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coursepage: seminar comparative politics
Welcome to the the POLS 550! CoursePage for Seminar Comparative Politics, Fall Quarter 2008 • This page contains links (see below) to the course syllabus, lecture notes and materials, supplemental and recommended readings, links to useful resources on the web, and other class-related information (including grades, assignments, and "model papers"). You should refer to this page first whenever you have questions about our class. If you cannot find what you are looking for, please do not hesitate to contact me.
introduction to course
From course syllabus. At the most general level, this seminar is intended to serve as a broad, graduate-level introduction to the study of a major issue in comparative politics, democratization. While introductory, this course is also advanced in that all students are already expected to have a firm grasp of the basic concepts, methods, and theoretical approaches of comparative politics. The focus of this course, to repeat, is the study of democratization. Democracy and democratization, as we will learn, are extremely contentious subjects. Despite intense study over several decades there is still no consensus on how and why democracies emerge, consolidate or breakdown. Indeed, there is even disagreement on what democracy is. This course is designed, in large measure, to examine the various aspects and sides of the debates on democratization. Students are expected to learn and understand the major theoretical arguments and to develop their own informed perspectives. At the same time, this course will focus on further developing, enhancing, and reinforcing students’ comparative analytical and theoretical skills for conducting independent and original scholarly research. In this regard, all students are expected to produce, by the end of the quarter, a professionally written, empirically well-supported, and methodologically and theoretically sophisticated research paper on the topic of democratization (more on this requirement below). Click here to download entire syllabus (pdf document)
WebCT Guidelines and Information (including grading rubric) are available here.
finding course information and materials
Finding course information is easy. Just click on the buttons (or text links) below to go where you want to go. Be advised, however, that some links may not be active and some pages may seem incomplete. For obvious reasons, this is more likely to happen in the beginning of the quarter, but there are times when I will not be able to update my CourseSite on a regular basis.
From course syllabus. At the most general level, this seminar is intended to serve as a broad, graduate-level introduction to the study of a major issue in comparative politics, democratization. While introductory, this course is also advanced in that all students are already expected to have a firm grasp of the basic concepts, methods, and theoretical approaches of comparative politics. The focus of this course, to repeat, is the study of democratization. Democracy and democratization, as we will learn, are extremely contentious subjects. Despite intense study over several decades there is still no consensus on how and why democracies emerge, consolidate or breakdown. Indeed, there is even disagreement on what democracy is. This course is designed, in large measure, to examine the various aspects and sides of the debates on democratization. Students are expected to learn and understand the major theoretical arguments and to develop their own informed perspectives. At the same time, this course will focus on further developing, enhancing, and reinforcing students’ comparative analytical and theoretical skills for conducting independent and original scholarly research. In this regard, all students are expected to produce, by the end of the quarter, a professionally written, empirically well-supported, and methodologically and theoretically sophisticated research paper on the topic of democratization (more on this requirement below). Click here to download entire syllabus (pdf document)
