Courses

Last updated: Summer 2025

All courses carry 3 credits unless otherwise specified.

590STA Indigenous Resistance in the Americas
Over the past four decades, Indigenous peoples have emerged as key actors in challenging and reshaping the law and politics of the Americas. Through grassroots organization, legal activism and innovative methods of political organization, mobilization, and theorizing indigenous groups and thinkers in Americas have fought against their dispossession from ancestral lands, exploitation of natural resources, violence, genocide, and countless other old and new modes of colonization to reshaping local, national, and global politics. This course centers on this struggle and examines the history, law, and politics framing Indigenous struggles in North, Central, and South America. It deals with the political and theoretical issues implicated in these struggles and alternate philosophies of decolonization, anti-imperialism, nature and environmental justice emerging from these struggles.

590STB Latin American Political Thought
This course examines critical thinkers in the tradition of Latin American political thought. Themes considered include colonialism, indigeneity, founding, imperialism, Marxism, and liberation.

596 Independent Study
Credit, 1-6.

608 Public Opinion in Politics
This course explores the landscape of opinion on a variety of political topics to develop an understanding about how the public thinks about issues and why they think the way they do. It also examines how peoples' opinions influence their behavior, and whether or not political leaders follow the "will of the public" or manipulate public opinion to achieve their own aims. Objectives for this course are: To understand how surveys are conducted, including sampling and questionnaire design, and how to interpret their results; To become familiar with political science theories about how people form opinions and how those opinions change; To recognize when and how elites can manipulate public opinion; and To evaluate the role of public opinion in a democratic system.

656 International Law
Examination of the basic legal rules regulating relations among states and between states and other entities. Analysis of theories of international law and of how and to what extent legal rules and legal reasoning affect the policies of governments.

674 Problems in Political Thought
Some basic problems of political science, political ethics, and political philosophy through study of selected classical and modern political thinkers.

691T Technology, Power and Governance
Examines power and uses of digital technologies in national, transnational and global governance. Topics include inequalities, transparency, civil society, state capacity, privacy, social movements, cyberwar and electoral politics.

696 Independent Study
Credit, 1-6.

697P Experiments in Political Persuasion, Perception, Power, Prejudice and Policy
From policy "nudges" to persuasive campaign ads to get out the vote efforts, experiments are increasingly being used to shape many aspects of political and social life. In the course, you will get a chance to participate in, read about, and discuss a wide range of experiments related to politics, policy and political behavior.

698 Practicum
Credit, 1-12.

699 Master's Thesis
Credit, 6.

700 Graduate Professional Development: Welcome to Political Science at UMass
This course offers an orientation to graduate study and careers in political science generally and also specifically at UMass Amherst. We will focus on the basic knowledge and tools that can help students navigate their graduate study while introducing students to the diversity of faculty interests, experiences, and insights in the Ph.D. program in Political Science at UMass Amherst. Credit, 1.

707 Empirical Research in Political Behavior
This course is a reading and research-intensive course that covers selected topics in comparative political behavior research in a reading group style format while practicing research relevant professional skills: assessing and summarizing articles, replicating or extending research using the appropriate method, and writing and revising for publication.

709 Political Polarization
By any measure, and at all levels, American politics is deeply polarized along partisan lines, often asymmetrically so. This tribal division along partisan lines has changed the tone of political discourse, impacted the ability of our government to function, spread into apolitical facets of American life, led to political violence, and now poses a significant threat to democratic norms and institutions. This class will delve into the origins, psychology, and social dynamics of this hyper-polarization. We will seek to understand the nature of this division and examine its implications for government, society and the future of American democracy. We will deeply engage this very active research program, covering scholarship on mass-, individual-, and elite-level polarization, and attending to issues of conceptualization, measurement, and methodology.

710 Proseminar in Comparative Politics
New methodologies and theories that focus on institutions, ideologies, and systems. Also, interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to the study of culture and history. Guest speakers with expertise in area studies. New methodologies and theories that focus on institutions, ideologies, and systems. Also, interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to the study of culture and history. Guest speakers with expertise in area studies. Provides an introduction to comparative politics by giving students an opportunity to read, discuss, and write about canonical works in the field. Students will learn to use a generic framework to make sense of the methodological and explanatory choices made in any piece of comparative politics research, and to understand the strengths and weaknesses that attend those choices.

720 Proseminar on International Relations
Survey of theory, research, and methodology in the field of international relations; its interdisciplinary dimensions.

725 International Security
A 'Dream Team' of Top International Security scholars will take turns providing weekly online lectures in their areas of expertise, followed by a weekly Q&A session with these experts in the field. Topics will include peacekeeping, war statistics, the protection of civilians, the war on terror, military coups, battlefield performance, artificial intelligence and war, public opinion and foreign policy, leadership and war, women and political violence and other topics. Grading will consist of weekly online quizzes. Graduate students must additionally write a 2500-word practice-comp question addressing the state of security studies.

740 The Language of Politics
This course examines linguistic approaches to studying politics, focusing on ordinary language use, speech acts, metaphor, linguistic relativity, and genealogy. These approaches share a recognition that language is constitutive of social reality, including the reality of politics. This starting point opens exciting possibilities for analyzing politics through language and provides new insights into the language used to study politics. The course engages the thought of an eclectic mix of authors that include writers, journalists, linguists, philosophers, psychologists, political scientists, and even a fire-prevention engineer.

750 Research Design
Introduction to the principles of research design, with particular emphasis on qualitative methods. Topics include philosophy of science, concept formation, case studies, casual inference, fieldwork, and content analysis. Practical aspects of research also covered, such as finding grant opportunities, preparing proposals, and completing a dissertation prospectus.

753 Political Network Analysis
This is a course on network analysis. The study of networks across the sciences has exploded recently. In this course, we will cover network scientific theory as it applies to the social sciences, network data collection and management, network visualization and description; and methods for the statistical analysis of networks. The course will make extensive use of real-world applications and students will gain a thorough background in the use of network analytic software. Most of the applications discussed will be drawn from political science, but this course will be relevant to anyone interested in network analytic research.

755 Introduction to Quantitative Analysis
This is a course on network analysis. The study of networks across the sciences has exploded recently. In this course, we will cover network scientific theory as it applies to the social sciences, network data collection and management, network visualization and description; and methods for the statistical analysis of networks. The course will make extensive use of real-world applications and students will gain a thorough background in the use of network analytic software. Most of the applications discussed will be drawn from political science, but this course will be relevant to anyone interested in network analytic research.

756 Survey Research Methods
This course will focus on advanced topics in survey design and analysis. Topics covered include different approaches to sampling, how to construct and use survey weights, and tools for analyzing and enriching survey data, including approaches to conducting matching and multiple imputation, as well as the construction and analysis of panel data. The course will also focus on designing and analyzing survey experiments.

762 Power, Institutions and the American Constitution
In this course, we will explore the American constitutional system as prescribed by the United States Constitution, and as developed by the myriad subsequent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court throughout this nation's history. Broadly, we will focus on the areas of institutional powers, federalism, and government involvement in commerce, regulation, and taxation. Across these areas, students will learn about the legal, social, historical, and political contexts in which the Supreme Court reaches its decisions. With active and lively debates in these areas to the present day, students who complete this course are expected to be able to think critically about the broad contours of government power, the role of the Supreme Court in defining and re-defining those contours, and the importance of institutional design and relationships.

763 Rights, Liberties and the American Constitution
This course examines the critical role that the Supreme Court has played in shaping the landscape of rights and liberties in the United States over time. We begin with a discussion about the power and potential of textual rights protections. Then, we examine the historic rise of an organizational structure that supported legal mobilization to protect individual rights in the United States, and learn about why certain rights were protected before others. Then, we will look thematically at the topics of: religious freedom, speech, guns, rights of the criminally accused, and gender and sexuality discrimination, reading and analyzing many of the Court's landmark decisions. We will close the semester by looking at some of the most recent constitutional controversies involving personal freedom.

774 Law, Politics, and Society
This course on law, politics, and society takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of law in society. The focus is on the construction and the implementation of law, not necessarily what the written law is. Most of the work that we will read is empirical in nature, meaning it uses data to explain how the law operates. The readings all have a particular set of theoretical 'tools' or insights that shape the way the data is collected and how the analysis is done. As social scientists, we learn how to draw on these tools to help answer the policy or theoretical puzzles that motivate our research questions. This course draws on socio-legal approaches, comparative approaches, and political approaches to the study of everyday topics such as social stratification, judicial decision making, criminal justice systems and punishment, access to justice, and social change.

780 Public Policy Proseminar
Theories and techniques of decision making and implementation, logical and ethical aspects of social choice, with illustrative case studies from different substantive policy fields.

781 Constitutional Collapse and Decolonial Theory
Recent unprecedented events have eroded Constitutional norms, judicial precedents, and even founding principles of the American republic. From a President that tweets in the middle of the night and then receive the attention of the mainstream media; the acquiescence of one major national party to authoritarian actions, the attempted coup of January 6th, 2021, the Supreme Court's decision on presidential immunity, and the reelection of the alleged main culprit of the explicit attempt to subvert the results of a presidential elections, stand out as parts of a sequence that have tested whether a Constitutional republic will survive. Yet emergency declarations, Executive Orders, Congress ceding to the Executive Branch the power to impose tariffs, judicial deference to the President in all matters related to national security, etc., were already systemic features anchored in the structure of the American government. All these elements constitute a legibility crisis. This new and challenging milieu finds some explanations in political theory: we will discuss texts on tendencies toward totalitarianism; ideas of the political; and how an emotional and political subjectivity emerges in both subordinate and dominant groups. This seminar will conclude with an examination of texts on decolonial thought. The aim is to understand how this framework departs, enriches, and may even relies on dominant modes of reasoning in Western culture.

782 Theories of Decolonization
As a core course in the proposed Grad Certificate in Decolonial Global Studies, this course will serve as an advanced introduction to political and social theories of coloniality and decolonization. Reading key texts within an enlarged conception of what constitutes postcolonial and decolonial thought, the seminar will address some of the most fundamental questions in social, political, and cultural theory (e.g. patriarchy, globalization, the state, racial capitalism, subjectivity, knowledge production, democracy, nationalism) from a transdisciplinary lens. Foregrounding the intersections of our own disciplinary perspectives - political theory and historical sociology - the seminar will provide an opportunity to foreground how decolonial perspectives orient both distinctive modes of critique and the search alternative possibilities to the nation-state form oriented around patriarchal domination, territorial sovereignty, capital accumulation, and rights-based individualism.

783 Theories of Interpretation
This course will focus on general approaches to the problem of interpretation in texts and social practices. All areas of political science research entail the investigation of written, spoken, or visual evidence, including books, archival documents of all kinds, speeches, verbal explanations by actors of their actions, images, and so on. These various materials require interpretation, different materials posing different problems for the interpreter. This course is meant to encourage reflection upon the interpretive act.

788 Causal Inference and Experiments
The nature of causality and techniques for making valid causal inferences have been the subject of intense recent discussion in the social sciences. These topics are also increasingly relevant in government, business, and non-profit sectors amid the growing popularity of evidence-based approaches. Rooted in the potential outcomes framework, this course will discuss various conceptualizations of causality, explore the statistics of causal inference and provide deep coverage of methods for design- and model-based causal inference with experimental and observational data. Students will learn about designing, implementing and analyzing survey, lab, field and natural experiments, and about analytic techniques such as matching and regression-discontinuity design.

790E Ethnographies of Energy
This multidisciplinary graduate seminar draws on readings from the fields of political science, anthropology, and geography among others. By the end of the semester, students will come away from this class with: an overview and analysis of what ethnographic approaches and methods can teach us about the study of energy and the ongoing transition; examples from communities resisting carbon-intensive energy systems and envisioning and implementing alternatives. This course counts as a graduate level comparative politics course in the Political Science department, as well as an option for the existing graduate Ethnography Certificate.

790M Migration, Orders, and the State
This course addresses the historical and contemporary intersection between migration, borders and the state from a critical and interdisciplinary perspective, in the United States and internationally. We will examine the role of law, the role of the state, and various institutional actors in theorizing, developing and implementing immigration policies at various levels of government, including the United Nations, state governments, and courts, as well as non-state actors such as lawyers, nonprofits and immigrant movements. Topics include borders, state control, public opinion, politics of protection (e.g., for refugees, victims of trafficking), legal status, gender, immigrant social movements and the criminalization of migration.

790Q Advanced Quantitative Methods
This course will build on students' previous foundations in probability, statistical inference, and linear regression. An introduction to generalized linear models (GLMs) and multilevel (mixed effects/hierarchical) models will be followed by additional advanced topics at the discretion of the instructor. These will include special cases of GLMs and multilevel models and may also consider measurement of latent variables (e.g. factor analysis, IRT).

791AB Political Inquiry
There is little consensus within political science about how to study politics. Political scientists use a range of approaches, and hold a variety of methodological commitments. This course is designed to introduce students to the philosophical and epistemological disputes that have given rise to this lack of consensus. The aim of the course is to enable students to make more deeply informed judgments about the types of political science work that they encounter and undertake. Students will be encouraged to appreciate alternative approaches to political analysis, weigh their relative utility in answering questions of importance to them, and determine whether and how these different approaches might fruitfully be combined.

791EA Empirical Analysis and Ideologies
This course will familiarize students with existing approaches to the measurement and classification of ideology in text, and provide an opportunity to think critically about how to improve upon these. We begin by examining various definitions of ideology from different empirical and philosophical traditions, distinguishing between those that emphasize core values and beliefs from ones that take policy positions as their essential indicators. We then consider what it would mean to analyze ideologies as shared, publicly-articulated philosophies; in particular, how might we operationalize such systems in order to effectively detect their presence in writing and speech? The instructor will draw examples primarily from contemporary U.S. media, but students are welcome to base their own research in other settings.

791EE Rules of War
This course evaluates the role of international ethical norms in regulating the practice of organized political violence. We will begin by considering how to think analytically about the effects of ethical norms on international policy-making. We next consider the origins and evolving dynamics of the laws of war, explore why political actors so often violate these rules and the conditions under which they follow them, and examine the political and ethical dilemmas involved in enforcing them. Specific topics covered include weapons bans, terrorism, protection of noncombatants, and war crimes tribunals. The course will conclude with an assessment of continuity and change in global security norms post 9/11.

791J American Political Development
American Political Development is a research tradition in which important theoretical and empirical questions pertaining to the workings of democracy, the development of public policy, and the evolution of political institutions are investigated using historical and qualitative methods. This graduate course is provides a survey of classic and contemporary readings in this field.

791N Democratization
This course focuses on the process of democratization in historical and comparative perspective. We will begin by examining different definitions and theories of democracy. We will then move on to discuss different approaches to understanding the emergence of democratic forms of government in the modern world in order to determine the basic dynamics of democratization. We will also consider patterns of democratization in different historical, social, and cultural context in order to assess and adjust our theoretical framework.

791PA Political Ethnography
What does it mean to study politics from below? How does immersion of the researcher in the research world contribute to the study of power? What are the promises, and perils, of social research that invites the unruly minutiae of lived experience to converse with, and contest, abstract disciplinary theories and categories? In this practice-intensive seminar, we explore ethnographic and other qualitative fieldwork methods with specific attention to their potential to subvert, generate, and extend understandings of politics and power. Readings draw on exemplary political ethnographies as well as discussions of methodology and method in political science, sociology, and anthropology. Participants will have the opportunity to craft and conduct locally based ethnographic research projects related to their primary areas of interest and will be expected to make significant weekly commitments to field research. The seminar is intended as preparation for students planning to conduct independent fieldwork for their MA or PhD research, but those interested in the epistemological, political and ethical implications of studying power from below are also welcome.

791PG History of US Social Policy, Politics of Gender, Race and Class
This interdisciplinary course, designed for students in both Political Science and History, will concentrate on approaches to the study of the history of U.S. public policy aimed at addressing social and political inequalities. We will explore the methods, findings, and controversies in research about public policy in American politics, history, and political science from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and approaches. Readings will focus our attention on policies aimed at the overlapping axes of marginalization on the basis of gender, race, class, and sexuality, in particular. Throughout the course, we will analyze the ways in which policy, over time, has come to address issues and discrimination in intersectional ways, defining politically-relevant categories, identities, and forms of marginalization, such as gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and ideological and partisan identification. Students will write a short reaction paper every other week, make two short presentations, and write a research paper that they will present to the class.

791PP Political Psychology
This course serves as a survey of the major theoretical approaches and empirical research in the field of political psychology. As such, it focuses primary attention on psychological explanations of individual political attitudes and actions among both elites as well as the masses. The course is designed to: (1) provide an overview of the burgeoning literature on political psychology in the discipline of political science and the myriad of frameworks and methods used to study political behavior and (2) to prepare graduate students to teach courses on political behavior, and political psychology.

791RC Comparative Political Theory: Race, Civilization and Empire
Examines the work of European political thinkers who have either justified or disavowed systems of European imperialism in conversation with postcolonial and anti-colonial thinkers who have contested those very systems of power. Readings include Du Bois, Kant, James, Rousseau, Bolivar, Montesquieu, Mariategui, Marx, Gandhi, Mill, Tocqueville, and Fanon.

791S Human Security
This course is a doctoral reading seminar focused on political science literature at the intersection of human rights and international security. Topics to be covered will include human rights, the law of war, conflict prevention and peace-keeping; humanitarian intervention and transitional justice.

791T Institutions
This course examines the theoretical underpinnings of and major empirical works associated with the study of American Political Institutions, including Congress, the Judiciary, and the Presidency.

791V Political Behavior
This course serves as a survey of the major theoretical approaches and empirical research in the field of American political behavior. The course is designed to: (1) provide an overview of the burgeoning literature on political behavior in the discipline of political science and the myriad of frameworks and methods used to study political behavior and (2) to prepare graduate students to teach courses on political behavior, political psychology, and/or public opinion.

792AP Knowledge Power Fragility: Platonic/Aristotelian
This course will examine several Platonic dialogues to address the elenchus, its epistemological consequences and ethical dangers, as well as the notion of knowledge in the crafting of political arguments. Apology, Laches, Charmides, Meno, and Republic are some of the Platonic dialogues to be discussed. We will also address some books in Aristotle's Politics.

792CJ Comparative Judicial Politics
This course will explore the causes and consequences of cross-national variation in judicial and constitutional systems, and in the politics of law. From where do these differences emerge? To what degree do they persist? What does it mean to say that there has been a global trend towards a judicialization of politics? Does that trend suggest some kind of cross-national convergence? Do judicial empowerment and rights consciousness look the same in every national context? How should scholars understand the spread of bill of rights? The proliferation of international law and supra-national courts?

792DD Distance, Deceit and Denial
This course examines the roles of distance, deceit, and denial in structuring, reproducing, and contesting relations of domination and exploitation. Drawing on a wide range of ethnographic, historical, sociological, psychological, and anthropological case studies, the course aims to stimulate imaginative theorizing and generative research projects about the operation of distance, deceit, and denial in three specific dimensions: language (euphemism, dysphemism, public and hidden transcripts, etc.), space (borders, walls, checkpoints, special economic zones, camps, policing and surveillance technologies, modes of experience-distant warfare, etc.), and social organization (the division of labor, hierarchy, chains of command, etc.).

792E Political Organizations
This seminar considers the role of political organizations, with an emphasis on political parties, interest groups, advocacy organizations, NGOs and, to a lesser extent, national and transnational advocacy networks, in society and in policy making. The course emphasizes the goals and imperatives of such organizations, including the need to overcome collective action problems and to compete along with other groups occupying similar policy niches. We examine the development and consequences of political groups' access to resources, institutional settings, strategic repertoires and tactical choices. The course also analyzes the extent and limits of their influence on civil society, agenda setters and policy makers. The course will include readings relevant not only to those studying American politics or public policy but also to those interested in comparative politics and international relations.

792L Law & American Democracy
This course examines key questions about the role of law and courts in American democracy, focusing in particular on the ability of American courts to fulfill the goals of democratic governance. Issues we address include: judicial review and the countermajoritarian difficulty; judicial policy making and the implementation and impact of court decisions; the response of courts to public opinion, and the responses of citizens and institutions to court decisions; social movement litigation; and methods of judicial selection and the representativeness of legal institutions.

792MA Modern Arab Political Thought
Massive political protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen, commonly dubbed as the Arab Spring, have gripped the world’s attention since December 2010, especially when they succeeded in overthrowing three of the most enduring Arab dictators. Since then, academics, news commentators, and lay people alike have offered various explanations for this seemingly unexpected turn of events by focusing mainly on contemporary socioeconomic, political and cultural causes. This course offers its own take on revolutionary politics in the Arab world through examining the history of ideas that have animated Arab society since the time of the Arab Renaissance in the mid-19th century, through colonial and postcolonial times, and up until the present.

792P Proseminar in Law and Courts
The discipline of political science finds its origins in the study of law and legal doctrine. Though the discipline has become much more diverse in terms of the topics investigated by political scientists, it is nonetheless essential to understand the roles played by law, courts, and other legal actors in the political process. The purpose of this seminar is to introduce graduate students to the public law subfield by focusing on empirical research on law and courts from both American and comparative perspectives. To achieve this end, we will address a wide range of theoretically rich and empirically driven research, including examining decision making by judges, the litigation strategies of interest groups, staffing the bench, as well as how courts both shape and are shaped by public opinion.

792PE Political Economy of Development
This course will cover foundational texts and core debates in the study of development. What is development? How have conceptualizations of 'development' and theories of 'development' changed over the past century? The course will focus on both domestic and international processes to illuminate a range of development challenges using examples from around the world.

792R Heidegger and Contemporary Radical Political Theory
This seminar will examine works by Antonio Negri, Jacques Ranciere, and Alain Badiou, among others. We will begin with Heidegger's 'Introduction' to Being and Time in order to broach cultural and philosophical problems that will be addressed in more details through the works of contemporary philosophers.

793G Public Opinion & Political Behavior
This course will cover several advanced topics in political behavior, with an emphasis on getting familiar with the research methods used in the relevant research literature.

793PC Postcolonial Political Thought
This course surveys some of the central texts of postcolonial theory. It begins with an examination of the foundational works in that field of study such as: Franz Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks," Edward Said's "Orientalism," Homi Bhabha's "Nation and Narration," and Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" The rest of the course is regionally and thematically organized to explore major writings in post-colonial theory from South Asia (Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty), Sub-Saharan Africa (Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Achille Mbembe), the Caribbean (Paul Gilroy), and the Arab world (Abdullah Laroui, Joseph Massad). The course will also examine central themes in postcolonial thought such as theories of postcolonial difference and postcolonial feminism. More generally, this course explores the following questions: how do non-western thinkers conceive of freedom, reason, equality, and political emancipation in the wake of a colonialism that has fundamentally re-shaped their modes of living and producing? In what ways do their formulations of these central concepts of European modernity embrace, question, critique, and/or cast doubt on their applicability to the post-colonial world? What alternatives, if any, do these thinkers put forward for the political future of their respective societies?

793X Critical Theory
In this course, we will examine some foundational works in first, second, and third generation Critical Theory (working within, influenced by or influential to the Frankfurt School) including Horkheimer & Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Juergen Habermas Seyla Benhabib.

795C Proseminar in American Politics
This course introduces graduate students to major theoretical approaches and areas of empirical research in the study of American politics. Topics covered may change over time or with students' interests, but are likely to include many of the following: voting and political participation; public opinion; the politics of race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, and other political identities; the Presidency; Congress; the Courts; bureaucracy; interest groups and social movements; parties & partisanship; the media; American Political Development; state and local politics; political networks; and theories of political decision-making. The course is a prerequisite for the comprehensive exam in American Politics for Political Science Ph.D. students.

795K Foucault
In a roughly chronological fashion, we will read many of the principle works of Michel Foucault, as well as essays, interviews, and lectures. The objectives of this seminar are to assess the significance of Foucault's works for understanding political institutions, government, ethics, and historical change, and for the practices of historical and critical research in political theory.

795Q Qualitative Methods
This seminar covers key issues in the study and practice of qualitative methods. After discussing various "meta-issues" regarding the nature of qualitative methods research, the course covers the ideal-typical and practical use of specific qualitative methods such as case-study analysis, interviewing, historical research, ethnography, and discourse analysis. Examples come from social science research and speak directly to the development of qualitative methods within political science.

796 Independent Study
Credit, 1-6.

797BB Qualitative Methods
This course covers key issues in the study and practice of qualitative methods. While this is not a “how-to” class, it is motivated by the belief that the study of methodology must be accompanied by the practical application of those methods. The course is designed to allow you to examine various approaches and specifically to produce an awareness of the trade-offs involved when one selects one approach, method, technique, or type of evidence over others. After discussing various “meta-issues” regarding the nature of qualitative methods research, the course covers the idealtypical and practical use of specific qualitative methods such as case-study, interviewing, historical research, ethnography, and discourse analysis. Examples come from social science research and speak directly to the development of qualitative
methods within political science.

797CA Causal Inference
The nature of causality and techniques for making valid causal inferences have been the subject of intense recent discussion in the social sciences. These topics are also increasingly relevant in government, business, and non-profit sectors amid the growing popularity of evidence-based approaches. Rooted in the potential outcomes framework, this course will discuss various conceptualizations of causality, explore the statistics of causal inference and provide deep coverage of methods for design- and model-based causal inference with experimental and observational data. Students will learn about designing, implementing and analyzing survey, lab, field and natural experiments, and about analytic techniques such as matching and regression-discontinuity design.

797DE Politics of Decolonization
This seminar examines political theories of decolonization. Instead of restricting our view to the period of decolonization after World War Two when European colonial possessions attained formal sovereignty, we will center on the 500-year struggle of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples as well as creole-settlers against and with the modern-colonial world system in the Americas. And rather than view decolonization solely as a struggle for national independence, we will emphasize its transnational dimensions, how ideologies and practices of decolonization travel across boundaries of race, nation, and empire and in doing so transform global power relations. In our efforts to theorize decolonization transnationally, we will situate our analyses in the interstices of different framings of the colonial situation (e.g., coloniality of power, neocolonialism, postcolonialism, settler colonialism). Readings draw from (but not exclusively) Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Ottobah Cugoano, Jose Marti, CLR James, Jose Carlos Mariategui, Frederick Douglass, WEB Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel.

797DM Democracy and Populism
This seminar is located in contemporary political theory and envisioned as a theoretical and political examination of populism. By theoretical, I refer to the concepts, definitions, and logical sequences that are part of frameworks attempting to see the uniqueness of populism. These frameworks also aim at providing an analysis of the causes that give rise to populist projects. By political, I mean an analysis and discussion of the political forces, words, rhetorical devices, and policies that are salient traits of the interaction between groups and the state. The seminar consists of four main areas, loosely construed: frameworks, backgrounds, the liberal-democratic critique of populism, and populist manifestations, if any, in both policies and current events. The reading sequence begins with different interpretations, goes into the background represented by populist experiences in the United States and by social processes of displacement and disorientation, and moves into the liberal-democratic critique.

797L Interpretation
This course will focus on general approaches to the problem of interpretation in texts and social practices. All areas of political science research entail the investigation of written, spoken, or visual evidence, including books, archival documents of all kinds, speeches, verbal explanations by actors of their actions, images, and so on. These various materials require interpretation, different materials posing different problems for the interpreter. This course is meant to encourage reflection upon the interpretive act. Among the issues to be discussed are those of intentionality, agency, contextualism, objectivity, and method. Readings will be drawn from several major schools of interpretation, including hermeneutics, Critical Theory, the so-called Cambridge school of the history of political thought, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralist and post-structuralist anthropology as well as from approaches less easily characterized.

797LP Language of Politics
This semester we will examine three approaches to studying politics through language: Wittgenstein's and Austin's ordinary language analysis, Skinner's "recovery of intentions," and Foucault's genealogy. What these approaches share is a recognition that language is constitutive of social and political reality. This starting point opens up exciting possibilities for studying politics by way of language. The main goals of this course are for you to (1) understand and critically assess the premises of each approach; (2) see how each approach has been used to study politics, broadly construed; (3) practice using the tools of each approach; and (4) put together and deploy what you have learned, perhaps in ways that the founders and/or practitioners of these approaches did not intend.

797LS Law, Politics and Society
This course takes a comparative, historical, interdisciplinary approach to the study of law as part of society and politics. It provides theoretical and methodological training for students interested in learning about law and society, political sociology, as well as domestic, international, and comparative public law. Our focus will be on classic texts within law and society, paired with contemporary work applying earlier theories in both the US and countries in the Global South. Topics include inequality related to race, gender, class, ability and geopolitics, legal mobilization, rights consciousness, criminal justice, civil courts, and organizations. Students will be expected to engage with both the theory and the research design of the various studies we read, and to use the theories to develop a conceptual framework for their own topic of study.

797ML Republicanism and the People
In very general terms, republicanism develops and stands for some crucial concepts as linchpins of the social order. Some of these concepts refer to both the community and individuals, as is the case of virtue, merit, and patriotism. These three concepts are individuals-oriented, but always for the sake of the larger moral entity represented by the community. Other concepts refer to the specific communitarian arena where the republic is expected to thrive. “Institutions,” “public good,” and “rule of law” are among these community-oriented concepts. The people, as opposed to any group whose claim to rule rests on ancestry, wealth, or both, are still another powerful element in the symbolic tapestry of republicanism. This seminar will discuss all these concepts in the following authors: Cicero, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Montesquieu. We will compare the view of the people in these authors to the way some seventeenth century English thinkers theorized the people. The seminar will conclude with some sections from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

797RD Religion and Democracy
This course explores various problems within political theory pertaining to the relationship between religion and democracy. Central topics include: the transformation of religious doctrines about politics and legitimacy in light of modern conditions of pluralism, competing theories of liberal versus agonistic pluralism, theories of the sociological role of religious life in supporting and/or stressing democratic life, and recent debates about secularism and secular power.

797TA Text as Data
With the recent explosion in the availability of digitized text, social scientists increasingly are turning to computational tools for the analysis of text as data. In this three-credit course, students will first learn how to convert text to formats suitable for analysis. From there, the course will introduce and proceed through tutorials on a variety of natural language processing approaches to the treatment of text-as-data. This will include relatively simple dictionary approaches for measurement, supervised learning approaches for document classification, vector representations, contextualized embeddings, and more.

800 Graduate Professional Development Workshop: Prospectus and Dissertation Writing
This course is intended to help students make progress on their dissertation prospectus and dissertation. To do this, we will discuss formulating a dissertation topic, assembling a dissertation committee, drafting and defending a prospectus, writing and researching a dissertation, and finding and applying for both internal and external grants and fellowships. The course will regularly feature visits from faculty members from across the Department who will share their insights into this process. This class is intended for students in their sixth semester of study, although students at any stage in the prospectus and dissertation writing process are welcome to join the course. Credit, 1.

899 Doctoral Dissertation
Credit, 10.