Democracy, Development, and Human Rights

A graduate seminar in comparative politics asking how regime type, economic development, and human rights actually interact in practice — whether democracy causes growth, whether wealth stabilizes freedom, and why oil, inequality, and globalization keep complicating the story. You'll read original journal articles each week, debate competing theories and their measurement problems in class, and write two short essays plus midterm and final essays that stake out positions on the evidence. It assumes you can read empirical political science critically, and it pairs well with methods coursework since most of the readings hinge on cross-national data and causal inference about cases from Latin America to the Middle East.