Gov 20: Foundations of Comparative Politics

Teaching Fellow: Adrian Scheibler

Sections: Thursdays at 1:30pm and 3pm in Room K108

Office Hours: Thurs 4:20am–6:20pm at CGIS Knafel Fisher Family Commons. Please sign up here.

Contact: Email me at ascheibler@fas.harvard.edu. I will attempt to respond to emails within 24 hours except the day before a paper is due. All emails should have a subject line that begins with “Gov20:”.

Section Syllabus: Please see the secion syllabus here.

Suggestion Box: I welcome suggestions at any point of the semester. Please submit (anonymously) here.

Week 1 — Introduction and Approaches to Comparative Politics

Week 2 — Politics of Economic Development: Modernization Theory and its Alternatives

Week 3 — The Politics of Late Development: State- versus Market-Led Approaches

Week 4 — The State, State-Building, and State Weakness

Week 5 — Democracy and Democratization

Week 6 — Democratization and Democratic Breakdown

Week 7 — Authoritarianism and Populism

Week 8 — Explaining Social Revolution I

Week 9 — Explaining Social Revolution II

Week 10 — Do Institutions Matter?

Week 11 — Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflict I

Week 12 — Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflict II

Week 13 — Civil Society and Social Capital

Week 14 — The United States in Comparative Perspective