Course Offerings by term

What is politics - the quest for the common good or who gets what, when, and how? We study what defines politics in the modern age: states and nations in the international system, collective action and representation in mass societies, trajectories of democracy and dictatorship, politics and development in the context of capitalism. The course will introduce the student to the concerns, the language and the methods of Political Science.

Political philosophy forms that branch of philosophy that reflects on the specificity of the political. Why are humans, as Aristotle argued, political animals? How are they political? What are the means and ends of the political, and how best does one organize the political with such questions in mind? The course offers a topic-oriented approach to the fundamental problems underlying political theory and practice.

Offers a comparative introduction to the political systems of developing countries through the study of decolonization, nation-building, political institutions, and economy. Studies problems of political culture, leadership, representation, and the place of developing countries in the world system.

This course introduces students to the comparative study of politics, focusing on political behavior and the structures and practices that political systems have in common and those that distinguish them. We study different forms of democratic and authoritarian rule, state-society relationships, and key issues of political economy like development and welfare states. While the emphasis is on domestic features, we also analyze the impacts of globalization on national politics.