Course Listing

Seminar in International Relations and World Politics.

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Despite a flourishing research agenda that increasingly considers complexity and implements theory, foreign aid is often misunderstood by well-meaning policymakers or misconstrued by those with an agenda. This course is designed to provide perspective on the empirical realities of foreign aid. We will dive into the recent research on the causes and effects of aid, especially as they relate to politics and economics. The goal is to understand when foreign aid works and why it sometimes backfires, in order to craft better aid policy as practitioners and better research as scholars.

Seminar

In this course, we will examine conflict, peace, and conflict resolution in contemporary international politics. We will interrogate what we mean by concepts such as peace, conflict, and violence, the different forms that these phenomena can take, and how we can measure their occurrence. We will discuss theoretical explanations for why individuals and groups have disputes, why these actors choose to use violence (or not) in these disputes, and ways in which violent disputes can be resolved peacefully. We will examine these arguments in a detailed study of conflicts in the Middle East, as well as by evaluating published articles that examine the effectiveness of conflict management strategies such as peacekeeping.

A series of critical tools and methods used to analyze environmental policy. This class should be of interest to students who are either considering a career or graduate studies in environmental protection.

Seminar

In this course students will learn how to apply theories of public polic y and evaluate policy effectiveness. Students will examine several policy areas and consider the challenges faced both in implementation and in attempts to evaluate policy outcomes. Students will collect and analyze data related to a policy area of their choice and derive assessments and recommendations from the data. By the end of the course students will have a better understanding of the policy implementation process and of the skills necessary to find evidence for whether or not policy is successful.

Introduction to concepts and practices used for measuring political behavior. Political analysis is an increasingly quantitative field, It is crucial for students of political behavior to learn how to define concepts in concrete ways, examine different methods of measuring concepts, learn how to test the quality of chosen measures, learn how to construct richer measures out of multiple questions, and finally how to examine the relationship between multiple measures of similar concepts. Common pitfalls, errors, bias, and ethics will be examined along the way.

Advanced quantitative methods for political science research.