Undergraduate

Berkeley Connect is a mentoring program, offered through various academic departments, that helps students build intellectual community. Over the course of a semester, enrolled students participate in regular small-group discussions facilitated by a graduate student mentor (following a faculty-directed curriculum), meet with their graduate student mentor for one-on-one academic advising, attend events and/or panel discussions, and go on field trips to campus resources. Students are not required to be declared majors in order to participate. There is no homework associated with Berkeley Connect: no exams, no papers, no quizzes.

 We encourage students in their first year at Berkeley, as freshman or transfers, to participate.

A situation involves strategic interaction if the best course of action of one agent depends on what others are going to do and vice-versa. These situations include, for example, the competition among firms in an oligopolistic market, the struggle between candidates in an election campaign, the wage bargaining between a worker and an employer, and the rivalry between states locked in an arms race. Although originally developed and applied in economics, game theory is now commonly used in political science and is beginning to be applied more widely throughout the social sciences to model strategic interaction. This course offers a non-technical introduction to game theory with a special emphasis on examples and applications drawn from economics, political science, and the other social sciences.

Note: Political Science c135 is cross-listed with Economics c110.

While there are no formal prerequisites for this course, some prior coursework in economics (e.g., Econ 1) is highly recommended. 
​Poli Sci majors without a strong Econ or Math (calculus) background find this course very challenging. Class requirements include a midterm, final, and problem sets.

Subfield: Empirical Theory and Quantitative Methods

Please note that this course is NOT a substitute for PS3.

Please note that this course description is from Fall 2013

Instructor: Shachar Kariv

This course is intended for outstanding students who intend to pursue graduate school in political science or another of the social sciences. The course is designed, and will be conducted, like a graduate seminar. The course aims to provide students with a rigorous introduction to core topics in social theory. The course centers on four major themes: power, equality, freedom, and community. 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 discussions. Grades will be determined as follows: one-half for the quality and quantity of contributions to seminar discussions; and one-half for a research paper that will be due at the time of our final class meeting. The paper will take the form of a comparative inquiry into several of the major theorists we are reading in the course. Students will begin developing plans for their research papers early in the course, and will present their work to the seminar at times that we will set aside for discussion of research-in-progress.

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

This writing intensive seminar explores everyday forms of resistance under conditions of extreme oppression—contexts in which fear of persecution drives political and moral agency underground. To examine concealment and deception as modes of resistance, we will draw from various genres, including academic monographs, memoirs, and fiction. To fully understand the idea of resistance, ranging from obscuring one’s preferences to wearing a mask, we will consider what each author believed should be resisted, why it should be resisted, and how they argued it should be resisted. Though important, we will not be studying heroic, openly defiant forms of resistance—such as revolutions, rebellions, and mass protests—but instead ask: How might I resist when the price of defiance is deportation, imprisonment, or even death? Resistance under such extreme conditions, particularly authoritarianism, requires rethinking the relationship between visibility and virtue, conscience and circumstance, defiance and dignity, deception and duty. To glimpse the tragic realism that often follows, we will read works by Herman Melville, Primo Levi, Toni Morrison, Leo Strauss, Nella Larsen, James Scott, Erving Goffman, Albert Hirschman, Timur Kuran, Václav Havel, Czesław Miłosz, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others.

Junior seminars fulfill upper division requirements for the major.

Subfield:   Political Theory

This course revolves around a central question: Why are women underrepresented in political office at all levels of American government? At the national level, women hold 26 percent of Senate seats and 29 percent of House seats. They make up 33 percent of state legislative seats and 25 percent of mayoral positions (Center for American Women in Politics, 2025). Women of color tend to be even less represented, particularly at higher levels of office. For instance, women of color make up only five percent of the current US Senate, and only four Black women have ever served in the Senate in its entire history. Non-binary gender identities are only now making in roads in elected office; only a handful of local or statewide elected officials identify as trans and/or non-binary.

This course reviews academic research to understand this underrepresentation puzzle. But it does more than that: it also teaches students how to run for office. We partner with a success California-based candidate training program to offer a non-partisan series of workshops centered around practical training exercises.

The program is open to all students who identify as belonging to underrepresented genders and their allies.

Applications will be accepted throughout the enrollment phases, with applications received by April 14th will be prioritized for the 1st enrollment phase. We look forward to receiving your application! Please submit your application through the link below:

In today’s world, many of the most pressing threats, such as Covid-19 and global climate change, cannot be managed by countries acting on their own; international cooperation between states is required. Yet, it is also difficult to achieve.

This class examines the scholarly literature on international cooperation and what it has to say about when, why, and how international cooperation occurs, and with what level of success. We will discuss when international cooperation is most urgent, what the obstacles to cooperation are, how international organizations can help states overcome these obstacles, the level of compliance international institutions evoke, why and when states comply with their commitments, and how international institutions might sometimes prove more influential than expected. The class does not focus on any specific area of cooperation and instead draws from a broad theoretical literature that covers cooperation on a diverse set of economic, security, environmental, and human rights issues. We will read articles on such diverse topics as the laws of war, military alliances, election monitoring, the international criminal court, oil pollution of the seas, the IMF and World Bank, and monetary cooperation, among others.

The class will not only introduce you to classical and cutting-edge scholarly research on the topic of international cooperation, but is also designed to foster your ability to pursue original research on international cooperation, by learning to ask novel and interesting questions, to formulate compelling arguments, and to devise systematic empirical tests.

Subfield: Comparative Politics

This course focuses on a central issue that all political leaders face: how to exert and maintain control over society. This topic is particularly timely in present-day China and one that the Party leadership has approached in many different ways. Topics covered will include: policing of protest and crime, censorship and information control, the Wuhan lockdown, and how the social welfare system is used to defuse discontent. We will consider both “hard” and “soft” repression and also strategies that incorporate responsiveness to popular expectations. Finally, the course will examine ways in which different social groups are coping with increased control.

The course is designed, and will be conducted, like a graduate seminar.  Students who enroll must be ready to do all the reading in advance of seminar meetings and to participate actively in class discussions.

Subfield: Comparative Politics

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.