Teaching

This course is designed to provide undergraduate students with an introduction to important concepts and methods in comparative politics. The second half of the course is focused on the causes and consequences of democratic erosion as part of a cross-university collaboration. By the end of the course, students should be able to:

1. Apply the logic and tools of comparative political analysis.
2. Show introductory knowledge on a broad range of topics in comparative politics, particularly theories of democratic accountability, democratization, and democratic decline.

This course provides students with an intuition for the statistical methods that underlie the social and behavioral sciences. Students will read, interpret, and create visualizations of data which are principled and based on factual evidence. Students will also learn to manipulate and “wrangle” data to generate complex visualizations of real-world data and interpret these visualizations through the programming language R.
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
– Understand quantitative data as presented in empirical reports in the social sciences
– Understand the rationale behind decisions relating to the management, summarization, and presentation of data
– Read, clean, wrangle, and export data files
– Produce graphs, figures, tables, using the programming language R
– Describe patterns in data, draw and justify conclusions drawn from data

This course is designed to provide advanced undergraduate students with an overview to important research topics in the politics and political economy of development in modern Africa. Topics include the legacies of colonial rule, state formation, state failure and conflict, democratization and democratic erosion, corruption and political accountability, and the role of foreign aid. Readings draw from comparative politics, political economy, history, geography, and development economics. The course puts an emphasis on research design and evaluating causal claims.

How can we change the world for the better? We may want to save water, reduce police abuse, reduce transmission of infectious disease, or enable small businesses to grow. In this course, we learn about a set of important social problems, and ideas from political science on how to address them. We do not only focus on these ideas, but how we would know if they work. We explore how randomized control trials, also known as A/B tests and randomized experiments, can be used to test these ideas. Students come away able to read a paper reporting on a randomized trial and evaluate the quality of its evidence. By the end of the course, students should be able to: 1) Describe what a randomized trial is and what we can learn with the tool; 2) Read and critically evaluate evidence related to causal relationships; 3) Use R to analyze data from a randomized trial; and 4) Conduct a small-scale randomized trial.

This is the second of three courses in our first-year methods sequence for doctoral students in political science. This course builds on the material learned in POL 211. In 211, you learned foundational skills to “think clearly with data”, including data generating processes, probability distributions, estimands versus estimators, and the potential outcomes framework. You also began to build your practical data analysis skills. In 212, we will expand on many of those ideas and get a hands-on introduction to regression analysis. You will learn to collect and work with data, with an emphasis on computational techniques and tools. We will also begin to build an understanding of core concepts in causal inference and regression analysis, including the potential outcomes framework, linear regression, and statistical uncertainty. In 213, you will deepen your understanding of the OLS model and developing a deeper understanding of the theory of inference, diagnostics, and model assessment.

This seminar introduces doctoral students to some of the central topics, concepts, and questions in the field of comparative politics. The course is designed to familiarize students with the field as it stands today and will focus on relatively recent contributions. This course does not pretend to cover the most important or foundational articles and books in the field. We will focus on what I see as the frontier of research being done by political scientists and scholars from related disciplines. The most important goals of the course are to stimulate students’ curiosity, to give a broad overview of the range of methodological approaches that can be used to tackle important questions, and to motivate students to identify areas where there is potential for making a contribution to the discipline. However, students specialized in comparative politics should become familiar with the more classical, foundational articles and books throughout their Ph.D. program.

We will not focus on any specific region of the world. Rather, throughout the semester, we will analyze substantive topics that are central to the current debates in comparative politics, including: the importance and origins of institutions, democratic and authoritarian regimes, the role of the state, political representation and accountability, violence, social and political change, and survival of democracy.

This course is designed to prepare advanced graduate students to do research on political behavior in the developing world. The primary goal of the course is to provide an overview of the literature on a handful of areas of active research on violence, protest, clientelism, identity and cooperation, and political participation. Class discussions are organized around questions such as, Why do individuals participate in violence? When do citizens mobilize to demand public services from politicians? and How do historical events shape current behavior? For each research area, we will read a mix of foundational texts and recent research that demonstrates how innovative research design can shed new light on foundational questions in comparative politics.

In addition to providing an overview of some substantive topics, this course aims to provide insights on how to launch new empirical research projects in comparative political behavior. To this end, we will 1) have guest speaker(s) who will discuss how they designed and implemented research projects as graduate students on 1-2 of the topics covered, 2) replicate and extend the analysis of a research paper, and 3) write and workshop a short research proposal. The goal of these exercises and one focus of the class discussions will be to go “behind the scenes” of research on the topics covered.