Political Science

This course provides a practical introduction to data analysis and statistics tailored to political science, economics, sociology, and related fields. Students learn to analyze real-world data using R programming language, with an emphasis on causal inference, measurement, and prediction models.

The contemporary House and Senate; elections, structures, functions, procedures, theories, and controversies examined through current scholarship; relations with the president and executive branch.

Nature, functions and evolution of the American presidency; competing definitions and interpretations of the power of the office; special attention to recent presidents.

Theoretical and empirical study of campaigns and elections; candidate and party decision-making; messaging; resource allocation; voter behavior; institutional rules and electoral design; representation and inequality; democratic accountability; electoral outcomes.

The development of international law, including legal principles, theoretical approaches, major treaties, and disputes; application to contemporary issues.

How states remember and commemorate dark pasts, including narratives of past wrongs; national apologies; denial and silencing; reparations and restitution; textbooks; and memorialization and commemoration. Comparative, with a sustained focus on the politics of the past in the United States.

Pandemics throughout history have affected political and social systems, and those systems in turn affect how pandemics are managed or mismanaged. The course will use the tools of social science and consider pandemics through comparative politics and international relations lenses.

Conceptual, analytical, and theoretical approaches to genocide and mass killing; causes of violence; contexts in which violence occurs; variations in violence; perpetrators' motivations; intervention and prevention; trials and tribunals; the politics of memory.

Approaches and topics in the study of war and conflict. Theories of international relations, focusing on interstate war, great power politics, and international order; laws  of war; nuclear proliferation; terrorism and counterterrorism; civil war and insurgency; genocide and humanitarian intervention.

This course examines how states, markets, and international institutions shape the global production, distribution, and consumption of resources. We study major theoretical approaches and apply them to historical and contemporary issues in trade, migration, finance, and development.

Russian political system in transition from authoritarian rule; historical and ideological roots of the Soviet system and initial efforts to reform it; the collapse of communism in Russia and the emergence of a new system.

China has emerged as one of the two most economically and politically powerful countries in the world. We will focus on China’s political development since the communist revolution, with emphasis on China’s more recent emergence as a modern industrial state.

Politics of deeply divided and conflict societies; conceptualization of deeply divided societies; causes of conflict and division; gender and intersectionality; conflict resolution approaches; democratic engineering in divided societies; equality and social justice in divided societies; comparative politics.

European Union as a microcosm of cooperation and conflict in international relations and comparative politics, including how European integration shapes domestic political economies, the rise of anti-EU parties, and the implications for the long-term trajectory of the European project.

Gender lens on global politics; concepts of gender and intersectionality; the state and economy; political representation; conflict and peacebuilding; politics of sexuality and the body; comparative politics; international relations.

Debate over the place of morals legislation in a free society; comparison of the central tradition of “perfectionist” thought with contemporary liberal positions on law’s regulation of virtue and vice.

Directed thesis research.