This course provides students with an introduction to the Comparative Politics subfield (CP) within the discipline of Political Science. Comparative Politics refers to the study of politics within different countries around the world. The focus is on the process of state-building, the emergence and development of major types of political regimes and institutions in relation to key cultural, economic, and historical forces.

Much of the research in CP begins with empirically grounded questions or puzzles. For example: What are the origins of contemporary states? Why some states have more capacity than others? Why are non-state actors capable of challenging state power? When do countries become democratic and when do they become authoritarian nations? What does explain the widespread democratic backsliding in several countries around the world? Under what conditions democratic regime transitions occur? What are the political origins of violence and conflict? When do people organize and mobilize collectively to make demands to the state? This course addresses these and related questions. It prepares students to think comparatively by introducing the wide range of topics, methodologies and research strategies that scholars of CP commonly use.

This writing-intensive course takes a broad as well as detailed approach: the course addresses major themes and concepts in comparative politics as well as specific country case studies. The course has no formal prerequisites and should be valuable to anyone with an interest in comparative politics. Much of the material covered in the course – both readings and lectures – draws from and grounds classic and emerging research in political science, but we also use broader social science research to understand political issues across the globe.