Advanced Topics in Political Science

Advanced political science investigates specialized subfields, methodological toolkits, and empirical puzzles that build upon undergraduate foundational knowledge. Learners are encouraged to choose one or two tracks aligned with their intellectual or professional goals rather than attempting to complete every track sequentially.

Political Behavior, Psychology & Public Opinion

Investigates how cognitive heuristics, affective identities, voter mobilization strategies, and evolving communication channels drive mass democratic behavior.

Partisanship, Polarization & Social Identity: Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (Lilliana Mason) - Analyzes how partisan affiliation has evolved into a megasocial identity that fuels affective polarization regardless of actual policy consensus.

Mass Political Behavior & Opinion Formation: Graduate Seminar in American Politics: Political Behavior (MIT OpenCourseWare / Ariel White) - A comprehensive graduate syllabus providing readings, analytical assignments, and lecture guidance on ideology, turnout, racial attitudes, and opinion-policy linkages.

Mass Political Behavior & Opinion Formation: The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (John R. Zaller) - The foundational theoretical text establishing the Receive-Accept-Sample (RAS) model to explain how citizens absorb political information and construct survey responses.

Voter Turnout & Field Mobilization: Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout (Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber) - A rigorous, evidence-based field experimental guide demonstrating what voter mobilization tactics work, what fails, and how campaign contact alters turnout.

Nationalism & Identity Construction: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Benedict Anderson) - The seminal text tracing how print capitalism and administrative vernaculars constructed the nation as an imagined, sovereign political community.

Media Choice & Digital Polarization: Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections (Markus Prior) - Demonstrates how the proliferation of media options widened the political knowledge gap between news junkies and entertainment seekers, altering electoral outcomes.

International Security & Conflict Studies

Examines the strategic logic of violence, crisis bargaining, arms escalation, and institutional cooperation in the international system.

Causes of War & Conflict Escalation: Causes and Prevention of War (MIT OpenCourseWare / Stephen Van Evera) - A rigorous course covering windows of vulnerability, elite misperception, offense-defense balance, and historical drivers of major interstate wars.

Nuclear Strategy & Deterrence: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels) - The definitive historical and analytical survey of nuclear doctrine, second-strike stability, flexible response, and modern strategic deterrence.

Civil Wars & Political Violence: The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Stathis N. Kalyvas) - A landmark study examining micro-level violence, showing how selective and indiscriminate coercion stem from information asymmetries and territorial control rather than raw ethnic hatred.

International Organizations & Norms: Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore) - Demonstrates how international bureaucracies exercise independent normative authority while generating their own organizational dysfunctions and unintended policy outcomes.

Foreign Policy Decision-Making: Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow) - The foundational monograph comparing the Rational Actor, Organizational Process, and Bureaucratic Politics models of national security decision-making.

Foreign Policy Decision-Making: American Foreign Policy: Past, Present, and Future (MIT OpenCourseWare / Stephen Van Evera) - Complements theoretical models of decision-making with historical analysis of grand strategy, regional interventions, and grand strategic debates.

Comparative Political Economy & Development

Investigates how domestic institutions, structural inequality, regimes, and resource distribution interact to shape economic and political trajectories.

Political Economy of Development: Political Economy and Economic Development (MIT OpenCourseWare / Benjamin Olken and Esther Duflo) - Evaluates empirical research and field experiments on corruption, institutional design, collective action, and the political drivers of development.

Political Economy of Development: Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson) - Uses formal game-theoretic models to analyze democratization as a credible institutional commitment by elites to redistribute wealth under the threat of revolution.

Varieties of Capitalism & Welfare States: Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, Eds.) - The seminal framework classifying advanced market economies into Liberal Market Economies and Coordinated Market Economies based on institutional complementarities across labor, finance, and training.

Authoritarian Politics & Dictatorships: The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Milan W. Svolik) - Models the core strategic dilemmas of authoritarian regimes: power-sharing among ruling elites and authoritarian control over the broader population.

The Resource Curse & Rentier States: The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations (Michael L. Ross) - A systematic empirical analysis demonstrating how oil wealth bolsters autocracies, increases conflict vulnerability, and depresses female labor force participation.

Public Policy, Bureaucracy & Governance

Analyzes the lifecycle of public interventions, including agenda setting, administrative discretion, regulatory oversight, and impact analysis.

Policy Analysis & Evaluation: Methods of Policy Analysis (MIT OpenCourseWare / Karen R. Polenske) - Introduces the foundational analytical approaches, criteria formulation, and real-world case studies necessary for evaluating public policies.

Policy Analysis & Evaluation: Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice (David L. Weimer and Aidan R. Vining) - The standard professional guide on market failure diagnostics, government failure rationales, and systematic problem structuring for public decision-makers.

Policy Agenda-Setting & Focusing Events: Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (John W. Kingdon) - Introduces the Multiple Streams Framework, explaining how problem streams, policy alternatives, and political dynamics align to open fleeting policy windows.

Bureaucratic Behavior & Administrative Discretion: Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (James Q. Wilson) - The classic treatise examining organizational culture, autonomy, agency turf, and the constraints that govern public bureaucracies.

Bureaucratic Behavior & Administrative Discretion: Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service (Michael Lipsky) - Focuses on how frontline public workers (police, teachers, social workers) exercise discretion to manage resource shortages and establish de facto public policy.

Cost-Benefit Analysis in Public Decision-Making: Cost-Benefit Analysis: Concepts and Practice (Anthony E. Boardman, David H. Greenberg, Aidan R. Vining, and David L. Weimer) - A comprehensive guide to time discounting, valuation of non-market goods, shadow pricing, and sensitivity analysis in regulatory evaluation.

Urban Politics & Metropolitan Governance: Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (Clarence N. Stone) - Develops Urban Regime Theory to illustrate how informal governing coalitions between elected officials and business elites build governing capacity in metropolitan centers.

Advanced Political Methodology & Formal Theory

Provides the mathematical and computational tools required for causal inference, strategic modeling, and large-scale political data analysis.

Causal Inference & Observational Research: Causal Inference: The Mixtape (Scott Cunningham) - A freely accessible online textbook covering the potential outcomes framework, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, and regression discontinuity with applied code.

Causal Inference & Observational Research: Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion (Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke) - The definitive practitioner guide detailing identification strategies, regression mechanics, and natural experiments for empirical social scientists.

Experimental Methods in Political Science: Field Experiments: Design, Analysis, and Interpretation (Alan S. Gerber and Donald P. Green) - The canonical manual on designing randomized controlled trials in political science, handling non-compliance, attrition, spillover, and cluster randomization.

Formal Political Theory & Game Theory: Game Theory (MIT OpenCourseWare / Alexander Wolitzky) - An advanced course providing lecture notes and problem sets covering normal and extensive form games, Bayesian games, repeated interaction, and bargaining models.

Formal Political Theory & Game Theory: Political Game Theory: An Introduction (Nolan McCarty and Adam Meirowitz) - A textbook that bridges mathematical game theory with core political institutions, covering spatial voting, legislative bargaining, signaling, and electoral competition.

Computational Social Science & Text as Data: Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age (Matthew J. Salganik) - An open-access text detailing how digital trace data, online experiments, and mass collaboration transform social and political inquiry.

Computational Social Science & Text as Data: Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences (Justin Grimmer, Margaret E. Roberts, and Brandon M. Stewart) - Introduces the foundational workflow for automated text analysis in political science, including classification, dictionary approaches, topic modeling, and causal estimation from text.