicial power and courts newly expanded roles in politics and policymaking? And what are the consequences of this judicialization of politics and policymaking for majoritarian institutions and democratic practices? 

This course provides an introduction to the political science of law and courts. This is not a course on constitutional law, and the focus will not be on the development of legal doctrines or the reasoning of important cases. Instead, we will evaluate law and courts as political institutions and judges as political actors and policy-makers across different types of political systems. Topics will include: the foundations of judicial independence, the relationship between the courts and other branches of government (e.g., judicial oversight of the bureaucracy), the sources of judicial power, the rights revolution and the role of courts in democratic consolidation. Courts in the U.S., France, Egypt, Turkey and Taiwan will be examined.

The Junior Seminars are intense writing seminars which focus on the research area of the faculty member teaching the course. The seminars provide an opportunity for students to have direct intellectual interactions with faculty members while also giving the students an understanding for faculty research.

Junior seminars fulfill upper division requirements for the major.

Subfield:   Comparative Politics

Note: This description is from Spring 2015