New Political Science Courses
New for Spring 2025
POLS 006/ECON 006: Great Issues in Public Policy (IR)
Our current political, social, and economic moment has brought a number of crucial public policy questions to center stage. In this course, we seek to engage critically with some of the biggest public policy challenges of our time - including reproductive rights, immigration, artificial intelligence, affordable housing, climate change, global conflict, the future of democracy, and more. The course is based primarily on the fields of economics, political science, and policy analysis, and how theories and frameworks from these fields inform how we might think about and tackle specific issues. Crucially, this course strives to bring a diversity of perspectives to bear on the selected topics (through discussions, readings, guest speakers, etc.), and students should expect their personal views on these issues to be critiqued and challenged. The broader goal of the course is to help students see policy issues in nuanced ways, so we can better understand other points of view, engage in more civil discourse, and more effectively advocate for our preferred policy positions in an increasingly polarized society.
Professor Dominic Tierney and Professor Syon Bhanot
POLS 018: Politics in Dark Times (TH)
This course is aimed at understanding prior historical periods of political/ social/ economic disruption and reorientation. The course is centered on Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, with readings from Alexis de Tocqueville, Antonio Gramsci, and Michael Sandel’s 1995 book Democracy’s Discontent. Readings approximately 60-70 pages per week; discussion-based. This course falls within the theory subfield but only POLS 11, 12, 100, and 101 satisfy the theory requirement.
Professor Ben Berger
POLS 021: Who Votes? Political Participation in the U.S. (AP)
This upper-level seminar will examine the nature of political participation in the United States. Topics include: women’s suffrage; minority voting rights; historic and contemporary efforts at voter suppression; felon disenfranchisement; rules regarding ballot access; Gen-Z voting patterns; a thorough examination of who turned out to vote in the 2024 presidential election - and importantly, who didn’t. We conclude with a normative discussion of how voting has been employed as a tool to radically alter the nature of American democracy
Professor Keith Reeves
POLS 078: Order, Empire, and Domination
The international system is defined by anarchy - no state "is entitled to command" and none are "required to obey." However, look anywhere and you'll find commanding and obeying. From the British Empire, Ming Hegemony, and America's stint as leader of the free world to global governance institutions, neo-imperialism, and persistent inequality along the lines of race, class, and gender, we see a system defined by hierarchy. While anarchy is a useful starting point for theories of international relations, this class proceeds on the assumption that it obscures more than it reveals. After surveying anarchy's place in mainstream scholarship, we turn to the alternative ordering principle of hierarchy. The first section defines hierarchy, authority, and status. Section two looks at international orders and empires: what are they, how do they start, how do they shape international relations, and how do they fall? Here, we pay special attention to historical empires, the beleaguered liberal international order that the US presides over, and the question of whether the US is an empire. Section three looks at networks of domination, and the ways in which race, class, and gender shape the system.
Visiting Assistant Professor Justin Casey
