Issues in Comparative Politics

A graduate-style seminar that treats comparative politics not as a survey of country cases but as a problem-driven field — asking how regimes, parties, identities, and economies actually take the shape they do, using book-length works (Polanyi, Berman, Kitschelt, Svolik, Bayat, etc.) as the unit of engagement rather than textbook chapters. You'll read a major monograph roughly every week or two, write response papers, sit a midterm, and produce a book review plus presentation, so the real work is sustained close reading and argument reconstruction. It sits at the top end of the POLS sequence, sharpening the theoretical and methodological instincts you'd carry into a thesis or graduate study.