Topics: spatial models of voting, redistributive voting, games, presidential campaign strategy, congress, congressional bureaucratic relations, and coverage of political issues by the mass media. Unites to be arranged any term.prerequisites: advanced political science and instructor’s permission. This courseoffers advanced undergraduates the opportunity to pursue research in political science individually or in a small group. Prerequisites: political science major completion of a required ps course for major. Development and presentation of a major research paper on a topic of interest in political science or political economy. The project will be one that the student has initiated in a political science course he or she has already taken from the ps courses required for the ps option, numbered above 101. This course will be devoted to understanding research in political science, and basic political science methodology.

Students will be exposed to current research journals, work to understand a research literature of interest, and work to formulate a research project. fulfills the institute scientific writing requirement. instructor: ordeshook ps 101. Units to be determined by arrangement with the instructor offered by announcement.

A consideration of existing literature on the voting behavior of the citizen, and an examination of theoretical and empirical views of the strategies followed by the parties. Introduction to the us congress with an emphasis on thinking analytically and empirically about the determinants of congressional behavior. Among the factors examined are the characteristics and incentives of legislators, rules governing the legislative process and internal organization, separation of powers, political parties, congressional elections, and interest group influence. Theory, practice, and consequence of political representation in the electoral context. Topics include the concept of representation how the degree of representation of various groups and interests such as ethnic and racial is affected by different electoral rules and the impact of representation of minorities on public policies.

The primary focus is on the empirical literature pertaining to the united states, but examples from other countries are also examined for comparative purposes. This course will examine the historical origins of several regulatory agencies and trace their development over the past century or so. It will also investigate a number of current issues in regulatory politics, including the great discrepancies that exist in the cost effectiveness of different regulations, and the advent of more market based approaches to regulations instead of traditional command and control. The aim of this course is to introduce students to theoretical and applied research in political economy. The focus will be on formal analysis of the strategic interaction between rational individuals, political institutions, and economic outcomes. In this course, students will learn the basic methodologies behind social science survey analysis: self completion and interview assisted surveying, sampling theory, questionnaire design, theories of survey response, and the basic analysis and presentation of survey results will be covered, as well as contemporary research in survey methodology and public opinion analysis. Students will be involved in the active collection and analysis of survey data and the presentation of survey results students will be required to complete an independent project involving some aspect of survey methodology.

Axiomatic structure and behavioral interpretations of game theoretic and social choice models and models of political processes based on them. The course will study, for example, what role money plays in elections and why incumbents do better at the polls. It will also examine how electoral rules impact the behavior both of candidates and voters, and will explore some of the consequences of legislative elections, such as divided government. The politics of non american political systems with an emphasis on their electoral systems and methodologies for assessing their compliance with democratic standards. Students will be expected to develop data sets appropriate to analyzing elections in individual countries and offering an assessment of the pervasiveness of fraud in those elections. The student’s grade will be determined by a final written report reporting the methodology and results of their analysis.

Topics include the struggle to establish a viable fiscal system in the early days of the republic, the ante bellum tariff, the pension politics of the post civil war era, the growth of the american welfare state, and the battle over tax and entitlement reform in the 1980s and 1990s. Prerequisites: ec 11 or ps 12 this course is an introduction to non cooperative game theory, with applications to political science and economics. It covers the theories of normal form games and extensive form games, and introduces solutions concepts that are relevant for situations of complete and incomplete information. Applications are to auction theory and asymmetric information in trading models, cheap talk and voting rules in congress, among many others.

Essays In Jewish And Comparative Legal History

an introduction to writing in political science by dave roberts, ur writing fellow 07 1.1 introduction 1.2 goals of writing in political science 1.3 characteristics of writing especially valued in political science 1.1 introduction writing is a diverse form of expression. As such, it is sometimes difficult to express ones thoughts when purposes and audiences vary. One might then be inclined to believe that a writing guide for a single discipline in this case, political science would avoid these problems. Unfortunately, things are not so simple: purposes and audiences vary widely within disciplines, not simply between them.

Even within a single class, students can be expected to write for different purposes or audiences. The resources in this writing guide provide some useful we hope! assistance to students, whether they are attempting to find their way through unfamiliar assignments or hone their papers for maximum effectiveness. 1.2 goals of writing in political science the political science curriculum is diverse accordingly, the goals of composition within it are similarly diverse. Despite these differing goals, there is a simple and intuitive way to classify the goal of the assignments you will face as a political science student. Put simply, assignments vary by their level of analysis: some call for description, others demand explanation, while still others require prescription. In writing briefs for a constitutional law course, for instance, your only goal consists of describing the facts of a case and the issue at hand, the legal rule or principle in place, the application of this rule to the case, and the finding of the case.

Though description is often thought of as the simplest task, it does not follow that it is always the easiest. Consider again the legal brief assignment: the facts of cases are sometimes extremely complicated, as are the legal principles being applied to these facts. Nor should students take lightly the task accurate description: describing information is often important in its own right moreover, description is the foundation upon which explanation and prescription rely. The question often associated with this goal is, why? in a public policy research paper, for example, a common paper assignment is to explain the success or failure of a policy.

Beyond describing the policy as a success or failure, you are asked how and why this outcome occurred. Explanation can also be thought of in terms of causation: the policy failed because it failed to address. As the name implies, these assignments call for prescriptions about policies, theories, courses of action, or similar topics about which you are likely to write. These assignments, also called normative, ask, what should be? rather than, what is? in these assignments, you still describe the topic, explain how it came about, but then go on to use these two previous levels to formulate a course of action. 1.3 characteristics of writing especially valued in political science although the following qualities of writing are valued across many disciplines, political science assignments and faculty stress these characteristics with particular emphasis.

1.3.1 all or nearly all political science assignments call for persuasion of some kind. While this is most apparent in prescriptive assignments where you are asked to advocate a theory or policy, one should not neglect the persuasive element to descriptive and explanatory assignments. The scientific aspect of political science, for instance, puts strong emphasis on data and measurement.