• JAPANESE POLITICS AND SOCIETY

    This course introduces several important aspects of postwar Japanese politics and society, including elections, political parties, the policymaking process, and security policy. We will examine the ways in which scholars have attempted to explain important events in these arenas over time, as well as major recent changes. In the process of evaluating these changes, we will learn: (i) important actors in Japanese politics (e.g., politicians and political parties, bureaucrats, business firms and voters), (ii) the positions that different actors take over policy issues, as well as the sources and evolution of these policy preferences over time, and (iii) the role of political institutions such as electoral systems in structuring political behavior.

    At each juncture, these subjects (party systems, institutions, voter behavior, etc) will be compared to counterparts in other advanced industrialized democracies, such as the US and polities in Western Europe, with the aim of discerning how Japan fits in with the rest of the world, and how the Japanese experience deepens our general understanding of various political phenomena in general.

  • INTRODUCTION TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS

    Comparative politics is the field within political science that tries to explain why countries vary in their domestic political institutions, the political behavior of their leaders and citizens, their levels and rates of development, and their public policies.

    In this introductory course, we tackle a range of questions that are of central concern to comparative political scientists – How do states form? How do states become nations? Why do some countries become democracies and not others? What is democracy good for? How do institutions affect the political process? What are the causes of civil wars? The goal is not just to acquaint you with these questions and the existing debates that surround them, but also to help you begin to develop the tools needed to evaluate different claims as you encounter them, and to reach your own reasoned conclusions leveraging the evidence at hand.

  • INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF EAST ASIA

    This course introduces the broader topic of East Asian international relations by taking an in-depth look at the specific postwar relationship between two of the region’s most important players – Japan and the United States. At its core, the course is a survey of US-Japan relations with a particular emphasis on the areas of economic trade and military security.

    However, in each of these areas we will also examine how Japan’s East Asian neighbors have influenced the bilateral relationship over time and in doing so we will gain a basic understanding of how regional dynamics are impacted by other major players such as China and the Koreas. While addressing a number of specific case studies of policymaking and political maneuvering in Japan and the United States, this targeted focus will allow us to investigate how both domestic and international forces interact to shape outcomes of relations between the two countries and in the region as a whole.

  • POLITICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH METHODS

    Why do political scientists call themselves scientists? What can we learn about the world of politics using the tools of scientific inquiry? This course will introduce students to the basic principles of research design, and show how they are applied to data by researchers in the real world to answer very important questions. The class surveys the fundamentals of causal inference, basic principles of statistical analysis, and core research methodologies used throughout the discipline.

    Though hands-on practical training, students will acquire many of the basic tools needed to evaluate other scholarly work as well as design and implement their own original studies. We will explore a wide range of methods, including experiments, statistical analysis of large data sets, and qualitative case studies. The readings combine textbook explanations of the methods with examples of how they are put into practice. Through a set of homework assignments, you will be asked to conduct your own analysis of a question of your choosing, using a dataset that will be provided to you. In order to work with the data, you will learn how to operate statistics programs (SPSS & STATA) which are used by scholars and practitioners in both the social and natural sciences. The two primary goals of the course are:

    1. To provide students with analytic tools that will help them understand how political scientists do research.

    2. To improve students’ ability to pose and answer research questions on their own.