Graduate
Graduate Focus Areas
In addition to the traditional fields of study, the following special foci represent areas of special teaching and research interest for clusters of our graduate faculty: Democracy and Democratization; Electoral Politics; Political Conflict Resolution; Politics, Race, Law and Minority Groups in America. Students interested in pursuing study in any of these focus areas will have ample opportunity to do so in regularly scheduled courses within the traditional fields and through participation in faculty research and colloquia.
DEMOCRACY AND DEMOCRATIZATION
Democracy and democratization are important concerns of political science. Questions central to the study of these topics include the social and economic prerequisites for the establishment and maintenance of stable democracy; constitutional design; the role of institutional actors such as political parties, interest groups, and government bureaucracies; and the attitudes and behaviors of individual citizens. Democratic practices in the established democracies of Western Europe and North America have long been studied by political scientists, and democratization in Southern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and East Asia has received more recent attention. With the collapse of communism, problems of democratization have become important in yet another part of the world, and have assumed both a new urgency and increased interest. Moreover, the relevance of many of these questions to the established democracies has become increasingly apparent with debates over the institutional structure and democratic legitimacy of the European Union, major institutional-constitutional reforms proposed or adopted in Canada, Italy, and Japan, and the strains of economic and racial polarization in the United States.
ELECTORAL POLITICS
The central mechanism by which citizens can control the direction of a democratic government is the electoral process. By electing leaders and political parties that represent their general perspectives on what the powers of government should or should not be used for, voters can affect how government serves the public. Democratic governance depends on a healthy electoral process.
Political scientists have long been interested in elections and how voters decide whether to vote and for whom to vote. There are many, many questions about electoral behavior and the electoral process that researchers in both American and Comparative Politics continue to pursue. The questions range from those concerning political participation to legal and constitutional issues of voting and elections. Among the many questions are these: What affects whether potential voters turn out to vote? Why is turnout higher in some nations or states than others? Why has turnout changed in different periods of history? What is the effect on the election results of higher or lower turnout? Why do people develop and sometimes change their partisan identifications? How much and why does partisanship affect who voters will vote for? What individual or group characteristics of voters affect how people vote and why? How informed are voters about their choice and what are the roles of the media and campaigns in increasing voter information? How does the organization of votes into districts and the scheduling of elections at different times affect who gets elected? How do political campaigns affect election results? Why do some potential candidates opt not to run, while others decide to ‘throw their hat in the ring”? To what extent and how does campaign financing affect elections? How competitive are elections? What could be done to make them more competitive? What are the effects of elections on public policy?
POLITICAL CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Conflicts of interests are the heart of politics at all levels. Without conflict, political processes are unnecessary. Without conflict, individual and group interaction is reduced to a coordination game. With complete information and unfettered communication, such games are, theoretically, trivial. Politics emerges, however, when conflict exists. Conflicting interests remain to be reconciled--or not. In a sense, then, the study of politics and the study of conflict are one and the same.
In some environments, conflicts are routinely managed. For example, in most industrialized democracies, political parties compete for elected offices. Laws are enacted and norms institutionalized to govern inter-personal and inter-group disputes. At times, however, competing interests are not successfully reconciled. Labor-management negotiations break down; strikes are called. Succession disputes are not settled; revolutions occur. Interstate competitions fester; wars--trade, cold, and hot--erupt.
When and why are some conflicts ameliorated while others are not? What is the nature of electoral competition? What causes revolutions, ethnic conflicts, civil and interstate wars? Under what conditions can individuals and groups with conflicting interests manage to cooperate with one another? What is the particular dynamic of conflict in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and other geographical areas? What is the geographic basis of political disputes? What role does or should norms play in dispute resolution? Research directed at addressing these and related questions constitutes the bedrock of this focus area.
POLITICS, RACE, LAW, AND MINORITY GROUPS IN AMERICA
There is no more enduring domestic political issue in the history of the United States than the treatment and conditions of America's racial and other minority citizens. In nearly every era of our national development the question of race has ranked among the most pressing issues confronting the country. It was present in the seventeenth century when slavery first appeared and became legitimated as an institution, in the eighteenth century when the founding fathers had to reconcile slavery with the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, in the nineteenth century in the struggles over sectionalism, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and in the twentieth century in the civil rights campaign for equal rights and, in recent decades, for economic justice.
In each epoch the political struggles over race have taken on a decidedly legal cast. This has meant that virtually every significant racial issue in our history has, in one fashion or another, ultimately been treated as a political issue. Accordingly, one cannot understand race as a political issue in America without focusing on the role that law has played as the handmaiden of public policies dealing with race. Despite the political significance of race and the links between race and law, there is no other political science graduate program in the nation focusing on race from the perspective of law, courts, and legal institutions.
The overarching conceptual theme of this focus area addresses how, through the use of law, majority-rule democratic political systems treat and protect politically vulnerable minority groups. Hence, this focus area also seeks to attract graduate students who will explore the political and legal struggles of minorities in addition to African-Americans, including Native Americans, Hispanics, the mentally and physically handicapped, gays, and women. Indeed, in recent decades several of those groups emulated the efforts of African-Americans by resorting to legal initiatives to achieve political goals. In addition, as the nations of Eastern Europe, Africa, and elsewhere grapple with the treatment of their own minority groups, the issues addressed by this focus area may come to have international applications and relevance as well.