Spring 2018

This course will provide graduate students the critical technical skills necessary to conduct research in computational social science and digital humanities, introducing them to the basic computer literacy, programming skills, and application knowledge that students need to be successful in further methods work.

The course is divided into three main sections: skills, applications, and community engagement. The “skills” portion will introduce students to basic computer literacy, terminologies, and programming languages - i.e. Unix Shall, R, Python, and Git. The second part of the course provides students the opportunity to use the skills they learned in part 1 towards practical applications such as automated text analysis, geospatial analysis, network analysis, data collection via APIs, crowdsourcing and online experiments, and data visualization. The third section on community engagement will introduce topics such as ethics and privacy, best practices of reproducible research, scholarly communication and collaboration, and how to further one’s research using UC Berkeley campus resources.

Instructor: Rachel Bernhard

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.

This course provides an introduction to the methodology of game theory and related modeling techniques, with a focus on applications in the study of politics.  The goal of the course is to get students familiar with the basic tools and frameworks of formal models as used in political science research.  This will enable you to be a more-informed reader of the growing body of literature that uses these methods or that tests predictions derived with them.  It should also prove useful in structuring your thinking about political actors and outcomes even when you are not explicitly using a formal model.  This course will also provide a starting point for students who hope to pursue more advanced training and even to use formal theory in their own future research.

The goal of this course is to introduce advanced political science graduate students to current debates in the filed of international security and to prepare theses students for conduction dissertation research in their own areas of interest within this field.  This course is designed for advanced political science graduate students preparing to commence their dissertation research.  Its orientation is theoretical rather than empirical and it is both reading and research. 

Please note that this course description is from Fall 2013.

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.

Homelessness, global warming, corruption, bankrupt pension systems, educational inequality... This course explores what we can learn in general about the way societies try to address and solve difficult and seemingly intractable public problems. Can we attribute success or failure to institutions and their capacity to solve problems? Are problems difficult to solve because they are so complex and we lack know-how or because of a failure of political will? What are the characteristics of organizations or communities able to solve problems proactively or creatively? How do public problems get politically framed and how are they used to mobilize constituencies? The course draws on literature in public administration, public policy studies, and democratic theory to try to better understand some of the major social, political, environmental, and economic problems of our contemporary world.

Note: This description is from Spring 2014

This course provides an overview of California politics, with a focus on contemporary issues and an analysis of who wields power and why. Specifically, the course will focus on : the demographic, social and economic forces that shape the State's politics- the three official branches of state government (executive, legislative and judicial)- the three unofficial branches (the media, lobbyists and interest groups)- campaigns (candidates, initiatives, consultants, pollsters, political parties and money), local government, the state budget and education policies.

Subfield:   American Politics

Please note this description is from Fall 2013

This course will introduce students to several foundational questions in the study of American constitutional politics and to techniques of constitutional interpretation. What are the political implications of a written constitution designed to limit the power of the national government? What is the role of the Supreme Court (and judges more generally) in ensuring an appropriate balance of national and state power? What does it mean to have a system that "separates" power? And what is the role of the judiciary in policing this separation of powers at the national level, in peacetime and in wartime? Should judges be engaged in these efforts at all? If so, why? If not, why not?

The objectives of this course are to: (1) introduce students to the core principles of constitutional law as developed under the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment, and civil rights legislation, (2) introduce students to the core principles of privacy and equal protection as developed under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and various forms of civil rights legislation; (3) apply these principles to a variety of contextual settings, (4) understand the judiciary as part of the political process, and (5) provide the basic tools for legal research, writing, and debate.  In addition to these objectives, this course is designed to be a forum for discussing current political issues within a constitutional framework. Students are encouraged to follow news events and to incorporate these items into class discussion. Many topics in this course -- war-making authority, states’ rights, and national security -- have generated considerable public debate. 

Instructor: Roy Ulrich

This course will focus on the transformative process through which the nations of contemporary Southeast Asia have confronted political crises and instability and the various levels of success with which they have attempted to implement comprehensive programs of reform.  This course will analyze several different areas of political activity, such as:  state-led initiatives (political economy) regarding development and resource distribution; citizen and opposition movements both within and outside formal state institutions which seek to influence, alter, or overturn state action and policy; institution-building and the cultivation of social capital; and regional and transnational flows of capital and labor which act in alliance with or in opposition to national economic institutions.  Specific topics will include a comparative analysis of state policy; the relationship between illicit economies (such as narcotics) and ethnic insurgency; the nascent political voice of religion and ethnicity as nationalist or opposition ideologies; the expansion and influence of local NGOs (legal aid, human rights, women’s rights, etc.); political violence and alternative paths to the expression of discontent; and corruption.  After a general overview of Southeast Asia as a regional political theater, we will turn our attention to a series of in-depth case studies.  

Please note that this course description is from Spring 2015