Consult department for detailed descriptions. More than one course may be taken in a given semester. Recent titles have included: Sustainable Environmental Policy & Global Politics; Shakespeare and Political Theory.

Consult department for detailed descriptions. More than one course may be taken in a given semester. Recent titles have included: Sustainable Environmental Policy & Global Politics; Shakespeare and Political Theory.

This course will focus primarily on epidoes of external intervention by Great Powers in the politics of Middle Eastern states. We shall begin by examining the emergence of the Middle Eastern state system after the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire in the early part of the 20th century. This discussion will provide opportunities to develop key concepts in the study of international politics and will serve as crucial historical background. We shall then turn our attention to the primary concern of the course - a systematic consideration of the motives, operational results, and long-term implications of a number of important examples of intervention by Great Powers in the Middle East. Among the episodes to be considered will be British policies toward the end of World War I, in Palestine in the 1930s, and, along with the French, in Suez in 1956. Soviet intervention in the first Arab-Israeli war, in 1948, will be analyzed along with Soviet policies toward Egypt in the early 1970s. American intervention in Iran in 1953 and in the Gulf War in 1991 will also be examined.

Designed to complement a policy internship, this two credit course will focus on content and skills that are likely to be useful in typical Washington offices. Students will develop literacy on the most pressing domestic policy topics and will work on writing and presentation skills. All students will participate in a public policy internship for at least ten hours a week.

This course is designed as a follow-up to PSCI 1800. In that class students learn a great deal about how to work with individual data sets in R: cleaning, tidying, merging, describing and visualizing data. PSCI 1801 shifts focus to the ultimate goal of data science: making inferences about the world based on the small sample of data that we have. Using a methodology that emphasizes intuition and simulation over mathematics, this course will cover the key statistical concepts of probability, sampling, distributions, hypothesis testing, and covariance. The ultimate goal of the class is for students to have the knowledge and ability to perform, customize, and explain bivariate and multivariate regression. Students who have not taken PSCI-1800 should have basic familiarity with R, including working with vectors and matrices, basic summary statistics, visualizations, and for() loops.

Why are some countries rich and some poor? Why are some households rich and some poor? This course introduces students to the intellectual tools for understanding why development varies across the globe and the practical tools for designing and evaluating policies aimed at alleviating poverty. To that end, the course is organized into three parts. The first part focuses on the big picture: the macroeconomic and political foundations for sustained economic growth, including historical legacies, technological innovation and political institutions. The second part focuses on the micro-picture: the household-level dynamics of poverty and development, including access to food and credit, the role of health and education, the transition from village to city life, and day-to-day governance. The third part of the course introduces students to the practicalities of designing and evaluating the efficacy of governance and poverty relief interventions and policies. The focus will be on the use of field experiments to study interventions to promote better governance and household wellbeing.

Jobs in data science are quickly proliferating throughout nearly every industry in the American economy. The purpose of this class is to build the statistics, programming, and qualitative skills that are required to excel in data science. The substantive focus of the class will largely be on topics related to politics and elections, although the technical skills can be applied to any subject matter.

This undergraduate seminar is for advanced undergraduates seeking to make sense of the upsurge in racist activism, combined with authoritarian populism and neo-fascist mobilization in many parts of the world. Contemporary manifestations of the phenomena noted above will be examined in a comparative and historical perspective to identify patterns and anomalies across various multiple nation-states. France, The United States, Britain, and Italy will be the countries examined.

Understanding and interpreting large datasets is increasingly central in political and social science. From polling, to policing, to economic inequality, to international trade, knowing how to work with data will allow you to shed light on a wide variety of substantive topics. This is a first course in a 4-course sequence that teaches students how to work with and analyze data. This class focuses on data acquisition, management, and visualization, the core skills needed to do data science. Leaving this course, students will be able to acquire, input, format, analyze, and visualize various types of political and social science data using the statistical programming language R. While no background in statistics or political science is required, students are expected to be generally familiar with contemporary computing environments (e.g. know how to use a computer) and have a willingness to learn a variety of data science tools. Leaving this class, students will be prepared to deepen their R skills in PSCI 3800, and then use their R skills to learn statistics in PSCI 1801 and 3801. They will also be ready to use their R skills in courses in other disciplines as well.

How do the Constitution's checks and balances work in practice? And where are they not working? This course examines the fault lines between Washington's two most powerful institutions - Congress and the President - how they clash, and where they work together. Students learn how Congress and the President share and compete for power in lawmaking, spending, investigations, nominations, foreign policy, and impeachment. The course is designed to foster skills in formulating strategies for conducting policy in an environment of institutions competing for power.