Courses

Introduction to government through the American experience. Concentrates on analysis of the institutions of government and politics as mechanisms of social control. (AM)

Introduction to the basic concepts and practice of international politics. (IR)

For description, see PHIL 2420

For description, see HIST 2711

For description, see NES 2674

This course focuses on political campaigns, a central feature of American democracy. We will examine how they work and the conditions under which they affect citizens’ decisions. The course looks at campaign strategies and attributes of candidates, as well as how and whether they affect key outcomes such as the decision to turn out, who to vote for, and whether to spend money and volunteer time helping favored candidates win.

The major political actors, institutions, and political styles in large American cities: mayors, city councils, bureaucracies, ethnic and racial minorities, urban machine politics and the municipal reform movement. The implications of these political forces for policies pertaining to urban poverty, homelessness, and criminal justice.

The United States stands alone among Western, industrialized countries with its persistent, high rates of incarceration, long sentences, and continued use of the death penalty. In order to pave the way toward the massive use of incarceration, ideas must develop about categories of people considered to be outlaws and about the relationship of these groups to those considered to be law-abiding. Our purpose in this course is to understand how social and political actors, through a range of categories and understandings involving ideas about rights, race, and responsibility, have enabled and/or deterred the rapid expansion of incarceration.

This class is intended to provoke some hard thinking about the relationship of committed “outsiders” and advocates of change to the experience of crime, punishment, and incarceration and to the men we meet at Auburn/Cayuga who have been in most instances long-confined to prison. We will read, think, talk and write about the incarceration experience and about policies that shape this experience. We will also think self-reflexively about the character of the ‘outsider’s’ educational, political, and personal engagement. What are the motivations and what are the goals of such engagement? What are the anticipated outcomes – personal, social, educational, political, and/or moral and perhaps spiritual? In an effort to delve deeply into these questions, we will read a broad selection of work on incarceration, itself, as well as on the experience of what has come to be termed service learning or civic engagement.

Prerequisite: participation as a Teaching Assistant in the CPEP program in Auburn or Cayuga or work in a juvenile or other correctional facility.

The purpose of this course is to analyze authoritarian leaders and political systems. We will focus on some historical cases, such as Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Haile Selassie’s regime in Ethiopia, and contemporary cases, such as Zimbabwe, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia. In addition, we will analyze why, when and how authoritarian regimes endure, and why they fall.

Unemployed auto workers in Detroit and the wood stoves in New England signal an important change in America’s relation to the world economy. This course characterizes these changes in a number of fields (trade, money, energy, technology), explains them as the result of the political choices of a declining imperial power that differs substantially from the choices of other states (Japan, Germany, Britain, France, the small European states, and Korea), and examines their consequences for America and international politics.

For description, see GERST 3570

For description, see PHIL 1410

A survey of American political thought from the Eighteenth Century to the present. Particular attention will be devoted to the persistence of liberal individualism in the American tradition. Politicians, pamphleteers and poets will provide the reading. The professor offers insightful historical and social context.

This course serves as an introduction to the study of war, peace, and peacemaking. We will study different theories of peace and war from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The course will cover definitions of peace and war, causes of conflict, and modes of conflict prevention and resolution. The concepts will be applied to a range of historical and current conflicts. (IR)

How important are regional groupings, non-governmental organizations, narco-terrorists, ethnic groups and transnational environmental issues, within international politics? These forces seem to be occupying an increasingly central position in the international arena, yet the factors that have caused their rise, and the degree to which they have transformed the face of international politics, are still poorly understood. In this course we will address such issues through exploring how students of international politics have described and explained the emergence of these new forces in the international system during the post-Cold War period. In short, the course will focus on determining the extent to which we are witnessing a transformation of the international political system, and why such a change is (or is not) taking place.

For description, see NES 3697

Does allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons reduce violent crime? Do affirmative action policies at law schools cause black students to fail the bar? Do micro-finance policies make the poor better off? Do the militaries of democracies fight better in the field than those of non-democracies? Does the death penalty save lives by deterring murders? Answering questions like these about the effects of public policy implies cause and effect knowledge: if we implement policy X, we will get effect Y. But on what evidence should answers to questions like these rest? How do you know the answer, and under what conditions can you? Providing robust answers to cause-and-effect questions in a (mostly) non-experimental field like political science is devilishly difficult. In this course, we will learn some of the pitfalls that make it so hard to evaluate evidence in the public policy realm, how to judge the quality of evidence cited in the media, and how to ask the right questions to get the best possible evidence. We’ll do so by working through the evidence supporting “yes” or “no” answers to the questions listed above.

This seminar discusses the extent to which recent changes in U.S. politics can or cannot be understood as indicating an underlying "realignment" in American party politics.

The purpose of this course is two-fold: to hold class discussions based on a common set of weekly assigned readings on contemporary authoritarian regimes and to write a research paper (involving additional work) analyzing authoritarian leaders and authoritarian regimes. The paper can be a case study or a comparison of several regimes, and the focus of the paper can be on the origins, structure, ideology, practices, or collapse of one or more authoritarian regimes.

Human rights pressures on governments come from many directions. We will explore their conceptual foundations and tensions among them by investigating national human rights practices worldwide in relation to international and regional covenants (like the Geneva Conventions, the American Convention on Human Rights, the African [Banjul] Charter); international and regional bodies (like the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the European Court of Human Rights); independent governmental agencies (like the US Helsinki Commission); and NGOs (like Human Rights Watch). We will also look in some detail at human rights monitoring in the former Soviet Union.

Concentrates on history and criticism of U.S. policies and the politics associated with them. Particular attention is given to the origins and character of the regulatory state and the welfare system. (AM)

(Not a senior seminar)

An interdisciplinary seminar that addresses landmark legal cases and political theory debates on the right to education, with special reference to education equity issues, especially racial segregation and court-ordered desegregation; voluntary integrative enrollment schemes; affirmative action in higher education; school funding and state court litigation pertaining to the education amendments in the state constitutions; and gender equality. Our readings will be primarily drawn out of a law casebook, but we will also read a major public policy text and a legal scholars’ anthology.

Americans, especially politicians, love to cite the founders as the source of all wisdom. It is a peculiarly American reflex. This seminar explores the ideas and ideals of the founding generations, looking, for example, at their notions of the role of government, the importance of property and the place of religion in public life. (PT)

For description, see ASRC 4603

(Not a senior seminar)

For description, see FREN 4330

(Not a senior seminar)

An inquiry into the moral and political importance of equality, liberty, and democracy, emphasizing deep issues raised in this year's U.S. presidential election. Six sessions will be led by eminent scholars who will come to Cornell as part of the Ethics and Public Life series, “Deep Issues of the 2012 Elections.” They are Jacob Hacker (Political Science, Yale), Larry Bartels (Political Science, Vanderbilt), David Schmidtz (Philosophy, Arizona), Harry Brighouse (Philosophy, Wisconsin-Madison), Doug McAdam (Sociology, Stanford), Hilary Hoynes (Economics, UC Davis). The other sessions will investigate enduring perspectives on these topics in political philosophy, including work by John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin, John Stuart Mill, and Edmund Burke.

For description, see GERST 4150 (NOT A SENIOR SEMINAR)

For description, see SHUM 4864

(Not a senior seminar)

This course focuses primarily on China’s evolving role in both Asia and world politics. It does so based on the premise that what China does in Asia may not necessarily be the sole determinant of the type of security order that will prevail there, but, that it does have a profound influence on the region (and, potentially, on the global order as well). In other words, in order to gain an understanding of the state of security issues in Asia today the seminar attempts to come to terms with the evolving nature of China’s foreign policy and national security strategies. The course then concentrates on the most influential academic work on China’s foreign relations and national security policies that has been published since the end of the Cold War.

Prerequisite: acceptance into honors program. Designed to support thesis writers in the honors program during the early stages of their research projects.

This is a seminar investigating how domestic politics - elections, public opinion, elite politics in authoritarian regimes, etc - affect states’ foreign policy decisions. The course will involve a survey of the extensive scholarly literature on the subject, focusing primarily on security politics but also with applications to topics in IPE. (IR)

The goal of this course is to introduce probability and statistics as fundamental building blocks for quantitative political analysis, with regression modeling as a focal application. We will begin with a brief survey of probability theory, types of measurements, and descriptive statistics. The bulk of the course then addresses inferential statistics, covering in detail sampling, methods for estimating unknown quantities, and methods for evaluating competing hypotheses. We will see how to formally assess estimators, and some basic principles that help to ensure optimality. Along the way, we will introduce the use of regression models to specify social scientific hypotheses, and employ our expanding repertoire of statistical concepts to understand and interpret estimates based on our data. Weekly exercises require students to deploy the methods both ‘by hand’ so they can grasp the basic mathematics, and by computer to meet the conceptual demands of non-trivial examples and prepare for independent research. Some time will be spent reviewing algebra, calculus, and elementary logic, as well as introducing computer statistical packages.

The major issues, approaches, and institutions of American government and the various subfields of American politics are introduced. The focus is on both substantive information and theoretical analysis, plus identification of big questions that have animated the field. (AM)

For description, see ENGL 6710

The topic for the field seminar in political thought this year will be the Enlightenment. We will read and discuss central texts of 18th-century Enlightenment thought, including texts by Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Condorcet, Hume, Smith, Burke, Paine, and Kant. We will explore the political dilemmas to which these Enlightenment texts responded—such as political theology, feudalism, and absolutist monarchy—and critically evaluate their attempts to establish a more secular, rational, and democratic form of politics. Was there a single Enlightenment? How do we characterize it? How do we assess its political, moral, and philosophical legacies?

The United States Congress will be examined: first, as a "closed system" in which institutional arrangements decisively apportion political power; and, second, as the product of electoral and social forces outside the institution. Emphasis will be placed on the historical relationship between institutional growth and state formation, parliamentary rules as both arrangements within which the "rational choices" of legislators are played out and as deliberate, constructions and allocations of political influence, and the use of legislative behavior as evidence in the analysis of fundamental principles of politics. Because the literature on the lower chamber is generally more rich, the House of Representatives will receive greater attention than the Senate.

This course is designed to provide doctoral students in political science with an introduction to experiment and survey design. Students will discuss all major types of experiments (e.g. field, lab, survey, natural, and economics), methods for analyzing experimental data, and methods for designing questionnaires that appear in experiments. The goal will be to convey a rich appreciation for the possibilities that experimental research offers, as well as a thoughtful understanding of the shortcomings of this research method. In addition, students will gain valuable knowledge in questionnaire design that can be used not only in experiments but in all forms of research that involve surveys (such as focus groups, one-on-one interviews, etc.).

This seminar is designed to introduce Ph.D. students to some of the major topics, theoretical approaches, and empirical findings in the relationship between people, states, and markets in advanced industrialized democracies. These include prominently the links between the economy and political behavior and political institutions and economic outcomes. (CP)

This course provides a graduate-level survey of the field of comparative politics, introducing students to classic works as well as recent contributions that build upon those works. Readings will draw from leading theoretical approaches—including structural, institutional, rational choice, and cultural perspectives—and cover a broad range of substantive topics, such as democratization, authoritarianism, states and civil society, political economy, and political participation and representation.

This course provides an introduction to the public opinion literature. Special attention will be paid to the determinants of political attitudes and their role in the larger political system. (AM)

This course provides an introduction to methodological and practical aspects of using various field methods to develop and test theory. Covered topics include ethics and human subject issues, case selection, ethnography, participant observation, interviewing, survey methods, and field experiments. Students will develop field research strategies for their own projects. The course assumes a grasp of research design at the graduate level.

Americans, especially politicians, love to cite the founders as the source of all wisdom. It is a peculiarly American reflex. This seminar explores the ideas and ideals of the founding generations, looking, for example, at their notions of the role of government, the importance of property and the place of religion in public life. (PT)

An interdisciplinary seminar that addresses landmark legal cases and political theory debates on the right to education, with special reference to education equity issues, especially racial segregation and court-ordered desegregation; voluntary integrative enrollment schemes; affirmative action in higher education; school funding and state court litigation pertaining to the education amendments in the state constitutions; and gender equality. Our readings will be primarily drawn out of a law casebook, but we will also read a major public policy text and a legal scholars’ anthology.

An inquiry into the moral and political importance of equality, liberty, and democracy, emphasizing deep issues raised in this year's U.S. presidential election. Six sessions will be led by eminent scholars who will come to Cornell as part of the Ethics and Public Life series, “Deep Issues of the 2012 Elections.” They are Jacob Hacker (Political Science, Yale), Larry Bartels (Political Science, Vanderbilt), David Schmidtz (Philosophy, Arizona), Harry Brighouse (Philosophy, Wisconsin-Madison), Doug McAdam (Sociology, Stanford), Hilary Hoynes (Economics, UC Davis). The other sessions will investigate enduring perspectives on these topics in political philosophy, including work by John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin, John Stuart Mill, and Edmund Burke.

The seminar will examine the writings of two political theorists central to the critical re-thinking of concepts of political economy, government/governmentality and (ir) rationality. We will be reading canonical works of Marx and Foucault, investigating their interrelation and their theoretical reception by Althusser, Gramsci, Derrida, and Deleuze, among others.

An exploration into a range of contemporary theories and research topics in the field of international political economy. The seminar will cover different theoretical perspectives and a number of substantive problems.

This course focuses primarily on China’s evolving role in both Asia and world politics. It does so based on the premise that what China does in Asia may not necessarily be the sole determinant of the type of security order that will prevail there, but, that it does have a profound influence on the region (and, potentially, on the global order as well). In other words, in order to gain an understanding of the state of security issues in Asia today the seminar attempts to come to terms with the evolving nature of China’s foreign policy and national security strategies. The course then concentrates on the most influential academic work on China’s foreign relations and national security policies that has been published since the end of the Cold War.

This is a seminar investigating how domestic politics - elections, public opinion, elite politics in authoritarian regimes, etc - affect states’ foreign policy decisions. The course will involve a survey of the extensive scholarly literature on the subject, focusing primarily on security politics but also with applications to topics in IPE. (IR)

Colloquium is the weekly seminar series hosted by the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA). It is also a required, one-credit course for al CIPA Fellows, and is graded S/U based on attendance. The colloquium series is a collaborative effort between the CIPA Colloquium Committee and the faculty and staff of CIPA.

Concentrates on history and criticism of U.S. policies and the politics associated with them. Particular attention is given to the origins and character of the regulatory state and the welfare system. (AM)