Introduction to Comparative Politics (Undergraduate)
Comparative political scientists are involved in comparing politics. What does that exactly mean? When you study international relations or US foreign policy, the subject is abundantly clear; however, the study of comparative politics is a broader intellectual space. Topics of investigation include everything from the formation of political parties or democratic governments, to public policy, to military coups, to economic policy, to immigration, and just about anything else “political.” Comparative political scientists even study the impact of international politics on domestic politics and how domestic politics shape foreign policy and international politics. This course focuses on the comparison of political institutions to understand differences in cross-national political outcomes. An underlying assumption to this course is that we can generalize about politics across national boundaries.
Introduction to Comparative Political Economy (Undergraduate)
This course introduces students to institutional and rational choice approaches to understanding policy outcomes. The course focuses on regulatory structures, common resources problems, fiscal federalism, and the politics of clientelism.
Introduction to Latin American Politics (Undergraduate)
We cannot hope to make sense of what is happening in Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia today without a broader understanding of politics in Latin America. During the 1980s, most Latin American countries democratized and most changed the basic thrust of their economic policies. This course will explore the relationship between economic policy, political instability, and democracy. The explicit goal of this class and each session is to consider political outcomes in Latin America comparatively (i.e. relative to one another, as well as to the United States and countries in other regions of the world) and to try to solve riddles about why countries vary in the ways in which their political processes are structured, and in how they
Latin American Political Economy (Undergraduate)
Latin America has emerged from more than two decades of economic reform and globalization as one of the world’s primary regions of emerging market growth. It is no longer an area whose development depends exclusively on ties to the United States and Europe (or is it?). This course introduces students to major theoretical approaches to the study of Latin American political-economy, and to specific issues of political and economic policies and reform from the 1960s to the present. The theoretical approaches focus on the economic and political impact of international constraints, economic interest groups, and representative institutions and electoral politicians.
Political Economy of Development (Undergraduate)
This course starts with modernization theory and ends with recent debates about development policies including the recent “popular” critiques by Sachs and Easterly. The course also spends time studying modern trends in development programs: south-south cooperation, like triangular cooperation, micro-financing, and policy experiments.
Country and Regulatory Risk [Riesgo País] (Masters)
This course is a professional / business-oriented course on perceptions of regulatory risk. Most businesses rank adverse regulator change as their principal preoccupation when conducting FDI. After introducing the concept of regulatory risk, the course focuses on institutional, political and societal sources of regulatory change. Significant emphasis is given to how the political and regulatory environment influences political risk and how governments and mitigate risk without sacrificing policy goals.