This course is designed to introduce students to comparative political analysis. How can the political behavior, circumstances, institutions, and dynamic patterns of change that people experience in very different societies be analyzed using the same set of concepts and theories? Key themes include nationalism, political culture, democratization, authoritarianism, and the nature of protracted conflict.

Freshmen seminars are small, substantive courses taught by members of the faculty and open only to freshmen. These seminars offer an excellent opportunity to explore areas not represented in high school curricula and to establish relationships with faculty members around areas of mutual interest. See www.college.upenn.edu/admissions/freshmen.php

This seminar introduces students to the nation's trillion-dollar tax-exempt sector with a focus on religious nonprofit organizations including congregations and other so-called faith-based institutions. Among the topics it explores are new and old questions surrounding church-state relations, the role of relgion in American politics, empirical "faith factor" research, and attempts to estimate the social costs and benefits associated with diverse religious nonprofit organizations.

An important strain within contemporary political science has been the attempt to explain how power is exercised through the manipulation or exploitation of consciousness, habits, and cultural predispositions. One of the key concepts in the study of these issues is that of "hegemony" --the establishment of particular beliefs as commonsensical presumptions of political life. In this course that notion will be systematically explored. Of particular interest will be how authors who conduct hegemonic analysis cope with the problem of analyzing the effect of what the objects of their analysis, by definition, do not and, in some sense, cannot, think about. Illustrations of hegemonic phenomena and attempts to analyze them will be drawn from a variety of fields, such as political theory, historiography, comparative politics, American politics, rational choice theory,agent based modeling, and epistemology.

In this course the Arab-Israeli dispute from 1948 to the present will serve as a vehicle for understanding how domestic and global political processes interact to shape, contain, or aggravate Middle Eastern wars between states and non-state actors. Particular stress will be placed on understanding how wars affect international politics in states and political organizations and how ideological and structural features of states and organizations find expression in wars and complicate or enable the search for peach. In addition, the key features of the conflict will be interpreted as both a clash between the political interests of national and/or religious groups and as a reflection of global political power struggles. Attention will be given toward the end of the course to alternative ideas about possible resolution of the conflict as well as to the increasingly prominent argument that, in this case, there is no solution.

In this course the Arab-Israeli dispute from 1948 to the present will serve as a vehicle for understanding how domestic and global political processes interact to shape, contain, or aggravate Middle Eastern wars between states and non-state actors. Particular stress will be placed on understanding how wars affect international politics in states and political organizations and how ideological and structural features of states and organizations find expression in wars and complicate or enable the search for peach. In addition, the key features of the conflict will be interpreted as both a clash between the political interests of national and/or religious groups and as a reflection of global political power struggles. Attention will be given toward the end of the course to alternative ideas about possible resolution of the conflict as well as to the increasingly prominent argument that, in this case, there is no solution.