Undergraduate Courses
POLI 212: Introduction to Comparative Politics: Europe and North America
This course is an introduction to fundamental comparative politics concepts and research that focuses on Europe and North America. Comparative politics is a subfield of political science that focuses on the domestic politics of individual countries, not on the interaction among countries in the international arena. Topics covered include: state and state institutions, regimes, form of government, parties and party systems, elections, protest, rule of law, corruption, and regime transitions—democratization and autocratization. You can expect to come away from this course with a solid background in the main concepts and themes in the literature on the politics of Europe and North America. The course will prepare you for advanced courses in European and North American politics, as well as for advanced courses on the substantive themes covered in this course, but focusing on different regions.
DOWNLOAD FALL 2024 syllabusPOLI 330: Law and Courts in Europe
This course is an introduction to judicial politics in Europe. We will examine the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical foundations of the study of the rule of law and the role of courts in European politics. The conceptual discussion will focus on the elements of the rule of law doctrine, the multiple definitions of judicial independence, and the judicialization of politics. We will also cover the dominant theories of the emergence and sustainability of independent courts and the trend towards judicial empowerment. The empirical examples provided will be very diverse: contemporary and historical European experiences, Western and Eastern European states, democratic, authoritarian, and post-authoritarian regime settings, and constitutional and ordinary judiciaries. The aim of the course is for students to come away with both a strong theoretical understanding of how civil law systems function, as well as some concrete factual knowledge of institutional configurations and salient issues in a broad range of European countries.
DOWNLOAD WINTER 2021 syllabusPOLI 331: Politics in East Central Europe
30 years after the collapse of communism, the Central European countries, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Romania have completed their “return to Europe” by joining the European Union and NATO.The other Balkan countries (Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, and Kosovo) are heading along the same trajectory, albeit at different paces.In this course, we will explore the unprecedented “triple transition” in national identities, political institutions, and economic systems that resulted from the breakdown of the Communist regimes in the Soviet Bloc. Some of the questions which this course will address include: Why did Communism collapse? What was the most effective way to transition from a command to a market economy? Why did inter-ethnic strife accompany the breakdown of Yugoslavia, but not Czechoslovakia? Have the transition and consolidation of democratic regimes in the region been completed? Did the EU play a decisive role in the consolidation of democracy in East Central Europe and the Balkans? Are Central European democracies backsliding into authoritarianism? The course will combine due attention to the milestones of post-communist trajectories in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and a survey of theoretical attempts to explain various facets of the “triple transition.”
DOWNLOAD WINTER 2020 syllabusPOLI 451: The European Union
This is a course on the politics of the European Union. It will start with a brief history of European integration ideas and then examine in some detail EU’s institutions and their effects on domestic politics in EU’s current and would-be member states. The theoretical and conceptual focus will be on the process of Europeanization of domestic European politics, rather than on the inter-governmentalism, i.e. relations between states, that motivated earlier studies of European integration. In other words, this is more of a comparative politics course, than an international relations course.
DOWNLOAD FALL 2018 syllabus