Fall 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.

Course description is TBA

This course is a graduate seminar in comparative politics. It aims to provide students with the conceptual, theoretical, and analytical tools necessary for comparative research. The course is divided into five parts. The first explores some of the central ideas and philosophies that animate comparative politics. The second introduces the field and explores some basic methodological problems. The third investigates core topics and theoretical approaches; the fourth centers on political regimes; and the fifth focuses on interest representation and state-society relations. This is a reading and discussion seminar. Our class sessions will focus on discussions of course readings. Students are required to do all of the readings for the week in advance of class meetings and to participate actively in class discussions.

Please note that the description is from Fall 2013.

This course will examine how government and industry interact to “govern” markets by surveying debates over specific substantive issues in the advanced industrial countries.  Topics include intellectual property rights, financial regulation, accounting standards, antitrust policy, the regulation of competition in network industries, and fabricated markets such as spectrum auctions and cap-and-trade schemes.  The course adopts an interdisciplinary approach to these topics, building on analytical perspectives from institutional economics and economic sociology as well as political science. 

This is an exploratory seminar in political theory and jurisprudence. We consider the question: “What is a constitution, and how might we conceptualize it?”   In considering this question, we will also consider others, both normative and empirical: What purposes should (or do) constitutions serve? How are they (or should they) be crafted, maintained, enforced or changed? How do they (or should they) incorporate cultural differences and/or protect cosmopolitan or universalist conceptions of human/individual rights? How are they to be interpreted and by whom? Of course, none of these are new questions, and the literature exploring them is large, and of variable quality. A principal focus of the course will be the contemporary American constitution, but our approach will be comparative across both time and political (national) context.  

We will read Aristotle and Polybius to consider both ancient Greek and Roman considerations of this important and politically contested concept. We will consider competing understandings of how constitutions ought to be crafted in the early modern period: Locke and Montesquieu; Rousseua's Government of Poland and arguments from Hamilton and Madison drawn from The Federalist Papers.

The second half of the course turns first to some case examples of actual constitution making and struggles to re-constitutionalize societies in the Middle East (Egypt) in Eastern Europe (Georgia) and in the larger political/economic context of the European Union (WTO). 

The final weeks of the course will turn then to interpretive debates on the nature and substance of the American Constitution among thinkers such as Ronald Dworkin, Antonin Scalia, Cass Sunstein and Jeremy Waldron. We will read selected books and articles and very few, if any, American Supreme Court cases [although case analysis might feature in the paper project as a vehicle in developing one or more of the contested concepts of constitution].

Hanna Pitkin has argued: “[T]o understand what a constitution is, one must look not for some crystalline core or essence of unambiguous meaning but precisely at the ambiguities, the specific oppositions that this specific concept helps us to hold in tension.” Without making claims for either the truth or persuasiveness of this claim, it is perhaps an interesting place to begin. 

Requirements: A short reading note (2-3pages) in selected weeks in preparation for the seminar; a short (20-25) page seminar paper due at the completion of the course by email submission to the Professor:  stimson@berkeley.edu

This course examines the interplay among domestic politics, international relations and international law in the creation, diffusion and enforcement of human rights norms. It considers the theories, principles and concepts related to human rights and their role in global politics and international law, the role of national and international institutions and actors in the current international human rights regime, recent developments in human rights law and their impact on the relations among states.  We will also discuss current debates about how to enforce human rights norms, including whether military intervention is justified.

Although Asia has clearly been the world’s outstanding developmental success story since World War II, as reflected for example in the steady increase of emerging Asian in world trade (increasing from 21% in 1990 to 34% by 2006),  the study of Asian politics has been hitherto dominated by area studies and to a lesser extent international relations; the comparative analysis of Asian polities has been rare and relatively unsystematic.  There are good reasons for this, including the bewildering diversity and exoticism of this vast continent, but as Asia rises economically it also becomes more economically and politically integrated, creating a basis to understand its patterned similarities and differences.  Still, this is an introductory course in a field that is only emerging.  The purpose of the course is to immerse advanced undergraduate students in the available analytical literature on contemporary Asia for the purpose of encouraging further comparative teaching and research.  

The methods used to manage the power of the bureaucracy in the American political system. An introduction to theories of organizational behavior. The effects of administration structure upon the creation and distribution of public benefits.

Subfield:   American Politics

Please note that this description is from Fall 2013.

This one-unit course will feature a guest speaker each week discussing an issue currently in the news. The class is open to all students, and there are no prerequisites. The class is offered Pass/Not Pass, based on a final examination. May be repeated for credit.

This course does not count as an upper division Political Science requirement.