Courses

Although the media focuses on national politics, local government, policy, and electoral politics are critically important around the world. Local governments in the U.S., for example, manage the police, determine housing policies, provide basic public services such as garbage collection and water and sanitation; and implement national policies from welfare programs to climate change. Local governments in developing countries like India also have substantial powers including the implementation of large programs for the poor, deciding where a road will be built, and helping citizens access a distant and often unresponsive state. In this class, we will examine local democracies, or elected local governments, in a diverse array of contexts in developed and developing democracies. Unlike a course that examines one city in-depth, this course will identify patterns in local representation and policy across contexts with different institutions, demographics, and levels of development (e.g., US vs India).

This six-week course is also unique in that it has a focus on New York City itself. We will have opportunities to have experiences in NYC related to local democracy. All students will attend a city council or neighborhood council meeting and take notes on what you see and hear. We will meet organizers of local campaigns and/or local activists participating in local issues specific to NYC. And we will have a field assignment where you explore an issue in NYC government. We will explore the following questions:

1. What do local governments do and how does this vary across contexts?
2. “Who governs” at the local level—that is, what types of people run for and hold office, and what types of individuals, social groups, institutions, or interest groups influence local government decisions? 
3. When is local democracy most responsive to poor and marginalized groups? Specifically, in what types of social and political contexts does local democracy work best for the poor? 
4. What explains variation in policy outcomes (housing, policing, public services, climate efforts) across towns in the US and across contexts?

Although the media focuses on national politics, local government, policy, and electoral politics are critically important around the world. Local governments in the U.S., for example, manage the police, determine housing policies, provide basic public services such as garbage collection and water and sanitation; and implement national policies from welfare programs to climate change. Local governments in developing countries like India also have substantial powers including the implementation of large programs for the poor, deciding where a road will be built, and helping citizens access a distant and often unresponsive state. In this class, we will examine local democracies, or elected local governments, in a diverse array of contexts in developed and developing democracies. Unlike a course that examines one city in-depth, this course will identify patterns in local representation and policy across contexts with different institutions, demographics, and levels of development (e.g., US vs India).

This six-week course is also unique in that it has a focus on New York City itself. We will have opportunities to have experiences in NYC related to local democracy. All students will attend a city council or neighborhood council meeting and take notes on what you see and hear. We will meet organizers of local campaigns and/or local activists participating in local issues specific to NYC. And we will have a field assignment where you explore an issue in NYC government. We will explore the following questions:

1. What do local governments do and how does this vary across contexts?
2. “Who governs” at the local level—that is, what types of people run for and hold office, and what types of individuals, social groups, institutions, or interest groups influence local government decisions? 
3. When is local democracy most responsive to poor and marginalized groups? Specifically, in what types of social and political contexts does local democracy work best for the poor? 
4. What explains variation in policy outcomes (housing, policing, public services, climate efforts) across towns in the US and across contexts?

This course provides an introduction to the politics of war termination and peace consolidation. The course examines the challenges posed by ending wars and the process by which parties to a conflict arrive at victory, ceasefires, and peace negotiations. It explores how peace is sustained, why peace lasts in some cases and breaks down in others and what can be done to make peace more stable, focusing on the role of international interventions, power-sharing arrangements, reconciliation between adversaries, and reconstruction.

This course examines questions in international political economy, asking what we know and how we know it. It addresses questions such as: Why do some countries promote globalization while others resist it? What do IOs do in international politics? Who runs our system of global governance? We will explore these questions and others by focusing on topics such as international trade, foreign aid, investment, and the environment. For each topic, we will use a variety of theoretical lenses and then investigate the evidence in favor of each. More generally, the course will consider the challenges of drawing casual inferences in the field of international political economy. There are no prerequisites for this course but an introductory economy course would be helpful. Students will write a short reading response each week and produce a research proposal for studying a topic related to international political economy, though they do not need to actually conduct this research. 

This course examines the basic methods data analysis and statistics that political scientists use in quantitative research that attempts to make causal inferences about how the political world works. The same methods apply to other kinds of problems about cause and effect relationships more generally. The course will provide students with extensive experience in analyzing data and in writing (and thus reading) research papers about testable theories and hypotheses. It will cover basic data analysis and statistical methods, from univariate and bivariate descriptive and inferential statistics through multivariate regression analysis. Computer applications will be emphasized. The course will focus largely on observational data used in cross-sectional statistical analysis, but it will consider issues of research design more broadly as well. It will assume that students have no mathematical background beyond high school algebra and no experience using computers for data analysis.

This class aims to introduce students to the logic of social scientific inquiry and research design. Although it is a course in political science, our emphasis will be on the science part rather than the political part — we’ll be reading about interesting substantive topics, but only insofar as they can teach us something about ways we can do systematic research. This class will introduce students to a medley of different methods to conduct social scientific research.

This class aims to introduce students to the logic of social scientific inquiry and research design. Although it is a course in political science, our emphasis will be on the science part rather than the political part — we’ll be reading about interesting substantive topics, but only insofar as they can teach us something about ways we can do systematic research. This class will introduce students to a medley of different methods to conduct social scientific research.

This course explores techniques to harness the power of ``big data'' to answer questions related to political science and/or American politics. Students will learn how to use R---a popular open-source programming language---to obtain, clean, analyze, and visualize data. No previous knowledge of R is required.

We will focus on applied problems using real data wherever possible, using R's ``Tidyverse.'' In total, in this course we will cover concepts such as reading data in various formats (including ``cracking'' atypical government data sources and pdf documents); web scraping; data joins; data manipulation and cleaning (including string variables and regular expressions); data mining; making effective data visualizations; using data to make informed prediction, and basic text analysis. We will also cover programming basics including writing functions and loops in R. Finally, we will discuss how to use R Markdown to communicate our results effectively to outside audiences. Class sessions are applied in nature, and our exercises are designed around practical problems: Predicting election outcomes, determining the author of anonymous texts, and cleaning up messy government data so we can use it.