Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

This course takes the abstract machinery of comparative politics and forces you to apply it to four very different large states — India, China, Russia, and Mexico — to see how regime type, party structure, economic development, and state-society relations actually play out on the ground. You'll work case by case through the Kesselman/Krieger/Joseph textbook, sit a midterm and final, and do homework that pushes you to use concepts like authoritarian resilience, hybrid regimes, and developmental states as analytical tools rather than vocabulary. It builds on the introductory comparative and political theory courses you've already taken, and it's where the framework-heavy material from earlier years finally pays off, giving you the empirical grounding you'll lean on in upper-level area-studies and IR electives.