Course Archive | Political Science | The University of Chicago

Michael Albertus

28710. Democracy and the Politics of Wealth Redistribution. (=LLSO 28710) How do political institutions affect the redistribution of wealth among members of a society? In most democracies, the distribution of wealth among citizens is unequal but the right to vote is universal. Why then have so many newly democratic states transitioned under conditions of high inequality yet failed to redistribute? This course explores this puzzle by analyzing the mechanisms through which individual and group preferences can be translated into pro-poor policies, and the role elites play in influencing a government's capacity or incentives to redistribute wealth. Topics include economic inequality and the demand for redistribution, the difference in redistribution between democracy and dictatorship, the role of globalization in policymaking, and the effects of redistribution on political stability and change.

41101. The Politics of Wealth Redistribution. How do political institutions affect the structure and scope of wealth redistribution initiatives? This graduate seminar will introduce students to the scholarly literature on redistribution, focusing primarily on recent work. We will study the causes and consequences of redistribution, focusing both on the institutions that shape incentives for governments to implement redistribution, as well as the mechanisms, actors, and international conditions that can erode government incentives or capabilities to redistribute. The emphasis of the course will be twofold: rigorously examining the inferences we can draw from existing work, and designing research that can contribute to a better understanding of the fundamental questions regarding redistributive policies.

41203 Political Regimes and Transitions. Despite a shift toward democracy in much of the world, many states have remained solidly autocratic while others are plagued by political instability and uncertainty. This graduate seminar will introduce students to fundamental questions in the study of political regimes: What distinguishes democracy from dictatorship? How does the functioning of democratic institutions affect democratic survival? Why are some dictatorships more stable than others, and what role do institutions such as legislatures, parties, and elections play in their stability? What political and economic factors explain regime transitions, and why do transitions tend to cluster both spatially and temporally? The course will examine how these questions are addressed in current scholarship, with an emphasis on enabling students to design research projects that contribute to our understanding of how political regimes function, persist, and change.

Ruth Bloch Rubin

23001. Southern Politics in State and Nation. This course revisits V.O. Key’s foundational study of the South to consider how southern sectionalism has shaped American politics since Reconstruction. In what ways is the South a distinctive polity—and how did it come to be so? How has the region’s politics changed over time? What can we learn about the nature and corrigibility of American democracy through the southern experience? Introducing students to canonical studies of the region, we will explore the economic and historical factors that shaped the South’s political and social development in the century after the Civil War. We will also consider “exceptional” features of southern politics today—including the increasing rate of black political participation and officeholding in the region’s urban centers. Finally, we will examine how the South’s regional distinctiveness has affected institutional development and policymaking at the national level.

26703. Political Parties in the United States. (=LLSO 26703) Political parties are a central feature of American government. In this course we will explore their role in contemporary politics and learn about their development over the course of American history. We will start by asking the following questions: What is a political party? Why do we have a two-party system, and how did that system develop? We will then proceed to study shifts in party coalitions, parties’ evolving structures, their role in policymaking, and trends in popular attitudes about parties. Although our primary empirical focus will be on parties in the United States, we will spend some time on comparative approaches to political parties.

35002. Race and the American State. This course explores how the politics of race have shaped the American state, and how that state’s governing institutions have, in turn, altered the meaning and place of race in our polity. Drawing on work by sociologists, historians, and political scientists broadly situated at the intersection of race and institutions, we will attempt to put the U.S. in comparative perspective. Key questions we will tackle include the following: how has race affected the construction of the American state, and the composition and development of its key institutions? How has race affected national policymaking on both social and economic issues? How have state actors deployed race as a tool of governance, and how have those efforts changed over time?

43902. US Congress. The purpose of this seminar is to introduce graduate students to the literature on the U.S. Congress. Although we will read a range of studies with different methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives, including some comparative research, we will focus in particular on the development of the U.S. Congress over time. We will be concerned with analyzing, explaining, and understanding key transformative sequences in American legislative politics — tracing the implications of these transformations through to contemporary times. To discuss these questions in appropriate depth, we will limit our inquiry to Congress as an institution (e.g., internal processes and behavior), discussing congressional campaigns and elections only as they relate to these subjects.

49200. American Political Development. In this course we will explore long-term changes in the American political system. Covering key works in the field, course readings will be organized around several core questions. How did we get the political institutions we have today? How has American political culture shaped these institutions? What is the relationship between changes in the economy and changes in state and party organization? We will also attend to issues of method, especially the links between history and social science.

John Brehm

22400. Public Opinion. (=LLSO 26802) What is the relationship between the mass citizenry and government in the U.S.? Does the public meet the conditions for a functioning democratic polity? This course considers the origins of mass opinion about politics and public policy, including the role of core values and beliefs, information, expectations about political actors, the mass media, economic self-interest, and racial attitudes. This course also examines problems of political representation, from the level of political elites communicating with constituents, and from the possibility of aggregate representation.

23500. Political Organizations. This course introduces the study of political organizations and organizational behavior. We examine classic and contemporary writings on organizations, as well as applications of those ideas to political problems.

30300. Survey of American Politics. A survey of some of the main themes, topics and approaches in the study of American politics and government.

30700. Introduction to Linear Models. This course will provide an introduction to the linear model, the dominant form of statistical inference in the social sciences. The goals of the course are to teach students the statistical methods needed to pursue independent large-n research projects and to develop the skills necessary to pursue further methods training in the social sciences. Part I of the course reviews the simple linear model (as seen in Stat 220 or its equivalent) with attention to the theory of statistical inference and the derivation of estimators. Basic calculus and linear algebra will be introduced. Part II extends the linear model to the multivariate case. Emphasis will be placed on model selection and specification. Part III examines the consequences of data that is “poorly behaved” and how to cope with the problem. Part IV introduces special topics like systems of simultaneous equations, logit and probit models, time-series methods, etc. The breadth of coverage depends on time. Relatively little prior knowledge of math or statistics is expected, but students are expected to work hard to develop the tools introduced in class.

35500. Public Opinion. A close examination of techniques employed, categories utilized and assumptions made by contemporary American students of public opinion. Criticism of these approaches from historical, philosophical and comparative perspectives will be encouraged. The course will make little sense to students without at least a background in Data Analysis (PLSC 30500).

43100. Maximum Likelihood. The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the estimation and interpretation of maximum likelihood, a statistical method which permits a close linkage of deductive theory and empirical estimation. Among the problems considered in this course include: models of dichotomous choice, such as turnout and vote choice; models of limited categorical data, such as those for multi-party elections and survey responses; models for counts of uncorrelated events, such as executive orders and bookburnings; models for duration, such as the length of parliamentary coalitions or the tenure of bureaucracies; models for compositional data, such as allocation of time by bureaucrats to task and district vote shares; and models for latent variables, such as for predispositions. The emphasis in this course will be on the extraction of information about political and social phenomena, not upon properties of estimators.

43200. Political Organizations. This course considers political organizations, such as bureaucracies, firms, parties, and unions, from two perspectives. The first regards organizations as structures, and examines such properties as hierarchy, asymmetric information, principal-agency, and span of control. The second regards organizations as composed of individual decision-makers, and examines such models of decision-making as rational choice, bounded rationality, routine-following, and the garbage can. Exemplars of the former approach include Max Weber and Frederick Taylor. Exemplars of the second approach include Herbert Simon and James March. The course draws from multiple fields, including sociology, psychology, and economics in order to understand the behavior of political organizations.

43300. Political Psychology. This course is about how the human mind can shape our attitudes and behaviors in the realm of politics. Do our personalities matter for our political choices? How much does what we learn from others determine our political beliefs, or is it most given by self- interested status? When we introduce heuristics, or cognitive short- cuts, to our decisions, what biases follow? How much of what we think about politics comes from our sense of identity, or those we feel are most similar to? Can we trust political actors, and under what kinds of conditions? When is a message persuasive, and why?

Austin Carson

29202. The Secret Side of International Politics. This course explores the secret side of international politics, analyzing what governments do "behind closed doors" and the reasons why they do it. Some questions the course addresses include: What agreements do diplomats negotiate privately and why? What role does secrecy play in wartime? What do covert operations actually look like and why are they used? And how have espionage practices evolved historically? Course material will draw on both well-known and obscure uses of secrecy in international politics; students will do their own hands-on research with declassified materials on new cases of their choosing. We conclude with analysis of the threat secrecy in all its guises poses to democracy and whether if at all social media and political openness are changing the secret side of international politics. This course has a heavy reading load and both attendance and substantial participation in weekly discussion sections are required.

36405. Becoming a Global Power: The American Experience. This course invites advanced undergraduates and M.A. students to explore America’s rise to great power status and its embrace of a global military role. We focus on two main topics in the post-World War II era. First, how did the U.S. approach the practical side of building and maintaining an infrastructure for global military power projection? In answering this we will learn about the complex, evolving, and often obscure arrangements necessary for the U.S. to forward deploy military power in Western Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. Second, how did the embrace of a global military role change American politics, society, and law back home? Here we will analyze everything from changes in domestic transportation infrastructure to legal rulings about crimes on military bases to social effects of troops returning home from abroad. The course features an interdisciplinary set of readings from International Relations scholars, historians, critical geographers, anthropologists, and specialists in American Political Development. Students will also get experience analyzing original primary materials via a set of assigned case studies. A recurring interest will be exploring how a uniquely American view of itself affected the methods it used to create a global military infrastructure, and the impact of a global military role on American ideology and identity. Grades will be based on short writing assignments, a midterm exam, and a take-home essay final exam.

40600. Seminar on IR Theory. This course is a PhD-level introductory survey of the major scholarly traditions in the field of International Relations. It provides an introduction to the central theoretical approaches including realism, liberalism, and constructivism and their variants. The course also exposes students to more recent non-paradigmatic research programs, reflections on the field's development over time, and the recurring "meta-debates" which underlie many of the differences in applied areas. Seminar discussion will identify and criticize the central arguments advanced by different scholars in order to assess the relative merits of different theoretical perspectives. The course is designed to help students prepare for the Department's IR general exam: assigned and suggested readings are a starting point for building a reading list; the course offers practice with answering exam questions; students will exercise modes of critical analysis during seminar critical to passing the exam.

40605. Recent Debates in International Relations. This course builds on the canonical works in International Relations (IR) theory covered in PLSC 40600 (Seminar on International Relations Theory), leading students through ten weeks of recent debates in IR research organized along substantive and methodological lines. There is an intentional absence of thematic unity among the topics. Some units look more closely at recent debates within the classic paradigms (e.g. “the practice turn in constructivist research”) while others are not easily categorized along these lines (e.g. “emotions in IR”). Some focus on work across empirical domains that shares a recently popular methodological innovation (e.g. “the experimental turn in IR”); other topics are located closer towards the fringe of mainstream IR but showcase interesting and creative ways of doing our work (e.g. “spatial thinking in IR”). Specific topics will change with each offering and are chosen based on a combination of importance to the field, value as exemplars of creative and rigorous research, and my own personal interests. Participants will demonstrate fluency in these debates and develop opinions about their significance and staying power. A secondary goal is for students to expand their own research interests and draw lessons about how debates and fads evolve in IR to maximize the impact of their own work.

Cathy Cohen

22100. African American Politics. This course will explore both the historical and contemporary political behavior of African Americans, examining the multitude of ways in which African Americans have engaged in politics and political struggle in the United States. In some cases, the political behavior of black Americans has manifested itself through traditional modes of participation such as voting, the running of black candidates for public office or involvement in political parties. In other cases, African Americans have worked to gain, exercise and maintain the rights guaranteed to all citizens in the U.S. through activities deemed outside "traditional" political participation. To understand such different approaches to the liberation of black people, we must pay special attention to the attitudes, world views and ideologies that structure and influence African-American political behavior. An analysis of difference and stratification in black communities and its resulting impact on political ideologies and mobilization will be a crucial component of this course. We will consistently seek to situate the politics of African Americans in the larger design we call American politics.

22150. Contemporary African American Politics. (=CRPC 22150, LLSO 25902) This course explores the issues, actions, and arguments that comprise black politics today.Our specific task is to explore the question of how do African Americans currently engage in politics and political struggles in the United States. This analysis is rooted in a discussion of contemporary issues, including the 2008 presidential election, the response to Hurricane Katrina, debates surrounding the topic of immigration, the exponential incarceration of black people, and the role of rap music and hip-hop among black youth. We situate the politics of African Americans into the larger design we call American politics. Is there such a thing as black politics? If there is, what does it tell us more generally about American politics?

23609. Black Feminist Thought and Politics. (=CRES 23609, AFAM 23609, GNDR 23901)

26000. Race and Politics. Fundamentally, this course is meant to explore how race, both historically and currently, influences politics in the United States. For example, is there something unique about the politics of African Americans? Does the idea and lived experience of whiteness shape one's political behavior? Throughout the quarter, students interrogate the way scholars, primarily in the field of American politics, have ignored, conceptualized, measured, modeled, and sometimes fully engaged the concept of race. We examine the multiple manifestations of race in the political domain, both as it functions alone and as it intersects with other identities such as gender, class, and sexuality.

30500. Introduction to Data Analysis. This course is an introduction to the research methods practiced by quantitative political scientists. The first part lays out the enterprise of empirical research: the structure and content of theories, the formulation of testable hypotheses, the logic of empirical tests, and the consideration of competing hypotheses. The second part considers the implementation of empirical research: the potential barriers to valid inferences, the strengths and limitations of research designs, and empirical representations of theoretical constructs. The final part provides hands-on experience with the two kinds of analyses most frequently performed by quantitative political researchers: contingency tables and regression.

35000. Race and Politics. Fundamentally, this course is meant to explore how race, both historically and currently, influences politics in the United States. For example, is there something unique about the politics of African Americans? Does the idea and lived experience of whiteness shape one's political behavior? Throughout the quarter, students interrogate the way scholars, primarily in the field of American politics, have ignored, conceptualized, measured, modeled, and sometimes fully engaged the concept of race. We examine the multiple manifestations of race in the political domain, both as it functions alone and as it intersects with other identities such as gender, class, and sexuality.

38200. Political Socialization: Contemporary Youth Politics. The course will explore the literature on how people develop their politics, paying special attention to the participation of young people, especially those from marginal communities.

41400. Race, Gender, and Politics. PQ: PLSC 35000.

41700. Social Movements. This course is an introduction to theoretical and empirical research on social movements. In this course we will take social movements to mean national-level collective mobilizations organized for political change. During the quarter we will examine and debate what a range of scholars across disciplines have written about some of the fundamental questions regarding the emergence, evolution and political impact of social movements. For example, what types of collective action qualify as social movements? What factors lead to or shape the development of social movements? What role do social movements play in the working of American democracy? Finally, why have political scientists largely ignored social movements as a topic for extensive and careful study?

46211. Political Participation and New Media. Throughout history "new media," for better or worse, have on occasion transformed politics. The use of radio to share Roosevelt's fireside chats and of television to broadcast the Civil Rights Movement are recognized as landmark moments when "new media," intersecting with political life, changed the course of political engagement. Today's "new media" (the Internet, digital media production, and computer games) may also radically change how we think about and engage in politics. This course will explore the historical and potential impact of new media on politics.

46500. Power and Politics. This course will explore the literature on power as it has developed largely in American politics.

46510. Politics of Deviance. This course will explore the explicit and implicit politics involved in the construction of individuals, groups, and populations as deviant. What is the role of the state in such processes? How do concepts such as power, morality and norms function to create and maintain deviants? How does the label/category of deviant impact the distribution of resources, status and political power? We will begin the course by reading the established literature on deviance and then focus our attention on the politics of deviance in the realms of sex and youth culture.

Patricia Conley

22913. The Practice of Social Science Research. This is a first course in empirical research as it is practiced across a broad range of the social sciences, including political science. It is meant to enable critical evaluation of statements of fact and cause in discussions of the polity, economy, and society. One aim is to improve students' ability to produce original research, perhaps in course papers or a senior thesis. A second objective is to improve students' ability to evaluate claims made by others in scholarship, commentary, or public discourse. The specific research tools that the course develops are statistical, but the approach is more general. It will be useful as a guide to critical thinking whether the research to be evaluated, or to be done, is quantitative or not. Above all, the course seeks to demonstrate the use of empirical research in the service of an argument.

25303. Evaluating the Candidates in the 2016 Presidential Election. Though the election is over, the question of how we evaluate and select our presidents is still relevant. What does it take to get elected? What does it take to do the job? Can we predict whether a candidate will be a good president? We will discuss presidential leadership as a function of character and experience, institutional constraints, the selection process, and the domestic and global political context. We will evaluate recent presidential candidates such as Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders using insights from the academic literature on the presidency. Finally, we will ask how much the individual who occupies the office can bring about change, given the political and institutional context of American government. Is the executive in the United States too powerful or not powerful enough?

28101. Topics in American Political Development. This seminar will focus on the historical development of the American presidency. We will view the institution of the presidency through its changing relationship with Congress and the courts (separation of powers, checks and balances); the evolution of foreign policy, beginning with the expansion of US territory and removal of indigenous peoples; and the growth of the executive branch bureaucracy. This course is intended for sophomore and junior political science majors who want to fulfill their long paper requirement or gain more research and writing experience before undertaking a BA thesis. The major course requirement will be a research paper based on both primary and secondary sources.

Chiara Cordelli

21820. Global Justice and the Ethics of Immigration. (=CRES 21820) This course examines different theories of global justice and justice in migration that have been developed by political theorists since the 1980s. It explores urgent ethical questions in international affairs, with a particular focus on global poverty, global inequality and the ethics of immigration. Addressed questions will include the following: what does justice require at the global level? Does the very idea of global justice make sense? Are economic inequalities between countries morally objectionable and, if so, why? What do affluent countries (and their citizens) owe to less affluent countries (and their citizens)? Should states have a right to control their territorial borders? To what extent do they have a right to exclude immigrants? What are the obligations of states towards newly arrived immigrants? We will address these normative questions by reading and critically assessing important texts written by leading scholars within the field of political theory and applied ethics, including John Rawls, Charles Beitz, Peter Singer, Thomas Pogge, Joseph Carens and many others.

26920/36920. Freedom, Justice and Legitimacy. In this course we will explore two main questions, which are central to both contemporary political theory and political discourse: (1) how different concepts and conceptions of freedom ground different theories of social justice and political legitimacy and (2) how to understand the relationship between justice and legitimacy. To what extent are justice and legitimacy separate ideas? Does legitimacy require justice? Are just states necessarily legitimate? We will critically analyze and normatively assess how different contemporary theories have answered, whether explicitly or implicitly, such questions. The course will focus on five major contemporary theories: liberal-egalitarianism as represented by the work of John Rawls; libertarianism, as represented by the work of Robert Nozick, neo-Lockean theories as represented by the work of John Simmons, neo-republicanism as represented by the work of Philip Pettit, and neo-Kantian theories as represented by the work of Arthur Ripstein.

41401. Contemporary Theories of Global Justice. This course involves a critical examination of different conceptions of international and global justice, including both statist and cosmopolitan perspectives. It provides an avenue for exploring questions about the nature of international morality; the scope of principles of justice beyond the nation-state; the moral and political significance of global inequality; the limits of state sovereignty and the value of nationality; the ethics of immigration; as well as the very boundaries of political philosophy itself. We will read texts by Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Hans Morgenthau, Charles Beitz, Thomas Pogge, Iris Marion Young, Thomas Nagel, and David Miller among others.

42101. John Rawls' Theory of Justice. This course involves a sustained critical examination of John Rawls' theory of "justice as fairness," as an avenue for wider exploration of questions about the nature and role of the concept of justice; the value of liberty and equality, and their relationship; distributive justice; the justification of democracy; and the enterprise of political philosophy itself. We will focus on Rawls' A Theory of Justice, and read many critics of Rawls, including Robert Nozick, G.A. Cohen, Susan Moller Okin, Charles Mills, and others.

Michael Dawson

22100. African American Politics. This course will focus on how the continuing struggle for black empowerment has helped to shape both the current American political environment as well as the social and economic conditions of the black community. While this course focuses on African-American politics since WWII, some attention is paid to the period before the war in order to lay a firm foundation for the analysis of modern black politics. The unique nature of African-American politics necessitates a multi-disciplinary approach to the subject. Consequently, materials and lectures will also show how the study of race relations, psychology, economics, and sociology can inform our understanding of the critical importance of black politics to American politics. After considering such topics as the politics of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, fiscal retrenchment, and blacks and governmental institutions, this course will end by considering whether a “New Black Politics” has emerged and the impact of the nation’s move toward the political right on African-American politics.

23100. Democracy and the Information Technology Revolution. (=LLSO 27101) The revolution in information technologies has serious implications for democratic societies. We concentrate, though not exclusively, on the United States. We look at which populations have the most access to technology-based information sources (the digital divide), and how individual and group identities are being forged online. We ask how is the responsiveness of government being affected, and how representative is the online community. Severe conflict over the tension between national security and individual privacy rights in the U.S., United Kingdom and Ireland will be explored as well. We analyze both modern works (such as those by Turkle and Gilder) and the work of modern democratic theorists (such as Habermas).

25200. Urban Politics. (=LLSO 26701) This course is designed to allow students to place research which tackles some of the basic urban problems that confront American society within the context of theories of urban politics. During the first part of the course we will critically review classic works in urban politics such as those of Dahl, Banfield, Peterson, and Castells. During the second part of the course we will shift to consider how the theory covered in the first part of the course can help us analyze and understand the implications for American democracy of selected severe urban problems. Problems selected for more detailed review this year include the Katrina disaster, and racial and ethnic urban conflict.

25600. Hurricane Katrina and American Politics. Hurricane Katrina was not only one of the worse modern disasters in the U.S., but particularly its aftermath provided a lens in many of the fault lines within American society and politics. This course will use the disaster as a lens with which to analyze a wide range of topics in the study of American politics. Topics to be examined in this course using the disaster as a focal point include: the divides in American public opinion; the role of the media in politics; the responses of local, state and federal institutions; the role of political leadership; and, the strength and weakness of civil society in the U.S.

29600. Black Political Thought. This course is an intensive introduction to black political thought. The majority of texts considered during the first part of the course will be from key authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and bell hooks. During the second part of the course we will consider selected examples of applications of black political thought to contemporary debates.

30300. Survey of American Politics. A survey of some of the main themes, topics and approaches in the study of American politics and government.

30500. Introduction to Data Analysis. Open to Political Science Ph.D. students only. This course is an introduction to the research methods practiced by quantitative political scientists. The first part lays out the enterprise of empirical research: the structure and content of theories, the formulation of testable hypotheses, the logic of empirical tests, and the consideration of competing hypotheses. The second part considers the implementation of empirical research: the potential barriers to valid inferences, the strengths and limitations of research designs, and empirical representations of theoretical constructs. The final part provides hands-on experience with the two kinds of analyses most frequently performed by quantitative political researchers: contingency tables and regression.

34315. Blacks and the Left In U.S. History.

35000. Race and Politics I. Fundamentally, this course is meant to explore how race, both historically and currently, influences politics in the United States. For example, is there something unique about the politics of African Americans? Does the idea and lived experience of whiteness shape one's political behavior? Throughout the quarter, students interrogate the way scholars, primarily in the field of American politics, have ignored, conceptualized, measured, modeled, and sometimes fully engaged the concept of race. We examine the multiple manifestations of race in the political domain, both as it functions alone and as it intersects with other identities such as gender, class, and sexuality.

35100. Race and Politics II: Intensive Writing Seminar. The focus of this seminar is to help students complete one publishable article of finished dissertation chapter by the end of the quarter. Students are advised to begin the quarter with the objective of revising a paper or chapter or with a clear sense of the paper or chapter they intend to write.

45500. Black Political Thought. This course is a very intensive introduction to black political thought. The majority of texts considered during the first part of the course will be from key authors such as the Combahee River Collective, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ida B. Wells. During the second part of the course we will reconsider the status of the "black public sphere"and its connection to other publics and counterpublics. Themes to be considered this year include: What are the core concepts and constellations of concepts historically found in African-American political thought? To what degree has the construction of gender in the African-American community and the interaction between gender and racial oppression shaped African-American political thought? To what degree do different classes and sectors within classes embrace different aspects of African-American political thought? To what degree does Habermas' concept of the "public sphere" help us understand the development of black political ideologies? Are other more modern understandings of publics, public spheres, and counterpublics useful for understanding African American ideological formation and the impact of African American ideologies on politics within the United States?

53100. Democracy and the Information Technology Revolution. The revolution in information technologies has serious implications for democratic societies. We concentrate, though not exclusively, on the United States. We look at which populations have the most access to technology-based information sources (the digital divide), and how individual and group identities are being forged online. We ask how is the responsiveness of government being affected, and how representative is the online community. Severe conflict over the tension between national security and individual privacy rights in the U.S., United Kingdom and Ireland will be explored as well. We analyze both modern works (such as those by Turkle and Gilder) and the work of modern democratic theorists (such as Habermas). An emphasis in this course will be the methodologies and research agendas utilized by scholars in this field.

Adom Getachew

25501. Race and Imperialism in the 20th Century. (=CRES 25501) The turn of the 20th C. marked the legal sanctioning of Jim Crow segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision while the Scramble for Africa only a decade earlier had inaugurated a new era of imperial expansion. For W.E.B. Du Bois and others, these confluences indicated a singularity about the global experience of race in the 20th C. Focusing on the period prior to WWII, this course is an effort at understanding this specificity through an engagement with the politicians, statesmen, activists, and intellectuals writing in the midst of “the problem of the color line.” The course exposes students to thinkers on both sides of the color line as we read Sir Frederick Lugard, the colonial administrator of Nigeria and a member of the League of Nations' Permanent Mandates Commission, alongside George Padmore, the anticolonialist of Trinidadian descent who played a central role in Ghana’s independence movement. To further our insights, we engage recent commentary by scholars who have sought to understand the racial formations of the 20th C. The course aims are 1) to trace the processes—ideological, political, and economic—through which the Jim Crow color line became international and consider the reverberations of this internationalism, 2) to reexamine the crisis of WWI and the creation of the League of Nations in light of the “problem of the color line,” and 3) to trace the intellectual roots of a global anticolonial movement concerned with securing racial equality.

43600. The Political Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois. The course will survey the political thought of leading American and international intellectual W.E.B Du Bois. Because Du Bois’s intellectual and activist contributions range across the fields of history, sociology, education, fiction, philosophy, political theory, literary theory, biography, and autobiography, the course samples works by him in each of these fields. Central themes include: (1) Du Bois’s shifting understanding of race as a concept, (2) his internationalist and Pan-African orientation, (3) his turn to Marxist analysis and political commitments. The seminar will be particularly concerned with situating Du Bois thought in historical context and understanding the transformations in his thinking.

45501. Black Political Thought: The Problem of Freedom. This advanced seminar will survey 19th and early 20th century texts in the history of black political thought with particular attention to the question of freedom. The course takes as its premise the constitutive role of transatlantic slave trade and new world slavery in the making of black modernity and black political thought. Drawing on a variety of figures including, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells Barnett, W.E.B Du Bois and C.L.R James, students will consider the meanings and contradictions of freedom when viewed from the underside of modernity.

56300. The Global Plantation. From its emergence in the late-medieval Mediterranean, to the slave societies of the New World, through its late colonial heritage in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, the plantation has been a paradigmatic institution of racial-capitalist modernity. Through a range of texts that includes slave narratives, novels, political economy, sociological studies and recent histories of capitalism, this course explores how the plantation opened a vexed problem-space in which concepts central to the modern world (such as sovereignty, freedom, and labor) emerged, were debated, and continuously refigured. While the plantation is frequently figured as an institution of the past, this transnationally and transhistorically oriented course will examine a set of thinkers who argue for the aliveness of the plantation’s present in the shaping of political, economic, and social trajectories in the postcolonial world.

Robert Gulotty

25402. Fragmented Politics and Global Markets. What explains a government's decision to block a trade deal, prevent foreign investors from gaining control of a local factory, or ban the export of rare earth minerals? This course develops theory and evidence that these decisions reflect domestic and international politics. We will discuss the political dimension of the integration of the global economy and the way that globalization separates workers, business and consumers. Drawing on methods and theory from international political economy, we will critically examine the prospects for international cooperation on trade, investment, and intellectual property protections, the role of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, and the future of international governance.

39501. International Political Economy. This graduate seminar focuses on the prevailing theoretical and empirical research programs in international political economy (IPE). The course will introduce a variety of frontier research problems that animate current work in the field as well as provide experience evaluating empirical research. We will discuss relations between international markets and politics: mass politics, domestic political institutions, and international politics. A central goal of the course is to generate ideas for student research, including papers and dissertation topics.

39601. The Political Economy of International Trade. This graduate seminar focuses on the political economy of international trade. We will draw on insights from international law, economics, and political science to answer research questions in international political economy and provide the foundations for the evaluation and production of empirical research. Topics include the determinants of trade policy preferences, the rationale for international trade agreements and the workings of the global trade regime. A central goal of the course is to generate ideas for student research, including papers and dissertation topics. Students are expected to have taken PLSC 43401: Mathematical Foundations of Political Methodology.

43401. Mathematical Foundations of Political Methodology. This is a first course on the theory and practice of mathematical methods in social science research. These mathematical and computer skills are needed for the quantitative and formal modeling courses offered in the political science department and are increasingly necessary for courses in American, Comparative, and International Relations. We will cover mathematical techniques (linear algebra, calculus, probability) and methods of logical and statistical inference (proofs and statistics). A weekly computing lab will apply these methods, as well as introduce the R statistical computing environment.

Mark Hansen

22710. Electoral Politics in America. This course explores the interactions of voters, candidates, the parties, and the media in American national elections, chiefly in the campaign for the presidency, both in nominating primaries and in the November general election. The course will examine how voters learn about candidates, how they perceive candidates, how they come to turn out to vote, and how they decide among the candidates. It will examine the strategies and techniques of electoral campaigns, including the choices of campaign themes and the impact of campaign advertising. It will consider the role of campaign contributors and volunteers, the party campaign organizations, campaign and media polls, and the press. Finally, it will assess the impact of campaigns and elections on governing and policymaking.

23301. Interest Group Politics. In this course we will take up claims about interest groups and their role in American politics and consider ways to evaluate them systematically. We will discuss their formation and maintenance as organizations, their efforts to influence Congress and the bureaucracy, their part in campaigns and elections and their overall effect on the conduct of American democracy.

24810. Politics of the U.S. Congress. This course examines Congress from the perspective of the 535 senators and representatives who constitute it. It examines congressional elections, legislators' relationships with their constituents, lawmakers' dealings in and with committees, and representatives' give-and-take with congressional leadership, the executive, and pressure groups.

30300. Survey of American Politics. A survey of some of the main themes, topics and approaches in the study of American politics and government.

30700. Introduction to Linear Models. An introduction to the general linear regression model, the most widely used inferential tool in quantitative social science. The course first considers the model and its statistical properties. It then considers generalizations of the model that deal with problems caused by violations of its assumptions. Topics include the general linear model, hypothesis testing, nonlinearities in variables, interactions, diagnostics, heteroscedastic residuals, autocorrelated residuals, lagged variables, qualitative dependent variables, measurement error, interdependent sets of equations and graphic display of data and regression models.

51400. Topics in American Politics: Party Nominations and Primary Elections.

Gary Herrigel

45000. Comparative Capitalisms I. This course is a general introduction to theories of capitalist organization and development. Foundational works by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Karl Polanyi will be reviewed in addition to more contemporary theoretical writings in neoclassical economics, economic geography, political economy and economic sociology.

45010. Social Theory and the Economy. This course surveys social theoretic writing on the boundaries and character of economic process. Topics include theories of reflexivity and agency, recombinant organizational forms, and alternative forms of governance.

45100. Comparative Capitalisms II. PQ: Completion of PolSci 450 is encouraged but not required. This course will address key empirical and theoretical controversies involving matters of economic and industrial adjustment in advanced industrial economies. Literature on the welfare state, regions, corporate governance, industrial relations and industrial organization will be examined in comparative context.

45110. Issues in Comparative Capitalism. PQ: Completion of PLSC 45010 is encouraged but not required. This course will address key empirical and theoretical controversies involving matters of economic and industrial adjustment in advanced industrial economies. Literature on the multinationals, regions, corporate governance, industrial relations, welfare states, new patterns of administrative governance and democracy will be examined in comparative context.

45111. Interdependent Development. This course will survey the impact of global production networks on developing and developed regions. Customer-supplier relations, labor standards, the politics of regional upgrading, the emergence of new forms of multinational enterprise in both developed and developing countries, trade union efforts to cope will all be topics. Various parts of Asia and Eastern Europe will be used as case studies for developing regions. Japan, Western Europe and the US will serve as developed country cases.

45200. Issues in Comparative Capitalisms. This course is a survey of the organizational, regional, and political economic dynamics involved in the current global transformation of manufacturing. The core concern is with the dynamics that follow from vertical disintegration and the break-up of old style hierarchical firms. Global production networks, regional development and national adjustment experiences in the developing and developed world constitute the cases within which these dynamics play themselves out in the course.

45701. Institutionalism and its Limits in Advanced Political Economies: Theory and Cases. This course surveys the current state of thought on institutional change in advanced political economies. Its focus is on the limits of traditional institutional approaches, particularly regarding change. The end of the course will adopt the issue of financialization and financial reform in advanced political economies as a case.

45702. Formal and Informal Governance in the Economy and Politics. This course will examine the possibilities and limits of formal systems and abstractions for the governance of production, markets, corporations and states. Special attention will be given to recent trends in both theory and practice to move beyond the traditional association of formality with rigidity and information reduction and informality with flexibility, innovation and learning. To what extent can (and do) new formal systems induce learning and innovation in the contemporary world? What are the normative implications of such systems? How do they relate to contemporary worries about neoliberalism, and the increasing marketization, financialization, modularization and digitization of social life? Can such systems be democratic in any sense? We will read social theoretic works on abstraction, habit, tacit knowledge and reflexivity; political economic writing on risk, governance, regulation and institutional change; and political theoretical discussions of democracy, social democracy and neoliberalism.

William Howell

25215. The American Presidency. This course examines the institution of the American presidency. It surveys the foundations of presidential power, both as the Founders conceived it, and as it is practiced in the modern era. This course also traces the historical development of the institutional presidency, the president's relationships with Congress and the courts, the influence presidents wield in domestic and foreign policymaking, and the ways in which presidents make decisions in a system of separated powers.

27702. Political Leadership: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. This course will examine both classical and contemporary analyses of leadership, with a particular focus on the relationship between executive authority and democratic politics. We will read traditional authors such as Cicero, Livy, Plutarch and Machiavelli as well as contemporary analyses of modern political leadership, especially of the American Presidency.

28801. Introduction to American Politics. This survey course canvasses the basic behavioral, institutional, and historical factors that comprise the study of American politics. We will evaluate various modes of survey opinion formation and political participation both inside and outside of elections. In addition to studying the primary branches of U.S. government, we will consider the role of interest groups, the media, and political action committees in American politics. We also will evaluate the persistent roles of race, class, and money in historical and contemporary political life.

Demetra Kasimis

24402/34402. Greek Political Thought. This course is designed to help students in political theory and related fields think about—and do—the history of political thought by recovering the strangeness of ancient democracy and its critics. It is an advanced survey of the political thought of classical Athens with particular emphasis on the cultural, institutional, and poetic practices through which Athenians enacted democracy and questioned its assumptions and effects. In sixth century Athens, the notion that the people could and should rule themselves—not by virtue of wealth, property, or family name but simply by birth—served as a radical rejection of the longstanding view that political power belonged in the hands of the few (the wealthy, propertied, and elite). We contextualize the dramatic poetry, philosophy, oratory, and history that emerged in the subsequent century or so, under conditions of expanding and contracting empire. We read them as critical reflections on what life was like under this new political arrangement and ask to what extent the works of Thucydides, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Plato can be said to constitute the birth of political theory as an idea and a practice.

25804/45804. Feminists Read the Greeks. As one scholar puts it, feminist thought has “gone a long way… toward inscribing classical Greek philosophy at the origins of some of the most tenacious assumptions about sexual difference in the Western tradition.” Since the 1970s, writing on gender, sex, and sexuality has staged a series of generative, critical, and sometimes controversial encounters with ancient Greek thought and culture. We examine the ways in which the texts and practices of ancient Greece, if not the idea of “the Greeks,” have offered theoretical and symbolic resources for feminists and others to think critically about gender as a conceptual and political category. What sorts of interpretive and historical assumptions govern these engagements? To what extent are the trajectories of gender studies and classics intertwined? Was there a concept of “gender” in ancient Greece? Of sexuality? Is it fair to say, as many have, that classical ideas about gender and the sexed body are wholly opposed to those of the “moderns”? Readings range from feminist theory to Greek mythology, philosophy, and drama to scholarship on gender and sexuality in antiquity (including Foucault, Halperin, and Winkler).

26603. Democracy and the Immigrant in Classical Greek Thought. Readers have long marveled at classical Greek thought’s ability to capture the enduring dilemmas of democratic life. But on the increasingly urgent issue of immigration, political scientists persistently bypass the Athenian democratic polis and its critics even though Athenians lived in a democracy that invited, but kept disenfranchised, a large number of free, integrated immigrants called “metics” (metoikoi). With this curiosity in mind, we seek to understand how ancient philosophers, dramatists, and orators saw the democracy’s dependence on immigrants to support its economy, fight its wars, educate its citizenry, and express a precarious way of living in the polis. On what grounds were metics excluded from citizenship? What do critics think citizenship comes to mean under such conditions? Can they shed new light on contemporary assumptions about the relationship between democracy and immigration? Readings of primary texts in translation will be paired with contemporary political theory, gender theory, and classical studies.

43001. The Refugee. This is a graduate class that critically explores the meaning of the refugee and some related questions of migration, asylum, borders, membership, diaspora, gender, and Europeanness in a wide range of texts (political, legal, literary, visual) in both contemporary and historical perspectives. How is a refugee different from a migrant? Can we talk about the refugee outside of a modern human rights framework? What relation is there between the ancient Greek notion of asylum and today’s practice? Particular attention may be paid to the case of modern Greece as a nation that not only sits at the intersections of Europe, Middle East, and North Africa and at the crossroads of immigration and emigration but also possesses a particular self-understanding as diasporic and hospitable.

43801. Plato's Legacies. Some of the most significant efforts to question political theory's core concepts, unsettle its approaches, and expose its dangerous ideals have depended on major re-interpretations of Plato's thought. This course investigates the broad critical impulse to treat Plato as the originator of political positions and interpretive assumptions that late modernity frequently seeks to critique and less often to celebrate. We consider the charges of essentialism, authoritarianism, and foundationalism, among others, and ask to what (if any) extent considerations of the texts' historical contexts and dramaturgical conditions have factored into these assessments. Readings will include works by Popper, Strauss, Arendt, Derrida, Castoriadis, Wolin, Irigaray, Cavarero, Butler, and Rancière alongside Plato's dialogues. Students are expected to be familiar with Plato's thought upon enrolling.

Matthew Landauer

22505. Knowledge and Politics. What is the relationship between knowledge and power, and between science and democracy? What kinds of knowledge are needed in politics, and who needs to know what? In this course we read a number of philosophers, theorists, and social scientists interested in the relationship between knowledge and politics. Topics covered may include: the epistemic properties of political institutions and markets; the role of expertise in politics; values in science and public policy; and theories of epistemic democracy and epistemic injustice.

24302/34302. Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Politics. Ancient Greece was the birthplace of the Western conceptions of philosophy, rhetoric, and politics – and the site of contentious debates about the relationship between them. This course offers an introduction to some of those debates. Does rhetoric pose a threat to the sound practice of democratic politics? Or is rhetoric instead a necessary part of any democratic politics? How did ancient Greek philosophers develop a critique of rhetoric and its practice in democratic Athens? What techniques and concepts did they themselves borrow from rhetoric in pursuing their own philosophical agendas? Does the power of rhetoric make the pursuit of rational and reasonable politics impossible? We will take up these and other related questions through a close reading of Plato (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Menexenus), Aristotle (Rhetoric), Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War), speeches of the Athenian orators, and other ancient Greek texts.

24401/34401. Herodotus and Thucydides: History and Politics. In this course we read Herodotus and Thucydides not only as historians but as political thinkers. The course will be organized around an intensive engagement with two central texts: Herodotus’ Histories and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. As we read through these works, we will also take up the wider historical and political context—e.g., the fifth-century rise of Athenian democracy and imperialism—and the relationship between our texts and other genres, including philosophy, drama, and rhetoric. The aim of the course is not only to give students a close familiarity with our two authors and some of the scholarship surrounding them, but also, more broadly, to think through the relationship between political theory and history. How might political theory guide the writing of history, and how can history contribute to theorizing politics? What can our reading of Herodotus and Thucydides tell us about how to think about these questions in different eras and contexts?

24902. Democratic Accountability and Transparency. Diagnoses of democratic failings, from the influence of money in politics to abuses of police power, often come with a promised solution: Our institutions need to be more "accountable" and "transparent." But what do these concepts really mean—and how much of a difference do they really make? We'll begin by considering the ways in which fears of tyrannical, arbitrary, unaccountable rule have long been central to democratic political thought and practice. But we'll spend most of our time on contemporary issues and problems. How should we conceive of accountability, both conceptually and normatively? Are elections sufficient to make politicians accountable to ordinary citizens? What forms of accountability are appropriate for modern democratic politics? Is accountability only for elites, or should ordinary citizens be accountable to one another? In what contexts are transparency and accountability valuable, and when might we instead find their operation counter-productive and troubling? In addition to philosophical readings, we consider a variety of real-world cases, from Wikileaks to Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.

25311/35311. Models of Ancient Politics I: Athens, Sparta, Rome. This course begins a two-quarter sequence on Athens, Sparta, and Rome as models of politics and their subsequent reception and appropriation in the history of Western political thought. This quarter, we will focus on understanding the institutions, political culture, and political theory of ancient Greece and Rome through an engagement with ancient texts and modern scholarship. Readings will include Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Plutarch, Polybius, Livy, and Sallust.

25312/35312. Models of Ancient Politics II: Modern Receptions. This is the second course in a two-quarter sequence on the importance of Athens, Sparta, and Rome for Western political theory. This quarter we will focus on the reception and appropriation of ancient political models in modern European political thought. Authors to be read include Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Adams, Hume, Rousseau, Mill, and Grote, as well as modern scholars.

Benjamin Lessing

29500. Drugs, Guns, and Money: The Politics of Criminal Conflict. (=LLSO 27307, LACS 29500) This course examines armed conflict between states and criminal groups, with a focus on Latin America's militarized drug wars. Why do states decide to crack down on cartels, and why do cartels decide to fight back? Are drug wars "insurgencies"? If so, can they be won? Why does drug violence vary over time, over space, and between market sector? We will study these issues from historical, economic, criminological, and cultural perspectives. Throughout, we focus on the interplay of domestic and international politics in formulating and enforcing drug policy.

40500. States and Institutions in Comparative Perspective. Good institutions and strong states are widely thought to be central to economic, political and social development. But what are "good institutions," and how do states become "strong"? Can we find answers that go beyond the tautological: "Good institutions are those that produce good results"? This course examines these central questions, focusing first on canonical literature largely growing out of studies of the developed world, then turning to post-colonial and non-western settings that have posed ongoing challenges to successful state-building. Lurking behind these questions are the roles played by coercion and violence, sometimes directed inward, sometimes outward, in establishing authority and the material basis for governance. In addition, we focus throughout on the methods scholars have used to probe these questions, and consider the prospects for future research agendas.

48700. Crime, Conflict and the State. Scholars of civil war emphasize the importance, and perhaps primacy, of criminal profits for insurgencies, especially in the post-cold war era. But theories of civil war generally rest on an assumption that insurgents aim to replace state power. This seminar approaches the issue from the other end of the spectrum: armed conflict between states and "purely" criminal groups--particularly drug cartels. Cartel-state conflict poses a fundamental puzzle: Why attack the state if you seek neither to topple nor secede from it? After a brief survey of the literature on civil war and organized crime, we will study recent work on criminal conflict, particularly in Latin America. We also consider the related topics of prison-based criminal networks and paramilitaries, and explore how crime and political insurgency interact in places like West Africa and Afghanistan. Throughout, we evaluate the concepts, questions and designs underpinning current research.

Zhaotian Luo

29102/30901. Game Theory I. This is a course for graduate students in Political Science. It introduces students to games of complete information through solving problem sets. We will cover the concepts of dominant strategies, rationalizable strategies, Nash equilibrium, subgame perfection, backward induction, and imperfect information. The course will be centered around several applications of game theory to politics: electoral competition, agenda control, lobbying, voting in legislatures and coalition games.

29103/31000. Game Theory II. 100 Units.
This course introduces students to games of incomplete information and several advanced topics through solving problem sets. We will cover the concepts of Bayes Nash equilibrium, perfect Bayesian equilibrium, and the basics of mechanism design and information design. In terms of applications, the course will extend the topics examined in the prerequisite, PLSC 30901. Game Theory I to allow for incomplete information, with a focus on the competing challenges of moral hazard and adverse selection in those settings.

Andrew McCall

45502. The Study of Criminal Justice and Race in the United States. This course will familiarize students with the major themes in recent scholarship on criminal justice and race in the United States. These include how racial hierarchies influence legislation, the role criminal justice plays in racial construction, the functioning of bureaucracies in racialized societies, and the political consequences of criminal justice policy. It will also take this scholarship as an object of study to critically assess the scope of questions being answered in this area, and examine the relationship between epistemological commitments, ontological premises, and the ability of systematic inquiry to serve or subvert racial hierarchies.

John McCormick

22800/52800. Principles and Practice of Roman Republicanism. Enrollment limited to 15. This course is devoted to the history, institutions and ideas of the Roman Republic. Readings include classical accounts of Rome’s development (Polybius and Livy), contemporary analyses of its constitution and social structure (Nicolet, Lintott, and Mitchell), philosophic expressions of the epoch (Cicero), and considerations of their reception in subsequent ages (Millar). Themes to be discussed include: the relationship of rich and poor citizens in a republic; the political accountability of elites; the rule of law; the common good; the necessity/threat of “great men”; and military power. Students are expected to come to the first session having read Book I of Livy’s History of Rome.

265615. Democracy’s Life and Death. (=LLSO 26615) How are democracies founded and maintained? What are their advantages and disadvantages with respect to stability, security, liberty, equality and justice? Why do democracies decline and die? This course addresses these questions by examining democracies, republics and popular governments in both the ancient and modern worlds. We will read and discuss primary texts from and social scientific analyses of Athenian democracy, the Roman Republic, the United States and modern representative governments throughout the globe.

27200/52300. Florentine Republicanism I: Political Theory. This is the first in a two-course sequence on republican theory and practice in Renaissance Florence. This term is devoted to the political writings of the two giants of Florentine republicanism: Francesco Guicciardini and Niccolo Machiavelli. Readings include Machiavelli's The Prince, and Discourses on Livy; and Guicciardini's Maxims and Dialogue on Florentine Government; as well as both authors' recommendations for reforming the constitution of Florence. Themes include the relationship between the person and the polity; the compatibility of moral and political virtue; the utility of class conflict; the advantages of mixed institutions; the principles of self-government, deliberation, and participation; and the question of military conquest.

27215. Machiavelli's Political Thought. (=LLSO 28200) This course is devoted to the political writings of Niccol Machiavelli. Readings include The Prince, Discourses on Livy, Florentine Histories and the "Discourses on Florentine Affairs." Themes to be explored include: the relationship between the person and the polity; the compatibility of moral and political virtue; the utility of class conflict; the advantages of mixed institutions; the principles of self-government, deliberation, and participation; the meaning of liberty and the question of military conquest.

27215/52315. Machiavelli and the Florentine Republic. (=LLSO 28200) This course is devoted to the political writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, his intellectual predecessors such as Petrarch, Bruni, Salutati, and contemporary interlocutors such as Guicciardini. These readings will be studied in light of the political history of these writers’ native city, the Florentine Republic. Themes to be explored include: the relationship between the person and the polity; the compatibility of moral and political virtue; the utility of class conflict; the advantages of mixed institutions; the principles of self-government, deliberation, and participation; the meaning of liberty and the question of military conquest. Students are expected to come to the first session having read Machiavelli’s The Prince in its entirety.

27216/52316. Machiavelli's Political Thought. (=LLSO 28200, FNDL 28102) This course is devoted to the political writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. Readings include The Prince, Discourses on Livy's History of Rome, selections from the Florentine Histories, and Machiavelli's proposal for reforming Florence's republic, "Discourses on Florentine Affairs." Topics include the relationship between the person and the polity; the compatibility of moral and political virtue; the utility of class conflict; the advantages of mixed institutions; the principles of self-government, deliberation, and participation; the meaning of liberty; and the question of military conquest.

27300/52400. Florentine Republicanism II: History and Interpretation. PQ: PLSC 27200. This is the second in a two-course sequence on republican theory and practice in Renaissance Florence. This term is devoted to classic histories and influential interpretations of Florentine republicanism. Readings include Burckhardt, Baron, Chabod, Rubinstein, Brucker, Pocock, Skinner, and Viroli. Themes include oligarchic versus populist republics, executive power in collegial regimes, the problem of faction, the significance of patriotism, the critique of tyranny, and the problems posed by alliances and wars.

27301/37301. Weimar Political Theology: Schmitt and Strauss. This course is devoted to the idea of "political theology" during the interwar period in 20th century Central Europe. We will focus specifically on the writings of and the intellectual exchange between Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, two authors who considered the extent to which both serious intellectual endeavors and political authority require extra-rational and transcendent foundations. Students are expected to come to the first session having read Schmitt's Political Theology in its entirety.

27315/52415. Machiavelli: Texts and Interpretations. This course assumes intimate familiarity on the part of students with Machiavelli's main political writings, The Prince and the Discourses. We devote most of the course to major interpretations of the Florentine's political thought, including: Baron, Berlin, Chabod, de Grazia, Gramsci, Hulliung, Kahn, Lefort, Mansfield, Najemy, Pitkin, Pocock, Ridolfi, Skinner, Strauss, Vivanti, and Wolin.

27400/47400. Carl Schmitt on Law and the Political. This course is devoted to the political thought of controversial lawyer and National Socialist partisan, Carl Schmitt. We will read and discuss his major works on sovereignty, the exception, legal theory, parliamentary government, liberalism versus democracy, and “the political.” But we will devote special attention to his two masterpieces of state philosophy and international law, respectively, Constitutional Theory and Nomos of the Earth. We will also consider recent appropriations of Schmitt’s theories by authors such as Agamben, Hardt and Negri. Students are expected to come to the first session having read The Concept of the Political in its entirety.

27400/47400. Carl Schmitt and Political Theology. This course is devoted to the political thought of controversial Weimar era lawyer and eventual National Socialist partisan, Carl Schmitt. Specifically, we will focus on Schmitt's claim that political authority requires extra-rational and transcendent foundations. Along with Schmitt's works from Weimar Germany, such as Political Theology and the Concept of the Political, we will read and discuss some of the related writings of two of his greatest interlocutors, Leo Strauss and Walter Benjamin. We will also consider recent appropriations of these theorists by authors such as Jakob Taubes, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Students are expected to come to the first session having read Political Theology in its entirety.

27700/57700. Popular Government in Principle and Practice. This is an advanced seminar that focuses on the normative justifications for regimes where, to some significant extent, "the people rule," and analyzes the institutions through which the people are meant to rule. We will consider constitutions and citizen self-understanding in ancient Greek democracies, ancient and medieval Italian peninsular republics, early-modern Central European city-states and post-18th century representative governments. Themes to be considered include liberty and equality, contestation and consent, the good life and class relations, passivity and participation, citizenship and slavery, as well as civil laws and military prowess.

42300. Democracy. This is an advanced seminar that focuses on the normative justifications for regimes where, to some significant extent, "the people rule"; it furthermore analyzes the institutions and practices through which the people are meant to rule. We will consider the constitutional structures of, citizen self-understandings within and theoretical reflections upon ancient and medieval democracies and republics, but focus primarily on modern representative governments. Themes to be explored include liberty and equality, contestation and consent, citizen participation and elite accountability. Students are expected to come to the first session having read Bernard Manin's Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge, 1997) in its entirety.

52402. Florentine Political Thought. This course is devoted to selected works of Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, studied in light of the political history of their native city, the Florentine Republic. We may also consider writings by Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's intellectual predecessors, and contemporary historical studies of Florentine republicanism. Themes to be explored include: the relationship between the person and the polity; the compatibility of moral and political virtue; the utility of class conflict; the advantages of mixed institutions; the principles of self-government, deliberation, and participation; the meaning of liberty and the question of military conquest.

52500. Contemporary Democratic Theory. This graduate seminar interrogates recent theoretical approaches to the theory and practice of popular government. In particular, it will focus on a number of tensions in the literature: between minimalist and participatory models; state-centered versus civil-society-focused approaches; emphases on class and identity; theories that prioritize rights as opposed to popular will, among others. Readings include Przeworski, Dahl, Putnam, Shapiro, Skocpol, Sandel, Young, and Pettit.

52800. The Roman Republic: Principles and Practice. This course is devoted to the history, institutions and ideas of the Roman republic. Readings include classical accounts of Rome's development (Polybius and Livy), contemporary analyses of its constitution and social structure (Nicolet, Lintott, and Mitchell), philosophic expressions of the epoch (Cicero), and considerations of their reception in subsequent ages (Millar). Themes to be discussed include: the relationship of rich and poor citizens in a republic; the political accountability of elites; the rule of law; the common good; and military power.

52900. Renaissance Florence: Political Theory meets Social History. This course adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of politics and society in Renaissance Florence, integrating political theory and social history. We will read primary sources, standard histories, classic interpretations, as well as examine new empirical data pertaining to the Florentine republics, oligarchies and Medici regimes of the Medieval and Renaissance eras. Primary authors include Bruni, Dante, Savonarola, Machiavelli and Guicciardini; historians consulted will be Najemy, Rubinstein, Butters, Stephens, Martines, Baron and Brucker. Mr. Padgett will make available original statistical data and analyses on the social networks and economic markets undergirding the political ideas, institutions and events that we consider. Renaissance intellectual history will be placed in the context of the political, social and economic context of thirteenth through fifteenth century Florence, thereby asking questions about mutual influence.

52315. Machiavelli's Political Thought. (=LLSO 28200) This course is devoted to the political writings of Niccol Machiavelli. Readings include The Prince, Discourses on Livy, Florentine Histories and the "Discourses on Florentine Affairs." Themes to be explored include: the relationship between the person and the polity; the compatibility of moral and political virtue; the utility of class conflict; the advantages of mixed institutions; the principles of self-government, deliberation, and participation; the meaning of liberty and the question of military conquest.

53500. Democratic Accountability. To what extent should public officials in a democracy be kept responsive and accountable to citizens? What are the best means available for democratic citizens to ensure the public accountability of elites? Should wealthy private citizens be included in the definition of the elites who are constrained by laws and institutions within a democracy? These are some of the questions we will pursue in this graduate seminar. After some consideration of political accountability in pre-18th century republics, most of the course will be devoted to the recent literature on accountability in contemporary democracies, especially the United States.

John Mearsheimer

27600/37600. War and the Nation-State. The aim of this course is to examine the phenomenon of war in its broader socio-economic context during the years between the emergence of the modern nation-state and the end of World War II.

28300. Seminar on Realism. The aim of this course is to read the key works dealing with the international relations theory called "realism."

28320. Realism. The aim of this course is to introduce students to the realist paradigm of international relations. The readings will include such classic works as Machiavelli' s The Prince and Kenneth Waltz' s Theory of International Politics. Special attention will be paid to subjects like: 1) human nature vs. structural realism, 2) defensive vs. offensive realism, 3) the absence of a balancing coalition against the United States since the Cold War ended, and 4) the role of ethics in realist thinking.

28400. American Grand Strategy. This course examines the evolution of American grand strategy since 1900, when the United States first emerged on the world stage as a great power. The focus is on assessing how its leaders have thought over time about which areas of the world are worth fighting and dying for, when it is necessary to fight in those strategically important areas, and what kinds of military forces are needed for deterrence and war-fighting in those regions.

28500. Zionism and Palestine. (=JWSC 26600) This course has three broad aims, the first of which is to explore the various strands of early Zionist thinking in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century. The second aim is to analyze how the European Zionists who came to Palestine created the Jewish state in the first half of the 20th century. The third aim is to examine some key developments in Israel's history since it gained its independence in 1948. While the main focus will be on Zionism and the state of Israel, considerable attention will be paid to the plight of the Palestinians and the development of Palestinian nationalism over the past century.

41500. Nationalism in the Age of Globalization. Nationalism has been the most powerful political ideology in the world for the past two centuries. This course examines its future in the age of globalization, focusing in particular on the widespread belief that it is a outmoded ideology. Specific topics covered in the course include: the causes of nationalism, its effects on international stability, nationalism and empires, globalization and the future of the state, globalization and national identities, the clash of civilizations, American nationalism, and the clash between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism.

41501. Foundations of Realism.

41600. Liberalism and American Foreign Policy.

49500. American Grand Strategy. This course examines the evolution of American grand strategy since 1900, when the United States first emerged on the world stage as a great power. The focus is on assessing how its leaders have thought over time about which areas of the world are worth fighting and dying for, when it is necessary to fight in those strategically important areas, and what kinds of military forces are needed for deterrence and war-fighting in those regions.

50900. Comparative Case Study Method. This course will examine the core epistemological and methodological issues surrounding the case study method.

53000. Seminar on Great Power Politics. The specific aim of this course is to introduce students to some of the key policy issues involving the great powers that dominate the post-Cold War world. Three topics will receive special emphasis: European security, Asian security, and the role of the United States in the larger world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is expected that all students in the class will be well-versed in international relations theory, and will bring their theoretical insights to bear on the relevant policy issues. The broad goal is to encourage students to appreciate that international relations theory and important policy issues are inextricably linked to each other.

53300. Seminar on Nuclear Weapons and International Politics. The aim of this course is to examine how nuclear weapons have affected the conduct of international relations. Special attention will be paid to subjects like: 1) nuclear deterrence, 2) the causes of nuclear proliferation, 3) the consequences of nuclear proliferation, 4) strategies for employing nuclear weapons, 4) the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War, 5) how nuclear weapons will affect relations among the great powers in the emerging multipolar world, and 6) whether there has been a "nuclear revolution."

Sankar Muthu

25110. Empire and International Justice. (=LLSO 25110) How did European thinkers from 1492 onward understand and evaluate the extraordinary developments by which some European countries came to rule over much of the non-European world? This seminar examines theories of international justice and global relations from the early sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Philosophers, theologians, and political actors in this period responded to the key issues of global politics in the modern age, including the seizure of non-European lands; the establishment of slavery and the slave trade; the religious and cultural conversion of colonized peoples; the emerging institutions and practices of global commerce; and the impact of these developments upon both European and non-European societies. Indeed, many dilemmas that confront citizens and states today about humanitarian intervention, national sovereignty, conquest and occupation, empire, and human rights in a global context have an intriguing and complex intellectual history. The readings are primary texts by influential thinkers from the period of the initial Spanish conquests of the Americas through the mid-nineteenth century, including Montesquieu, Diderot, Burke, Bentham, Adam Smith, Cugoano, Kant, Herder, Constant, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx.

25610/35610. Authority, Obligation, and Dissent. What is the basis of political authority? What, if anything, makes it legitimate? Under what conditions are we obliged to follow the laws and orders of government authorities? Under what conditions can we legitimately disobey such laws or orders, or even engage in violent rebellion? How have some of the most influential political thinkers answered such questions historically and which of their theories are most helpful for illuminating these issues for us today? Readings include classic writings by Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Paine, Kant, Thoreau, Gandhi, Fanon, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

35901. Enlightenment Political Thought. An intensive examination and comparative analysis of the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. We will examine writings about a broad range of topics, including human nature, freedom, social relations, property, government, justice, religion, history and progress, equality and inequality, patriotism, cosmopolitanism, and international relations.

42801. Empire and International Justice. Many modern European political thinkers sought to shape and were deeply influenced by political controversies over Europe's relations with the rest of the world. What understandings of freedom, accounts of human nature, and theories of human diversity were more likely to generate support for-or attacks upon-slavery, conquest, trading companies, and empire? What were the range of theoretical arguments about universal morality; the meaning, worth, and location of "civilization"; and the value of cultural diversity that were elaborated by thinkers who sought to emancipate and defend-or to enslave and subject-those who were deemed foreign? We will also examine the legacies of such writings for contemporary thinking about universal moral and political principles, cultural pluralism, and international justice.

42910. Kant's Political Thought. An intensive examination of Immanuel Kant's political thought. We will examine his writings about a broad range of topics, including human nature, freedom, social relations, property, government, justice, religion, history and progress, revolution, equality and inequality, and cosmopolitanism.

Monika Nalepa

28105. Transitional Justice. This class will expose students to readings and research in a new area of social science: Transitional Justice. Transitional justice (TJ) refers to how new democracies deal with members and collaborators of former authoritarian regimes. In an era of democratic backsliding, getting TJ right cannot be overstated. When fragile new democracies are at risk of reverting back to dictatorship, the question arises: Can mechanisms set up by new democracies to deal with former authoritarian elites prevent such backsliding from happening? Or is backsliding occurring despite extensive TJ provisions? The class will introduce students a newly released dataset on Global Transitional Justice. Students will be encouraged and trained to conduct statistical analysis of their own to test hypotheses about the causes and effects of various transitional justice mechanisms.

28901. Introduction to Comparative Politics. What factors prolong the lives of dictatorships? When do autocrats choose to relinquish power? Why does democratization sometimes produce violence and/or social inequality? What are the long-term consequences of colonial rule for democratic development? This course will use pairwise comparisons of countries from four different world regions and apply the comparative method to address some of the most enduring puzzles and paradoxes of democratization. Rather than covering an exhaustive set of topics that make up the entire field of comparative politics, we will focus on some of the most pressing challenges to democratic development today. In addition to course readings, we will also include the screening of several films that underscore and dramatize the key themes discussed in the class.

30900. Applied Game Theory. This course will introduce students to the systematic study of social, political and economic interactions, where the optimal course of one person's action, depends on the options and preferences of other people involved in the interaction. Students will learn how to model strategic situations in the language of mathematics, and how to make equilibrium predictions. Every other week, we will cover a different equilibrium from the set of four basic equilibrium concepts: Nash, Subgame Perfect Nash, Bayesian Nash and Perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium. In the week following the theoretical introduction of an equilibrium concept, we will study a political application of that equilibrium.

30901. Game Theory I. This is a course for graduate students in Political Science. It introduces students to games of complete information through solving problem sets. We will cover the concepts of equilibrium in dominant strategies, weak dominance, iterated elimination of weakly dominated strategies, Nash equilibrium, subgame perfection, backward induction, and imperfect information. The course will be centered around several applications of game theory to politics: electoral competition, agenda control, lobbying, voting in legislatures and coalition games. This class serves as a prerequisite for Game Theory II.

35801. Formal Models in Comparative Politics. In this course we will discuss 10 newly published or still in press papers in Comparative Politics that employ formal modeling. We will study models of the state and its security agencies (by Dragu and Tyson), models of state-building (by Robinson and Lessing), models of authoritarianism and regime change (Svolik, Little, and Miller) and models of corruption and clientelism (by Stokes, Nichter, and Rueda). Because of its topical breadth, this course may therefore be also taken as a field survey in comparative politics.

47201. Institutions of Democratic Transitions. This class will focus on the defining ‘moments’ of democratic transitions. We will talk about negotiated transitions to democracy that come in the form of bargains struck between outgoing autocrats and the pro-democratic opposition. We will discuss the processes of setting up the rules of “the new game in town,” i.e., drafting constitutions, creating electoral laws, designing legislatures, and specifying its relations with the executive and judiciary. We will discuss legal reform, including procedures established for dealing with the former autocrats. We will also consider economic transitions to a market system.

48000. Field Seminar in Comparative Politics. This seminar broadly surveys the study of comparative politics in contemporary political science.

Eric Oliver

25201/35200. Politics, Evolutionary Psychology, and Social Neuroscience. This course utilizes recent advances in evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience to investigate claims by political theorists (both classical and contemporary) about human nature and political organization. Topics include the inter-relationship between affective and cognitive information processes, the physiology of morality and ideology, the meaning of self-governance, inter-group dynamics, political cognition, and the possibility for making essential claims about human nature, particularly as they relate to political organization.

28600. Political Psychology. Using abstract theories and empirical studies, we investigate the sources of human thinking and behavior as they relate to political action, conflict, and organization. Topics include the inevitability of conflict, the dynamics of obedience and authority, the function and organization of political attitudes, the variety in styles of political thinking, the sources of stereotypes and intolerance, the role of emotions in political life, and non-Western understandings of human consciousness and political action.

28610. Psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and the Emotional Life. Using abstract theories and empirical studies, we investigate the sources of human thinking and behavior as they relate to political action, conflict, and organization. Topics include the inevitability of conflict, the dynamics of obedience and authority, the function and organization of political attitudes, the variety in styles of political thinking, the sources of stereotypes and intolerance, the role of emotions in political life, and non-Western understandings of human consciousness and political action.

28615. Politics and Human Nature. Class limited to 15 and 3rd and 4th years only. This course explores commonalities among psychoanalytic theory, Buddhism, and studies of emotions and brain physiology, particularly as they relate to questions of the self and political life. In addition to exploring each of these theories, we investigate particular questions such as the inevitability of conflict, the dynamics of obedience and authority, the emotional power of ideology, and non-Western understandings of human consciousness.

32200. Urban Politics/Voting Behavior. This course examines two topics normally not studied in conjunction within American politics: urban politics and voting behavior. The goal of this course is to familiarize students with the literatures in these two areas and ultimately to prompt students to develop their own theories of what drives voting choices in local elections. The first half of the course will focus on studies of urban politics, examining topics such as what has driven the development of metropolitan areas, who has power in local affairs, how land, capital, and labor drive political decisions, and the impact of race, ethnicity, and gender in local politics. The second half of the class examines American voting behavior and what factors influence the choices voters make. Topics will include what influences voter turnout and participation, the origins of party identification, and the impact of issues, race and ideology on vote choice. In the final part of the course, students will integrate these two areas of inquiry and think about what drives voting in local elections and what role local elections have in the functioning of democracy within metropolitan areas.

35200. Political Theory and Social Neuroscience. This course utilizes recent advances in cognitive neuroscience to investigate claims by political theorists (both classical and contemporary) about human nature and political organization. Topics include the inter-relationship between affective and cognitive information processes, the physiology of morality, the meaning of self-governance, and the possibility for making essential claims about human nature, particularly as they relate to processes of political organization. Readings will draw from both the political science cannon as well as recent journals and books in neuroscience.

35395. American Political Culture. What are the values and beliefs that organize American politics? In this seminar, we’ll answer this question looking at both historical works of American political and contemporary studies of mass attitudes. Particular attention will be paid to American “exceptionalism,” the role of class, race, and religion, and the impact of media.

35601. The Evolution of Ideology and Partisanship. The seminar examines the evolution of partisanship and ideology in America over the past sixty years. We will examine the factors that shape ideological movements, how ideology has altered the nature of political parties, and what factors party attachment in an era of increasing polarization. Students will conduct original research projects based on readings and class discussion.

36301. Ideology and Partisanship in Contemporary American Politics. The seminar examines the evolution of partisanship and ideology in America over the past sixty years. We will examine the factors that shape ideological movements, how ideology has altered the nature of political parties, and what factors party attachment in an era of increasing polarization. Students will conduct original research projects based on readings and class discussion.

37200. Race, Politics, and Segregation. This seminar will focus on a particular area of politics in the metropolis: the interrelationship between racial attitudes and racial segregation. Many of the biggest political challenges within metropolitan areas continue to revolve around questions of racism and racial segregation. In this seminar we will explore the bases of racial resentment, patterns and sources of racial segregation, the effects of segregation and racial hostility (and vice-versa), and what policy challenges they present. In addition to the readings, students will be expected to produce a research report on a particular aspect of this problem. Topics can include: racial attitudes among understudied groups (such as Latinos and Asian Americans), new trends in racial segregation (from 2000 Census data), consequences of racial segregation for particular groups in areas such as health, education, or employment. These will be developed in consultation with me. In addition to the written report, students will write a 3-4 page analysis of the week's readings to be shared for the group every third week.

43501. Strategies and Techniques of Empirical Research. This course aims to help advanced political science graduate students improve how they communicate their empirical research findings. We will focus on techniques of effective writing, how to present quantitative information, and how to identify compelling narratives that link research findings together.

43509. Conceptualizing and Measuring Ideology. Prior coursework in quantitative methods is strongly recommended. The seminar examines how political scientists conceptualize and measure political ideology in both mass publics and political elites. The first half of the seminar will investigate the various meanings of ideology, including central questions of what ideology is, where it comes from, and how it relates to public opinion and political behavior. The second half will explore the ways social scientists have tried to measure ideology and its causes and consequences, with particular focus on datasets like the American National Election Studies, the European Social Survey, and the D-NOMINATE scores of congress members. In addition to active class participation, students will be responsible for creating their own research proposal for either a qualitative, experimental, or quantitative study of ideology.

49700. Obesity, Politics and Society. This course examines the political and cultural consequences of America's obesity epidemic. Topics to be examined include: the factors behind the growth of obesity, the changing food and exercise culture in the United States, the intersection of obesity with concerns of race, class, and gender, issues of size discrimination, and various policy options.

John Padgett

275003/37500. Organizational Decision Making. This course is an examination of the process of decision making in modern complex organizations such as universities, schools, hospitals, business firms, and public bureaucracies. The course also considers the impact of information, power, resources, organizational structure, and the environment, as well as alternative models of choice and other implications.

46400. State and Market Formation. This course will focus on the emergence of alternative forms of organization control (e.g., centralized bureaucracy, multiple hierarchies, elite networks, and clientage) in different social structural contexts (e.g., the interaction of kinship, class, nation states, markets and heterodox mobilization). Themes will be illustrated in numerous cross-cultural contexts.

46410. Co-evolution of States and Markets. This course will focus on the emergence of alternative forms of organization control (e.g., centralized bureaucracy, multiple hierarchies, elite networks, and clientage) in different social structural contexts (e.g., the interaction of kinship, class, nation states, markets and heterodox mobilization). Themes will be illustrated in numerous cross-cultural contexts.

46411. The Emergence of Organizations and Markets. This course will focus on the emergence of alternative forms of organization control (e.g., centralized bureaucracy, multiple hierarchies, elite networks, and clientage) in different social structural contexts (e.g., the interaction of kinship, class, nation states, markets and heterodox mobilization). Themes will be illustrated in numerous cross-cultural contexts.

47300. Complexity.

57200. Social Networks. This seminar explores the sociological utility of the network" as a unit of analysis. How do the patterns of social ties in which individuals are embedded differentially affect their ability to cope with crises, their decisions to move or change jobs, their eagerness to adopt new attitudes and behaviors? The seminar group will consider (a) how the network differs from other units of analysis, (b) structural properties of networks, consequences of flows (or content) in network ties, and (d) dynamics of those ties.

Robert Pape

28900/39900. Strategy. This course is about American national security policy in the post-Cold War world, especially the principal issues of military strategy that are likely to face the United States in the next decade. The course is structured in five parts. The first component examines the key changes in strategic environment since 1990. The second looks at the effects of multipolarity on American grand strategy and basic national goals. The third block focuses on nuclear strategy. The fourth section is about conventional strategy. The last block discusses the future of war and peace in the Pacific Rim.

40600. Seminar on International Relations Theory. The end of the Cold War ushered in a new set of debates about how to study international politics. This course is an introduction to some of those important theoretical approaches and is organized around debate among realism, liberalism, and constructivism and their variants. Seminar discussion will identify and criticize the central arguments advanced by different scholars in order to assess the relative merits of different theoretical perspectives.

PLSC 40604. Militant Power Politics. In what way does ISIS calculate its options differently than great powers or states in general? Over the past twenty years, the study of militant power politics has exploded both empirically, but especially theoretically. Today, there are a variety of theories of the causes, conduct and consequences of violence by militant non-state actors that rest on fundamentally different assumptions about the coherence of militant groups, the degree of rationality in their decision-making, and and the nature of their dynamics in competition with rival states. The most important are ideological, religious, ethnic, and strategic theories which also drive the principle policy choices about how to respond to militant power politics. Seminar will cover the main theories of militant power politics, encouraging students to carry out policy relevant research in this area.

40610. Seminar on International Security Affairs. This course introduces students to a selection of the principal literature that forms the foundation of contemporary international security affairs. It is organized around four general subject areas: The international system and war, crises and war, the conduct of war, and the outcome of war. Each week, our purpose will be to critically assess the strengths and limits of the central arguments of the readings, on their own terms. Students preparing masters and PhD theses and for PhD preliminary exams will find this approach particularly useful. Specific weeks will include: Preventive War, Reputation and Deterrence, Targeting Civilians, Violence in Civil Wars, Relative Decline and War, and Why Armies Fight, among others.

41200. Terrorism. This course examines the causes, conduct, and consequences of terrorism, with special emphasis on suicide terrorism. The course takes a building-block approach. It begins with competing theories about the causes of terrorism, then examines prominent cases, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al Qaeda, and ends with a series of student research days focusing on important topics, such as those covered in the course as well as on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the IRA, the Assassins, and other cases.

42700. Politics of Unipolarity.

50900. Comparative Case Study Method. This course will examine the core epistemological and methodological issues surrounding the case study method.

Jennifer Pitts

21810/39000. Global Justice. (=HMRT 39000) Undergraduates by consent. What duties do states and societies have beyond their borders? Are obligations of justice global in scope? What is the moral standing of states? This course will examine theories of global distributive and political justice, controversies over cosmopolitan democracy, and theories of human rights, in light of global social structures and international inequalities. We will consider contemporary arguments in political philosophy, sometimes in conversation with texts in the history of political thought. Authors will include Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Thomas Pogge, Amartya Sen, Thomas Nagel, Iris Marion Young.

23010/33010. Liberalism and Empire. The evolution of liberal thought coincided and intersected with the rise of European empires, and those empires have been shaped by liberal preoccupations, including ideas of tutelage in self-government, exporting the rule of law, and the normativity of European modernity. Some of the questions this course will address include: how was liberalism, an apparently universalistic and egalitarian theory, used to legitimate conquest and imperial domination? Is liberalism inherently imperialist? Are certain liberal ideas and doctrines (progress, development, liberty) particularly compatible with empire? What does, or what might, a critique of liberal imperialism look like? Readings will include historical works by authors such as Locke, Mill, Tocqueville, and Hobson, as well as contemporary works of political theory and the history of political thought (by authors such as James Tully, Michael Ignatieff, David Kennedy, and Uday Mehta).

27101/47101. Liberalism Confronts Democracy: Tocqueville and Mill. This course examines liberalism's wary embrace of democracy through an examination of the political thought of Tocqueville and J.S. Mill and selected contemporaries. We will examine their arguments for, and worries about, democratic politics, and their reactions to American events as well as critical moments such as the French revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 and the British Reform Acts. We will explore the ways in which debates over expanding political participation intersected with themes such as the nation, representation, gender, moral character, class, slavery, empire, and international politics.

28109/38109. Burke in an Age of Empire and Revolution.

33200. History of International Thought. (HMRT 33200) The field of International Relations long traced its history through traditions and conceptions (realism, liberalism, anarchy, international society) understood to be derived from a series of founding figures and moments--Grotius, Hobbes, Kant, the 1648 Westphalia treaties, and others. At the same time, the history of international thought was until recently relatively neglected by political theorists and intellectual historians. This course examines some of the most influential "originary" figures and moments for theorists of international relations, alongside recent historical work, in order to reconsider possibilities for international theory and the history of international thought.

42013. Adam Smith's Social and Political Thought. Adam Smith's thought, and his immense influence, ranged across a remarkable array of subjects: from rhetoric and the art of writing, through the early history of language and thought, through moral philosophy and the history of law, to the political economy of the modern commercial state and the politics of global empires. This seminar reads Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations in light of his broader intellectual concerns in less well-known works, and in the philosophical and political context of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially in relation to the work of David Hume. We will pay particular attention to such topics as Smith's ambivalent account of progress, his narrative of global history, his critique of European commercial society and imperial expansion, and his polemical and didactic purposes. We will also read selectively from the rich body of new scholarly literature on Smith.

42420. Approaches to the History of Political Thought. This course will examine some of the most influential recent statements of method in the history of political thought, alongside work by the same authors that may (or may not) put those methods or approaches into practice. We will read works by Quentin Skinner, Reinhart Koselleck, J.GA. Pocock, Leo Strauss, Sheldon Wolin, Michael Oakeshott, Michel Foucault, and David Scott among others, with some emphasis on writings about Hobbes and questions of sovereignty and the state.

Paul Poast

27001. The Problem of World Government. Why is there no single world government? From Tennyson to Einstein, thinkers have asserted that solving the world's ills could be accomplished only through the creation of a single, global government. Is this feasible? What forces, technological and political, have prevented its creation? Do institutions of global governance, such as the United Nations Security Council, serve as a stepping stone towards or a substitute for world government? The course mixes readings in philosophy, theory, and history to consider such questions. Students will grapple with two fundamental ideas in international relations – sovereignty and anarchy – and use these ideas to gauge the practicality of achieving a global monopoly on the use of violence, the creation of a global single currency, and the viability of a global constitution.

47701. Political Economy of International Security. How do money and markets influence states' security policies? This course uses classic and current work in the field to directly explore the role of economics in creating state military power. Topics include the instruments of war finance, the economic incentives to intervene in conflict, the ability of economic interdependence to prevent conflict, how alliance policies influence the arming and trading policies of states, and labor mobility as a cause of border instability. A central goal of the course is to generate ideas for your own research, including papers and dissertation topics.

48301. Inference in Diplomatic History and International Relations. This is the first course in the two course sequence "Evidence and Analysis in International Relations Research." The course will address a host of questions fundamental to international relations research, particularly when that research entails writing historical case studies. These questions include: What does it mean to identify a causal relationship? What is the relationship between diplomatic history and IR? What controversies have arisen over the use of archival evidence, diplomatic histories, and memoirs in international relations scholarship? What are the techniques for acquiring and using such source materials? How should one interpret information found in such source materials? How have scholars used diplomatic histories to create large-n data? Students who complete this course will be prepared to smoothly transition into the sequence's second course, "Quantitative Security."

48401. Quantitative Security. Since Quincy Wright's A Study of War, scholars of war and security have collected and analyzed data. This course guides students through an intellectual history of the quantitative study of war. The course begins with Wright, moves to the founding of the Correlates of War project in the late 1960s, and then explores the proliferation of quantitative conflict studies in the 1990s and 2000s. The course ends by considering the recent focus on experimental and quasi-experimental analysis. Throughout the course, students will be introduced to the empirical methods used to study conflict and the data issues facing quantitative conflict scholars. For students with limited training in quantitative methods, this course will serve as a useful introduction to such methods. For students with extensive experience with quantitative methods, this course will deepen their understanding of when and how to apply these methods.

Patricia Posey

26205. American Political Economy and Race. This course will explore how individual or group identity and social location is understood in economics. Specifically, we will use a political economy framework, which emerges from the premise that economic life has material, cultural, and political dimensions and that an individual’s (or group’s) identity or social location–e.g., race, gender, and class–may constrain or empower agents in their participation in economic and political life. The readings will draw from diverse disciplines including political science, economics, and sociology and will focus primarily on the intersection of race and class.

Gerald Rosenberg

22500. Law and Society. (=FNDL 28100, LLSO 28100) This course examines the myriad relationships between courts, laws, and lawyers in the United States. Issues covered range from legal consciousness to the role of rights to access to courts to implementation of decisions to professionalism.

22510. Law and Society. (=LLSO 28100) PQ: PLSC 28800 or equivalent. This course examines the myriad relationships between courts, laws, and lawyers in the United States. Issues covered range from legal consciousness to the role of rights to access to courts to implementation of decisions to professionalism.

22515. The Political Nature of the American Judicial System. PQ: PLSC 28800 or equivalent. This course aims to introduce students to the political nature of the American legal system. In examining foundational parts of the political science literature on courts conceived of as political institutions, the seminar will focus on the relationship between the courts and other political institutions. The sorts of questions to be asked include: Are there interests that courts are particularly prone to support? What effect does congressional or executive action have on court decisions? What impact do court decisions have? While the answers will not always be clear, students should complete the seminar with an awareness of and sensitivity to the political nature of the American legal system.

28800/48800. Introduction to Constitutional Law (=LLSO 23900). This course is an introduction to the constitutional doctrines and political role of the U.S. Supreme Court, focusing on its evolving constitutional priorities and its response to basic governmental and political problems, including maintenance of the federal system, promotion of economic welfare, and protection of individual and minority rights.

29200. Civil Rights/Civil Liberties. (=LLSO 24000) PQ: PLSC 28800 or equivalent and consent of instructor. This course examines selected civil rights and civil liberties decisions of U.S. courts with particular emphasis on the broader political context. Areas covered include speech, race, and gender.

37000. U.S. Courts as Political Institutions. (=LAWS 51300) An examination of the ways in which United States courts affect public policy. Questions include: How do the procedures, structures, and organization of the courts affect judicial outcomes? Are there interests that courts are particularly prone to support? What effect does congressional or executive impact, including judicial selection, have on court decisions? What are the difficulties with implementation of judicial decisions?

38500. Recent Literature on the Courts. PQ: PLSC 37000. This course examines new and recent literature in public law broadly defined. It aims to bring participants in touch with the newest and most exciting work in the public law field and to identify the most promising questions for future research. Topics covered range from recent jurisprudential work (Bork, Dworkin and Ackerman) to agenda-setting (Perry, Provine) to public opinion (Marshall) to judicial policy (Rabkin, Morgan).

43000. Law and Social Science.

50101. Constitutional Law I: Governmental Structure. (=LAWS 40101) This course analyzes the structure of American government, as defined through the text of the Constitution and its interpretation. The major subjects covered are the allocation of powers among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches; the function of judicial review; and the role of the states and the federal government in the federal structure. The student's grade is based on class participation and a take-home final examination.

Paul Staniland

26005/36005. International Relations of South Asia. South Asia is one of the most complex, dynamic, and dangerous foreign policy environments in the world, encompassing decades of warfare in Afghanistan, the rise of India as a major power, instability in and around a nuclear-armed Pakistan, and Myanmar's tenuous opening to the world. This course will systematically explore the foreign policies of the region's states, extra-regional involvement and intervention by China, the United States, and Russia/Soviet Union, and the domestic politics and internal conflicts that have shaped international politics. It will combine international relations theory, detailed research on individual countries, and thematic topics (such as alliances, nuclear weapons, the domestic politics of security policy, international implications of insurgencies and coups, economic globalization, and the causes and prevention of interstate war), using a blend of lecture and discussion. Though the primary focus will be on India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, the course will also cover Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar.

26800. Insurgency, Terrorism, and Civil War. This course provides an introduction to asymmetric and irregular warfare. From Colombia to Afghanistan, non-state armed organizations are crucially important actors. We will study how they organize themselves, extract resources, deploy violence, attract recruits, and both fight and negotiate with states. We will also examine government counterinsurgency and counterterrorism policies, peace-building after conflict, and international involvement in internal wars. Case materials will be drawn from a variety of conflicts and cover a number of distinct topics. This course has a heavy reading load, and both attendance and substantial participation in weekly discussion sections are required.

36100. Civil War. Civil war is the dominant form of political violence in the contemporary world. This graduate seminar will introduce students to cutting edge scholarly work and to the task of carrying out research on internal conflict. We will study the origins, dynamics, and termination of civil wars, as well as international interventions, post-conflict legacies, and policy responses to war. A variety of research approaches will be explored, including qualitative, quantitative, and interpretive methods, micro- and macro-level levels of analysis, and sub- and cross-national comparative designs. Our emphasis throughout will be on designing rigorous research that persuasively addresses important questions.

41201. Militaries in Politics. This seminar studies how militaries shape political life. Though often ignored in favor of political parties, economic inequality and class coalitions, and legislatures, militaries are pivotal political actors in much of the world. Their ability to engage in large-scale organized violence makes them powerful allies and dangerous foes for civilian elites and mass publics. This course studies the internal and external politics of militaries. We will examine a variety of topics, including coups and withdrawals, counterinsurgency and countersubversion, foreign policy, organizational politics and socialization, military rule, the coercive politics of state formation, and the remarkable variety of civil-military relationships (from collusion to conflict). The focus will be on the developing world but we will also cover classic cases of military politics in Europe and the United States. We will also compare militaries to other forms of armed organization, particularly police, militias, paramilitaries, mercenaries, and insurgents. This course draws on numerous disciplines, sub-fields, and methods, and requires a major research paper.

44701. Comparative Approaches to Civil War. This course blends theoretical, empirical, and conceptual work on civil conflict with detailed studies of cases. It will assess research on civil war "onset," mobilization, violence, civilian agency, and resolution, while linking these broader literatures to conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia. The course will emphasize theoretical innovations grounded in detailed empirical knowledge, including primary texts, ethnographies, films, and other forms of cultural production.

50901. Qualitative Methods. This course examines small-N research designs and methods for engaging in qualitative research. We will discuss concept formation, case selection, comparative case studies, process-tracing, combinations with other methods, and the virtues and limitations of different approaches to theory development and causal inference. We will then consider some of the tools that are often associated with qualitative research, including ethnography, interviews, archival work, and historiography. Because other courses in the department and university cover some of these methods in greater depth, this class will particularly emphasize their relationship to research design.

51700. Violence and State Formation. This class examines state control over coercion and the relationship between states and non-state violent actors. The goal is a better understanding of how states manage, manipulate, and monopolize violence, whether through the military, sponsorship of militants at home and abroad, or collusive bargains with local strongmen. An overarching emphasis will be on the intersection of international security pressures with domestic threats and political interests. The unintended consequences and long-term effects of different structures of violence management are also considered. We will draw on a number of disciplines and sources of evidence. The course requires a major research paper and instructor's consent for enrollment.

Susan Stokes

28405. Democratic Erosion. Until recently, democracies died dramatic deaths. Tanks rolled out, politicians were arrested, a free press was suddenly closed. In recent years, the coup d’état is being replaced by slower and less easily identified challenges to democratic governance. The attacks often arise from within, as elected leaders chip away at democratic institutions and norms. What are the causes of the erosion of democracy? What are the early warning signs, and can it be reversed? This course, which is being taught in tandem among 35 universities across the U.S. and several abroad, delves deeply into these themes. It offers students opportunities to write policy briefings and to blog about challenges to democracy in the world today.

Nathan Tarcov

20800/32100. Machiavelli's Discourses. (=FNDL 29300) A reading of Machiavelli's Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. We will consider such themes as princes, nobles, and peoples; republics and principalities; religion and morality; war and imperialism; founding and reform; virtue, corruption, and fortune.

20800. Machiavelli's The Prince. (=FNDL 29301) A reading of The Prince supplemented by relevant portions of Machiavelli's Discourses and Florentine Histories. Themes include princes, peoples, and elites; morality and religion; force and persuasion; war and politics; law and liberty; virtue and fortune; ancient history and modern experience; and theory and practice.

20800/32110. Machiavelli's The Prince and Discourses. (=FNDL 29301) This course is a reading and discussion of The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, supplemented by portions of Livy's History of Rome. Themes include the roles of princes, peoples, and elites; the merits of republics and principalities; the political roles of pagan and Christian religion and morality; war and empire; founding and reform; virtue, corruption, and fortune; the relevance of ancient history to modern experience; reading and writing; and theory and practice.

20901. Shakespeare on Tyranny. (=FNDL 24500, SCTH 34800) PQ: Enrollment limited. Open to undergraduates with consent of instructor. An exploration of Shakespeare's portrayals of tyrants and tyrannies in such plays as Macbeth and Richard III.

21900. Cyrus and Socrates. (=FNDL 29302) This course investigates the two poles of Xenophon's thought, politics, and philosophy, represented by Cyrus the Great and Socrates. We read Xenophon's Education of Cyrus, Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, and Symposium.

22615. The Political Thought of Tacitus. (=FNDL 23401) Enrollment limited to 15. An exploration of the political thought of Tacitus through a reading of his Agricola, germania, Dialogue on Oratory, and excerpts from the Annals and the History.

22715. Machiavelli on War. (=FNDL 29300) An exploration of Machiavelli's thought on war through a reading of The Art of War and excerpts from The Prince and Discourses on Livy.

23800/48300. Plato's Laws. (=FNDL 23400, LLSO 28500, SCTH 30300) PQ: Enrollment limited. Open to undergraduates with consent of instructor. An introductory reading of Plato's Laws with attention to such themes as the following: war and peace; courage and moderation; rule of law; music, poetry, drinking, and education; sex, marriage, and gender; property and class structure; crime and punishment; religion and theology; and philosophy.

23900/53900. Thucydides. (=FNDL 29315, LLSO 27402, SCTH 31780) A reading of Thucydides' history, one of the classic guides to politics within and among political communities. Themes may include: progress and decline; justice, necessity, and expediency; strengths and weaknesses of democracies and oligarchies in domestic and foreign policy; stability, revolution, and civil war; strategy, statesmanship, and prudence; causes and effects of war and peace; imperialism, isolationism, and alliances; and piety, chance, and the limits of rationality. The first parts of Xenophon's Hellenica on the conclusion of the War will also be read.

24400/54400. Machiavelli and Clausewitz on War. (=FNDL 29311, LLSO 28511, SCTH 31790) A reading and comparison of the two greatest modern thinkers about war.

31801. Shakespeare on Tyranny. (=FNDL 24500, SCTH 34800) PQ: Enrollment limited. Open to undergraduates with consent of instructor. An exploration of Shakespeare's portrayals of tyrants and tyrannies in such plays as Macbeth and Richard III.

31900. Cyrus and Socrates. (=FNDL 29302) This course investigates the two poles of Xenophon's thought, politics, and philosophy, represented by Cyrus the Great and Socrates. We read Xenophon's Education of Cyrus, Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, and Symposium.

32100. Machiavelli's Florentine Histories. (=SCTH 31700) PQ: Enrollment limited. Open to undergraduates with consent of instructor. An introductory reading of Machiavelli's Florentine Histories with attention to such themes as the following: rhetoric; faction; war and foreign policy; tyranny and liberty; morality and religion, leaders and peoples; and the character and purpose of historical writing. Some familiarity with The Prince and the Discourses on Livy would be helpful.

32100. Machiavelli's The Prince. (=FNDL 29301) A reading of The Prince supplemented by relevant portions of Machiavelli's Discourses and Florentine Histories. Themes include princes, peoples, and elites; morality and religion; force and persuasion; war and politics; law and liberty; virtue and fortune; ancient history and modern experience; and theory and practice.

32115. Machiavelli and the Arthashastra. (=FNDL 29313) A comparative reading of Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses on Livy and Kautilya's Arthashastra.

32700. Machiavelli on War. (=FNDL 29300) An exploration of Machiavelli's thought on war through a reading of The Art of War and excerpts from The Prince and Discourses on Livy.

33015. Education for Liberty: Locke and Rousseau. (=FNDL 29303) PQ: Consent of instructor. A reading of Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Rousseau' s Emile considered in relation to their political thought. Familiarity with the political thought of at least two of the authors is presumed.

33600. Plutarch's Lives. (=FNDL 29001, SCTH 41810). A reading of selections from Plutarch's Parallel Lives (possibly supplemented by essays from the Moralia) with attention to individual character, moral virtues and vices, the scope and limits of statesmanship, and the differences between Greece and Rome.

36710. Leo Strauss. An introduction to the thought of Leo Strauss through a reading of a selection of his writings and some recent secondary literature.

36720. Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem. Reading and discussion of some of Strauss's works dealing with what he called the theologico-political problem and some recent secondary work.

41100. Tyranny: Ancient and Modern. (=SCTH 31600) An examination of some classical understandings of tyranny and consideration of their relevance to modern tyrants. Reading will include relevant works by Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Leo Strauss, and Alexandre Kojve, and secondary literature about modern tyrants.

43800. Plato's Laws (=FNDL 23400, LLSO 28500, SCTH 30300). PQ: Enrollment limited. Open to undergraduates with consent of instructor. An introductory reading of Plato's Laws with attention to such themes as the following: war and peace; courage and moderation; rule of law; music, poetry, drinking, and education; sex, marriage, and gender; property and class structure; crime and punishment; religion and theology; and philosophy.

43820. Plato's Republic. Reading and discussion of The Republic and some secondary work with attention to justice in the city and the soul, war and warriors, education, theology, poetry, gender, eros, and actually existing cities.

47200. Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. A reading of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Julius Caesar along with treatments of those two figures by such ancient authors as Livy, Plutarch, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and by Machiavelli.

Rochelle Terman

31101. Computational Tools for Social Science. The purpose of this course is to provide graduate students with the critical technical skills necessary to conduct research in quantitative / computational social science. This course is not an introduction to statistics, computer science, or specialized social science methods. Rather, the focus will be on practical skills necessary to be successful in further methods work. The first portion of the class introduces students to basic computer literacy, terminologies, and programming languages, covering Bash, R, 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 webscraping, data collection through APIs, automated text analysis, etc. We will assume no prior experience with programming or computer science.

43701. Constructivism. This seminar traces the development of the constructivist program in international relations in order to better understand its elements, assumptions, and methods, and apply those to current issues. We start by uncovering the roots of constructivism in sociology and philosophy and examine structuation theory, the English School, world systems theory, regime theory, and sociological institutionalism. The second part of this course focuses on the constructivist agenda in international relations, its boundaries and its critics. In the last part of the course we examine current research in international relations that draws on constructivist methods, including work on the role of norms, epistemic communities, transnational civil society, and the origins of the state.

Lisa Wedeen

24400/34400. Authoritarianism and Political Change in the Middle East. Recent scholarship on domestic politics in the Middle East centers on "democratization," or on "transitions" to democracy away from authoritarian rule. This seminar investigates the causes and persistence of authoritarian forms of rule in the Middle East while also interrogating our theoretical understandings of "democratization" and democracy. Popular conceptions of Middle Eastern politics suggest that authoritarian rule derives from deep, sedimented essences inhering in Arabs or Muslims. The literature we will explore suggests that the roots of authoritarian political practices reside not in a primordial Arab culture, but instead in a complex dynamic involving the history of state formation, nation-building, and economic development. Some of the themes we will examine are: the relationship between authoritarianism and colonial rule, the importance of class coalitions in determining the levels of state violence, the role of institutions of repression in sustaining violence, the everyday practices of authoritarian rule, and the nature and purposes of ideology. We will also discuss recent changes in the Middle East and evaluate the ways in which they might be interpreted as moves towards "democracy." The course will ask: what do scholars mean by democracy? In what ways do elections, independent judicial courts, and popular forms of expression indicate fundamental changes in the nature of rule in the Middle East?

26300/39300. Comparative Politics of the Middle East and North Africa. This course examines major theoretical concerns in comparative politics using cases from the Middle East. It investigates the relationships between political and economic change in the processes of state-building, economic development, and national integration. The course begins by comparing the experience of early and late developing countries, which will provide students with a broad historical overview of market formation and state-building in Europe and will cover the legacies of the Ottoman empire, European colonialism, and the Mandate period in the Middle East. The course then explores topics such as: the failure of constitutional regimes and the role of the military, class formation and inequality, the conflict between Pan-Arabism and state-centered nationalisms, the role of political parties, revolutionary and Islamicist movements, labor migration and remittances, and political and economic liberalization in the 1990s.

26400. Islamic Politics. This senior seminar examines the specific historical processes and particular power relations that have given rise to the recent phenomenon of radical religious expression in the Middle East. We investigate claims that the contraction of welfare states, the "blowback" from U.S. imperial policies, the corruption and brutality of prevailing regimes, and the demise of leftist movements have each, or in combination, contributed to the rise of diverse Islamicist movements. We also explore explicitly the variation among movements and debates - the ways in which diverse, vibrant communities of argument have arisen over what makes a Muslim a Muslim, what Islam means, and what, if any, its political role should be. The course thus charts how discourses about Muslim identity and Islam operate in context, investigating the changing public debates among self-avowed Muslims. We shall ask questions such as: What is the relationship between ideas and organized political activity? How do modern technological innovations, such as satellite television, foster new transnational collectivities and under what conditions could such collectivities shape political outcomes and/or understandings of piety? To what extent are current scholarly explanations about the causes and logics of Islamicist movements compelling? In what ways are these movements simply instances of larger global phenomena?

29401/39401. Arab Uprisings. This course examines the reasons for and variations in contemporary uprisings in the Middle East. At once theoretical and empirical, the class focuses on events in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Libya and considers them in relation to prevailing social scientific theories of change and management. We shall cover the following topics: the causes and meanings of "revolution;" the rise of new social movements in a neoliberal era; the various roles of the military; vigilante justice; the importance of digital publics; popular culture and artistic practices in the context of ongoing tumult; generational conflict; the causes of civil war; authoritarianism and its "reinvention(s);" practices of piety and the role of Islam; and the politics of foreign intervention.

29500/39700. International Relations: Transnationalism in a Post-Colonial World. (=INST 29500/39700, SOSCi 20500) PQ: PLSC 29400 strongly recommended. Class limited to sixty students; preference given to students with third- or fourth-year standing. Dominant conceptions in international relations privilege states by treating them as natural and exclusive actors in international relations; privilege the Western world by treating it as the center; and privilege the balance of power and deterrence by treating military force as the primary means of self-help in allegedly anarchical space beyond state frontiers. This course focuses on national and transnational civil society as the arena of action. We address a variety of topics such as nationalism; transnational identities generated by migration and refugee flows; environmentalism; human rights; cyber space; religions; and internal wars.

29602. Topics in Critical Theory: Repurposing "Ideology" for the Present. This course examines selections from the vast literature on ideology—with attention to the political commitments and intellectual genealogies that have made the concept both important and vexed. We begin with Weber and then explore a variety of trajectories in the Marxist tradition. The bulk of the course will entail examining ideology’s relationship to material practice, the notion of interpellation, the usefulness of “hegemony,” and the problems associated with false consciousness. We shall also analyze ideology’s connection to prevailing theoretical concerns, such as those related to “subject” formation, affect, new developments in capitalism, and dynamics associated with contemporary “democratic” liberal, as well as authoritarian, political orders. We conclude by considering how social science has employed and developed this body of knowledge, why the concept seemed to lose its explanatory power, and how it might be repurposed for the present.

33300. Interpretative Methods in the Social Sciences. This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to interpretive methods in the social sciences. Students will learn to "read" texts and images while also becoming familiar with contemporary thinking about interpretation, narrative, ethnography, and social construction. Among the methods we shall explore are: semiotics, hermeneutics, ordinary language theory, and discourse analysis.

35700. Identity-Formation in Comparative Perspective. This seminar is designed to be both theoretical and empirical, clarifying concepts such as "identity" and "subjectivity," and exploring various approaches to questions of political identification and self-understanding. We shall look at authors who use psychoanalysis, rational choice theory, versions of constructivism, and analytic philosophy in their studies. Although some of the readings will be explicitly devoted to conceptual conundrums and theories of the self, many will be comparative case studies--various contexts in which scholars identify political identification and subject formation as central political phenomena. Among the authors we shall read are Brubaker, Williams, Taylor, Butler, Hall, Erikson, Calhoun, and Laitin. Students will attend class regularly and write one 10-15 page paper.

36800. Death, Mourning, and the Politics of Self-Sacrifice in the Middle East. (=ANTH 45915) Open to senior undergraduates and graduates by consent only. This graduate seminar explores suicide bombing, discourses of martyrdom, contestation over gravesites, practices of commemoration, and the imagery of self-sacrifice in the Middle East. Drawing on debates in political science, anthropology, and history, we shall investigate the relevance of military occupation to suicide bombing, the relationships among dying, killing, and state sovereignty, the vexed connections between obligation and consent, changing norms about violence as a mode of political struggle, and the various forms of political solidarity that notions of sacrifice exemplify. This course is theoretically oriented and historically and ethnographically grounded. In contrast to approaches that posit the politics of self-sacrifice as a "problem" in need of a solution or as a peculiarly Middle Eastern phenomenon, this course seeks to de-pathologize such practices by comparing and contrasting them to practices of violence and commemoration in other times and places. Among the authors we will read are Hannah Arendt, Talal Asad, Lara Deeb, Frantz Fanon, Engseng Ho, Thomas Laqueur, Claudio Lomnitz, Robert Pape, Roxanne Varzi, and Slavoj Zizek.

47800. Rethinking Democratic Practice. This course explores some of the vast literature in comparative politics and political theory on "democracy" and "democratization." Among the issues we shall investigate are the meanings of these terms, the relationships between economic development and political change, and the conditions of possibility under which democratic transformations take place. We shall examine the roles particular institutions play, such as legislatures and political parties. We shall ask questions such as how important for contemporary democracy are sufficient economic resources or mobile capital? How critical is the existence of elections? What about the presence of a large middle class, politicized workers, civic associations, committed democrats, and/or a shared understanding of what democracy means? What are the relationships among nation-building, state sovereignty, and democratic practice? How do specific historical pasts affect the neo-liberal present? Students will take a final exam or write a research paper.

49400. Nations and Nationalism. This course explores the recent literature on the formation of nations and the development of nationalism, with attention to other forms of subnational and supranational organization and identity (e.g., class, diaspora, empire). The shift from more structuralist and social determinations of nationhood to discursive and constructivist approaches will be investigated, as well as the intersection of nationality and "race" with gender and class. Some readings will focus on ethnic conflict, its causes, consequences, and possible resolution.

50000. Dissertation Proposal Seminar.

51800. Ideology. (=ANTH 54505) This course examines selections from the vast literature on ideology—with attention to the political commitments and intellectual genealogies that have made the concept both important and vexed. We begin with Weber and then explore a variety of trajectories in the Marxist tradition. The bulk of the course will entail considering ideology’s relationship to material practice, the notion of interpellation, and concepts linked to ideology, such as hegemony and false consciousness. We shall also analyze ideology’s connection to contemporary concerns, such as those related to “subject” formation, new developments in capitalism, and dynamics associated with contemporary.

James Wilson

23313. Democracy and Equality. Democracy has often been celebrated (and often criticized) for expressing some kind of equality among citizens. This course will investigate a series of questions prompted by this supposed relationship between democracy and equality. Is democracy an important part of a just society? What institutions and practices does democracy require? Is equality a meaningful or important political ideal? If so, what kind of equality? Does democracy require some kind of equality, or vice-versa? The course will begin by studying classical arguments for democracy by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill, and then focus on contemporary approaches to these questions. The course will conclude with some treatment of current democratic controversies, potentially including issues of race and representation; the fair design of elections; the role of wealth in political processes; and the role of judicial review. The course aims to deepen participants' understanding of these and related issues, and to develop our abilities to engage in argument about moral and political life.

25205/35205. Racial Justice and Injustice. The course will explore moral and political problems of racial justice and injustice. Topics may include antidiscrimination theory, the fair political representation of racial minorities, reparations for racial injustice, racial segregation, the use of racial preferences in various practices of selection, and the evaluation of practices of law enforcement and punishment. We will use reflections on particular problems such as these to inquire about the uses of racial concepts in political theory; the connections between racial justice and ostensibly more general conceptions of justice; and the connections between racial equality and other egalitarian ideals.

28701. Introduction to Political Theory. This course will address several major, pressing questions of political morality, and introduce students to theoretical approaches to those questions. The class aims to develop students' abilities to address political problems in rigorous and thoughtful ways. Topics may include property rights and distributive justice; arguments for and against democracy and the proper design of democratic institutions; war and the use of force; racial and gender justice; and global economic justice and human rights. The focus will be on contemporary approaches to these problems rather than on classical works of political thought. Familiarity with some such works will be helpful but is not required.

45801. The Ethics of War. The course examines moral problems surrounding war. We will focus on traditional questions of jus ad bellum—the conditions under which war is justified—and of jus in bello—the moral principles that regulate the conduct of war. We will also consider pacifist claims that war is never justified. While considering normative philosophical approaches to war in general, we will give special attention where possible to problems arising in recent conflicts, such as the use of drone strikes, asymmetric warfare between states and non-state groups, and humanitarian intervention.

45901. Contemporary Egalitarianism. This seminar will examine different understandings of the idea of equality (moral, social and political) in contemporary analytical political thought. It will explore a series of questions that have been at the center of recent debates between egalitarians, including: what the foundation of equal moral status between persons is; whether the main reasons for objecting to social inequalities are intrinsically egalitarian or rather derive from non-egalitarian values; what (if anything) should be equalized; how justice and equality relate to each other; whether the ideal of social equality should ultimately be understood as a relationship between persons or as a distributive ideal; whether the ideal of social equality makes sense only within bounded political societies, or is instead broader in scope. We will read the work of, among others, Elizabeth Anderson, Richard Arneson, Charles Beitz, Simon Caney, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon, Samuel Scheffler, Amartya Sen and Larry Temkin.

Dali Yang

22020. Chinese Foreign Policy. This course examines the rise of China and its global implications from both historical and theoretical perspectives. It reviews China's interactions with the world in the past century and places China's rise in its global context. It engages contending theories about whether China will become a responsible stakeholder or challenge the existing global order. Special attention is given to the relationship between the United States and China.

23200. China in the World. Enrollment will be limited to 25. Today China is being viewed in sharply divergent terms. Some see reformist China becoming a global citizen while others view China's growth with alarm and believe a rising China will challenge the existing global order. In this course we combine theories of international relations with the history of China's interactions with the world. The emphasis is on developments in the past two centuries, with special attention to the implications of China's rise in the global economy. Requirements include short papers, class presentations, and a final.

27800. Introduction to Chinese Politics. This course offers a historical and thematic survey of Chinese politics in the twentieth century. Particular attention is given to the formation of the party-state, the imposition of central planning, the Great Leap forward, the Cultural Revolution, reform and liberalization, and prospects for democracy. The discussion is framed in terms that allow comparison with other countries.

27815. Politics and Public Policy in China. This course offers a historical and thematic survey to Chinese politics in the twentieth century. Particular attention is given to the formation of the party-state, the imposition of central planning, the Great Leap forward, the Cultural Revolution, reform and liberalization, and China's role in the world in the post-Cold War era. The discussion is framed in terms that allow comparison with other countries.

34700. Political Economy of China. This course offers a set of tools for analyzing Chinese economic development and reforms. Our focus will be on how economic and political institutions have changed and how those changes affect the behavior of citizens, consumers, and businesses. We seek to understand the patterns of institutional transformation by examining legacies of the past, political and economic campaigns, leadership transitions, as well as China's integration with the world economy. Topics covered include reforms in industrial governance, financial supervision, market regulation, and state-business relations; variations across regions and industrial sectors; the integration of Hong Kong into China; Taiwan and China; and China's international trade strategy. All major topics are examined with a view to their international implications.

34725. Globalization and Nationalism in China. This graduate course considers the dynamics and implications of China's interactions with the international system. How has China's growing participation in the international economy and society affected developments in China? What is the role of nationalism in Chinese politics and foreign policy? What implications does China's rise have for the global system? These are but some of the questions to be considered.

38400. Introduction to Chinese Politics. This course offers a historical and thematic survey of Chinese politics in the twentieth century. Particular attention is given to the formation of the party-state, the imposition of central planning, the Great Leap forward, the Cultural Revolution, reform and liberalization, and prospects for democracy. The discussion is framed in terms that allow comparison with other countries.

38415. Politics and Public Policy in China. This course offers a historical and thematic survey to Chinese politics in the twentieth century. Particular attention is given to the formation of the party-state, the imposition of central planning, the Great Leap forward, the Cultural Revolution, reform and liberalization, and China's role in the world in the post-Cold War era. The discussion is framed in terms that allow comparison with other countries.

38900. Political and Legal Development in China. This is a research-oriented seminar for graduate students interested in learning about current research on China and in conducting their own research. No attempt is made to provide complete coverage of all aspects of China's political economy. Topics covered include state building, constitutionalism, rights, state-society relations, corruption, and the prospects for democratization. Grading is based on class participation, presentations, and a research paper. It is essential that students come to class having read the required readings. Students are required to present a draft of the research paper in the final session.

42701. Seminar in Chinese Politics. This is a research-oriented seminar for graduate students interested in exploring current research on China and in conducting their own research. Our emphasis will be on the changing nature of the Chinese Party-state, and the relations between state and economy and between state and society as the Chinese society, economy and the level of technology have undergone dramatic changes in recent decades. Throughout the course we'll also pay attention to the course, dynamics, and challenges of making reform. Though the readings are on China, we are to consider China's development comparatively and in view of recent developments in political science.

47000. Political Development.

Linda Zerilli

20100. Problems in the Study Gender. (=GNDR 10100, ENGL 10200, HUMA 22800, SOSC 28200)

44001. Gender, Sexuality, and Poltics in Postmodernity. (=GNDR 44000) Beginning with the extension of the democratic revolution in the breakup of the New Left, this seminar will explore the key debates (foundations, psychoanalysis, historicism, sexual difference, universalism, multiculturalism) around which gender and sexuality came to be articulated as politically significant categories in the late 1980s and the 1990s. We seek to understand how the problem of exclusion, which was initially formulated as a democratic problem of exclusion from participation in common affairs, came to be scripted increasingly in terms of identity and the so-called politics of recognition. We seek to understand how, and to what extent, a juridical and state-centered conception of politics, combined with a critical interest in questions of identity, have come to displace feminism as quotidian practice of freedom based in political action. Why did identity emerge as the premiere problem for feminism? Why did feminist theory become caught in a series of epistemological debates about foundations? What are the limits to an understanding of feminism as a rights-based political practice? The seminar examines these questions in an effort to develop alternatives to the conceptions of politics that were presupposed in the central analytic categories of both second- and third-wave feminism.

44810. Hannah Arendt: From Kantian Aesthetics to the Practice of Political Judgment. The third volume of Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind was never written. As her editor, Mary McCarthy, observed: "After her death, a sheet of paper was found in her typewriter, blank except for the heading 'Judging' and two epigraphs. Some time between the Saturday of finishing 'Willing' [the second volume of the aforementioned work] and the Thursday of her death, she must have sat down to confront the final section." Fond of quoting McCarthy, commentators have turned the missing volume on Judging into an enigma of spectral proportions. It is said that Arendt's reflections on the faculty of judging suggest a turn away from the vita activa and toward the life of the mind; in short, judging brought Arendt back home to Western philosophy, especially the philosophy of Kant. Arendt's attempt to develop an account of political judgment based on Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment, say critics like Ronald Beiner and Jürgen Habermas, was deeply mistaken, for his transcendental philosophical approach to judgment leads away from the empirical realm and from anything that could possibly be considered political. Even more problematic, so the accusation goes, Arendt's attempt to model political judgment on a non-cognitive aesthetic judgment, (i.e., on a judgment that cannot be demonstrated by proofs and that is only "an example of a rule that we cannot state," as Kant puts it), bypasses the central problem of political judgment, namely the rational adjudication of competing validity claims. In this course we will consider the possibility that Arendt does in fact address the problem of validity (which, with Kant she calls "subjective validity"), with one important caveat: she does not think that validity in itself is the all-important problem or task for political judgment-the affirmation of political community as the realm of human plurality and freedom is. To develop this reading of Arendt, we will examine those aspects of Kant's Critique of Judgment that she neglected, such as the non-cognitive function of productive imagination and the limits of reproductive imagination in the aesthetic of the sublime. In this way we shall also consider the rather different critical view, advanced by postmodern thinkers like Lyotard, that Arendt does not repudiate but rather shares Habermas' attempt to ground political community on a practice of judgment at whose center stands not the demand to create political community anew, but the idea that radical differences of opinion are in principle resolvable by means of proofs.

45805. Realism and Futurity in Contemporary Critical Political Thought. Contemporary critical thought is characterized by a “realist turn” that departs markedly from the earlier “linguistic turn” of poststructuralist forms of theorizing. Positing the “limits of critique,” the new realism is animated by political concerns about the ways in which antirealist social constructivist approaches have generated a deep and corrosive skepticism towards the idea of any shared reality whatsoever, thus undermining collective social change. This class examines the possibilities and limits associated with the new turn to realism by putting it in dialogue with other realistic approaches to critique and its “figures/forms of the newly thinkable” (Castoriadis), including the “plausible worlds” of counterfactual judgments (Hawthorn), the pluralism of “ways of worldmaking” (Goodman), and the modality of “rhetoric as inquiry” (Struever).