Political Science 601: Scope and Methods
Fall 2015
22799
COURSE INFORMATION
Class Days: M
Class Times: 16:00-18:40
Class Location: NH 131
Office Hours Times (and by appointment): Mondays 9:30-10:30,Wednesdays 10:30-noon, Thursdays
2:30-4:30
Office Hours Location: NH 122
Course Overview
This course introduces graduate students to the discipline of political science by examining four core
concepts: power, rationality, institutions, and democracy. We will approach each concept from different
perspectives, drawing on works from all of the discipline’s subfields. These concepts are central to
understanding the political world and conceptualizing, defining, and measuring them is a central task of
political analysis. In the process of exploring these concepts, we will also examine the methodological
debates within the discipline. This is not a “how to” course that teaches students how to use various
methodological tools (POSC 615 and 516 perform that function), but it will orient students towards the
different approaches to studying politics. The course is also designed to develop skills that graduate
students need to write a thesis and successfully complete the program. Specifically, students will learn
how to define a research question and write a literature review.
Student Learning Outcomes

Recognize the diversity of research conducted within the political science discipline.

Identify the different methodological approaches to doing political science research and the
advantages and disadvantages of each.

Learn how to conduct a literature review.

Explain why key terms in political science are fundamentally contested.

Identify core debates within the discipline surrounding how to conduct political science
research.
Texts
Eliasoph, Nina (1998). Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hirshmann, Albert O. (1970). Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Harvard University Press.
Przeworski, Adam et al. (2000). Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the
World, 1950-1990. Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, Robert D. (1993). Making Democracy Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Walzer, Michael (1983). Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books.
Journal articles and book chapters available through the course website on blackboard.
ASSIGNMENTS/GRADING
1. Class participation. Students are expected to come to every class period, prepared to discuss the
assigned readings. Class attendance is mandatory. Students who miss class, or come to class unprepared
and/or late, may be required to complete additional writing assignments. (about one-third of course
grade).
2. Literature review (due November 13th). See page 7 for guidelines. (about one-third of course grade).
3. Take-home final (due December 14th) (about one-third of course grade).
Students With Disabilities
If you are a student with a disability and believe you will need accommodations for this class, it is your
responsibility to contact Student Disability Services at (619) 594-6473. To avoid any delay in the receipt
of your accommodations, you should contact Student Disability Services as soon as possible. Please note
that accommodations are not retroactive, and that accommodations based upon disability cannot be
provided until you have presented your instructor with an accommodation letter from Student Disability
Services. Your cooperation is appreciated.
Course Outline
Note: Course readings are subject to change—changes will be announced in class or via e-mail.
Week 1 (August 24th)
a.) Introduction to the course
b.) How to read political science articles
c.) How to find academic literature
d.) Historical development of the discipline
Part I: Power
Week 2 (August 31st): What is “power”?
Dahl, Robert A. (1957). “The Concept of Power.” Behavioral Science 2 (3): 201-215.
Lukes, Steven (ed.), Power: A Radical View, pp. 14-37.
Hayward, Clarissa R. (1998). “De-facing Power.” Polity 31 (1): 1-22
Goldman, Alvin I. (1972). “Towards a Theory of Social Power.” Philosophical Studies 23 (4): 221268.
Barnett and Duvall, “Power in Global Governance.” Pp. 1-23.
Week 3 (Sep 7th): Labor Day (no class)
Week 4: (September 14th: Power relations between branches of government
Edwards, George C. (2009). The Strategic President : Persuasion and Opportunity in Presidential
Leadership. Princeton University Press. Pages 1-18
Barrett, Andrew W. and Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha (2007). “Presidential Success on the Substance
of Legislation.” Political Research Quarterly 60 (1): 100-112.
Cohen, Jeffrey E, Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher (2013). “Placing Presidential-Congressional
Relations in Context: A Comparison of Barack Obama and His Predecessors.” Polity 45 (1): 105126.
Vanberg, Georg (2015). “Constitutional Courts in Comparative Perspective: A theoretical
Assessment.” Annual Review of Political Science 18: 167-185.
Lemieux, Scott and George Lovell (2010). “Legislative Defaults: Interbranch Power Sharing and
Abortion Politics.” Polity 42 (2): 210-243.
Recommended: Knopf, Jeffrey W. (2006). “Doing a Literature Review.” PS: Political Science and
Politics 39 (1): 127-132.
Note: Students should submit a one-paragraph summary of their literature review topic sometime this
week through blackboard.
Week 5 (September 21st): Who has power?
Dahl, Who Governs, pp. 1-8, 85-6, 115-140, 163-165, 223-228.
Stone, Clarence N. (1993). "Urban Regimes and the Capacity to Govern: A Political Economy
Approach." Journal of Urban Affairs 15 (1): 1-28.
Lindblom, Charles E. (1982). “The Market as Prison.” Journal of Politics 44 (2): 324-336.
Gilens, Martin and Benjamin I. Page (2014). “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites,
Interest Groups and Average Citizens.” Perspectives on Politics 12 (3): 564-581.
Smith, Mark A. (1999). “Public Opinion, Elections, and Representation Within a Market
Economy: Does the Structural Power of Business Undermine Popular Sovereignty?” American
Journal of Political Science 43 (3); 842-863.
Part II: Rationality
Week 6 (September 28th): The rational choice approach to political science
Green, Donald P. and Ian Shapiro. Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory. Pp. 13-32.
Riker, William H. and Peter C. Ordeshook (1968). “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting.” American
Political Science Review 62 (1): 25-42.
Ferejohn, John A. and Morris P. Fiorina (1974) “The Paradox of Not Voting: A Decision Theoretic
Analysis.” American Political Science Review 68 (2): 525-536.
Wildavsky, Aaron (1987). “Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory
of Preference Formation.” American Political Science Review 81 (1): 3-21.
Edelman, Murray. The Symbolic Uses of Politics, pp. 1-21.
Week 7 (October 5th): The “rationality” of war and ethnic conflict
Fearon, James D. (1995). “Rationalist Explanations for War.” International Organization 49 (3):
379-414.
Walt, Stephen M. (1999). “Rigor or Rigor Mortis? Rational Choice and Security Studies.”
International Security 23 (4): 5-48.
Varshney, Ashutosh (2003). “Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Rationality.” Perspectives on
Politics 1, 1: 85-99.
Kaufman, Stuart J. (2006). “Symbolic Politics or Rational Choice? Testing Theories of Extreme
Ethnic Violence.” International Security 30 (4): 45-86.
Week 8 (October 12th): Rationality and responses to institutional decline
Hirschmann, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, pp. 1-128
Warren, Mark E. 2011. “Voting With Your Feet: Exit-Based Empowerment in Democratic
Theory.” American Political Science Review 105 (4): 683-694 (note I have not assigned the entire
article).
Part III: Institutions
Week 9 (October 19th): Institutional theories
March, James G. and Johan P. Olsen (1984). “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in
Political Life.” American Political Science Review 78 (3): 734-743.
Hall, Peter A. and Rosemary C.R. Taylor (1996). “Political Science and the Three New
Institutionalisms.” Political Studies 44 (5): 937-956.
Lieberman, Robert C. (2002). “Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political
Change.” American Political Science Review 96 (4): 697-712.
Beland, Daniel (2009). “Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Change.” Journal of European Public Policy
16 (5): 701-718.
Week 10 (October 26th): Institutional frameworks in American politics research
Hacker, Jacob S. (2004). “Privatizing Risk Without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden
Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States.” American Political Science Review 98
(2): 243-260.
Frymer, Paul (2005). “Racism Revisited: Courts, Labor Law, and the Institutional Construction of
Racial Animus.” American Political Science Review 99 (3), 373-387.
Galanter, Marc (1974). “Why the ‘Haves’ Come out Ahead: Speculation on the Limits of Legal
Change.” Law and Society Review 9 (1): 95-125 and 135-144.
Soss, Joe (1999). “Lessons of Welfare: Policy Design, Political Learning and Political Action.”
American Political Science Review 93 (2): 363-380.
Week 11 (November 2nd): Institutional Approaches to Chinese Politics
Gilley, Bruce (2008). “Legitimacy and Institutional Change: The Case of China.” Comparative
Political Studies 41 (3): 259-284.
Fewsmith, Joseph (2013) The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China. Cambridge University
Press. pages 1-17 and 42-67.
Heilmann, Sebastian and Elizabeth J. Perry (2011). “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerilla Policy Style
and Adaptive Governance in china.” In Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds. Mao’s
Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China. Harvard University
Press. Pages 1-29.
Yan, Jirong (2014) “China’s Experiments in Social Autonomy and Grassroots Democracy.” In
Kenneth Lieberthal, Cheng Li, and Yu Keping, eds. China’s Political Development. Brookings
Institution Press. Pages 192-220 (including response Andrew G. Walder).
Week 12 (November 9th): Decentralization: Institutions and Governmental Performance
Diamond, Larry. 1999. Developing Democracy: Towards Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University
Press. Pages 117-159
Treisman, Daniel. 2007. The Architecture of Government: Rethinking Political Decentralization.
Cambridge University Press. Pages 1-15.
Kymlicka, Will. 2005. “Federalism, Nationalism, and Multiculturalism.” In Dimitrios Karmis and
Wayne Norman, eds. Theories of Federalism: A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan. Pages 269-289.
Faguet, Jean-Paul (2012). Decentralization and Popular Democracy: Governance from Below in
Bolivia. University of Michigan Press. Pages 1-47 and 159-198.
This is an e-book available for free through the SDSU library.
Literature Review due November 13th
Part IV: Democracy
Week 13 (November 16th): Justice and Democracy
Walzer, Spheres of Justice, preface and chapters 1, 4, 8, 12, 13
Week 14 (November 23rd): Social capital
Putnam, Robert D. Making Democracy Work. pp. 1-192.
Week 15 (November 30th): Democratization
Przeworski, Adam et al. Democracy and Development. Pp. 1-215 (you can skim the chapter
appendices).
Week 16 (December 7th): Political apathy
Eliasoph, Nina. Avoiding Politics, pp. 1-84, 131-187, 230-263
Final exam due Monday, December 14th
Guidelines for writing the literature review
Choosing a research topic
1. There are few restrictions on the topic you choose, other than it must be “political science” in some
general sense.
2. Your topic should be a narrow research question. By narrow, I mean that it should deal with one
specific political phenomenon. For example, “racial politics in American cities” is way too broad for a
topic; something along the lines of “Is deracialization a successful strategy for mayoral candidates?”
would be more appropriate.
3. Your topic should be formulated as a question that attempts to understand a specific political
phenomenon.
4. In order to define a research topic, you need to know something about the literature. Thus, you need
to do some reading even before you have a clear idea of what research question you want to study. The
best approach is to start out with a general topic, do some reading on that topic, and then define a more
specific research question.
5. The research topic can be tweaked as you write your literature review. Defining a research question is
necessary to orient your research, but it is not written in stone.
6. You may not “recycle” papers you wrote as an undergraduate or graduate student. Any student found
doing this will be given a failing grade.
Writing the Literature Review
1. A literature review synthesizes past research on a topic. Literature reviews are not simply summaries
of books and articles. You should not write this paper in the format “author A said x, and author B said
y,” which is essentially a series of book reports rather than a literature review. What you should do is
integrate your sources to map out the terrain of the scholarly discourse on the subject. You should pull
out core ideas and concepts from the readings, and weave them together into a coherent discussion of
your topic. Part of this process involves “comparing and contrasting” different authors, but a literature
review goes beyond that: it not only compares authors, but also fits them together into a coherent
picture. The best literature reviews say something about the literature as a whole: in addition to
describing the scholarly debate, they also comment on it. This is not in the form of who’s right or wrong
but rather a commentary on the fundamental issues at stake or the particular shape or characteristics of
the debate. In other words, a good literature reviews is not just a description of the literature, but also
an interpretation. We will talk about what makes for a good literature review in class, and we are
reading some literature reviews in class that are good models to follow.
2. One of the biggest problems graduate students often run into is they miss important parts of the
literature or spend too much time on insignificant/tangential works. As you write your literature review,
ask yourself whether you are focused on the most important research in the area.
3. Doing a good literature review requires good library skills. Spend some time familiarizing yourself with
library resources and using online library databases.
4. One of the best article databases to use is Web of Science Core Collection; even though it is not userfriendly, it includes almost all political science journals and most relevant journals from other disciplines.
You can also do cited reference searches, which are quite valuable. Another database that include
political science journals is J-Stor, although it is less comprehensive than Web of Science. There are
some political science journals in ProQuest and Academic Search Premier, but they are incomplete in
their coverage.
5. Your literature review should focus on academic literature (books and articles). Do not include
newspaper or magazine articles. If you have reason to, you can draw on literature outside of political
science (such as sociology or economics).
6. Page length. There is no specified minimum or maximum, although I expect it will be about 10-15
pages.
General
1. If you want some examples of literature reviews, a good place to look is The Annual Review of Political
Science, which is an annual collection of literature reviews on various topics with the discipline. The
quality of the reviews vary, but they will provide you with some idea of how literature reviews are
structured. The Annual Review of Political Science is available for free through SDSU’s library databases.
2. You should use the citation method used in the American Political Science Review, which is the
generally accepted method of citation in the discipline (although there is a lot of variation). I would
suggest getting a recent article of the APSR and following its citation method.
3. Don’t hesitate to come to my office hours to discuss your literature review. We can also make an
appointment to meet if you cannot make office hours.