121 - 130 of 308 results for: POLISCI

A discussion of critical ethical issues faced by American and other national leaders. Case studies of 20th- and 21st-century decisions, including those involved with violence (e.g., the use of drone missiles or torture to extract information from enemies), whistle-blowing in government (e.g., decisions to expose what was known about 9/11 in advance), disobedience of those in authority (e.g., Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers), policies on distributing scarce goods in society (e.g. rationing health care), policies involving justice and equal treatment (e.g. affirmative action or gay marriage), policies regarding life and death (e.g., abortion and euthanasia laws), and others. Students will debate some of the key issues, relying on ethical principles that will be discussed each week, and develop their own case studies.

American lawyers and policymakers work today in a system of institutions that are strikingly unique in comparative and historical terms. With some exceptions, that system is characterized by relatively stable political and legal institutions, low levels of explicit corruption, high bureaucratic capacity in public organizations, and relatively open, impersonal access to political, policymaking, and legal institutions. Although these characteristics are now too often taken for granted, the process through which they emerged remains remarkably opaque. In the 1780s under the Articles of Confederation, the United States was a poor developing country on the fringe of the Atlantic community with limited capacity and a striking inability to provide basic public goods, such as security. One hundred years later, it well along the way to becoming the richest nation in the world. How did this transformation occur?nnnDrawing on judicial opinions, legal scholarship, political science, economics, and history, this course explores how institutions evolved to create such a system. It traces the problem of institutional development through several critical periods in the history of American public law, including the emergence of the Constitution, the events leading up to and following the Civil War, the Progressive era, World War II, 1964-75, and the emergence of the modern administrative state. Although the primarily focus is on the American experience, we place these developments in comparative context as well.

Broad survey of religious discrimination and persecution in the Euro-American tradition, and the rise of tolerationist ideas and practices, from Augustine's rationale for punishing dissenters to the current European debates over the regulation of Islam. Topics include the Inquisition; struggles over toleration in Reformation Europe; the impact of Locke, Bayle, and Spinoza; Spanish practice in the Americas; and the American constitutional experiment in free exercise.

Americans have been trying to perfect their system of government since its founding. Despite some notable achievements, there is a pervasive sense of frustration with political reform. This course will examine the goals and political consequences of American political regulation. Topics will vary by year to some degree but examples include campaign finance, lobbying, term limits, conflict of interest regulation, direct democracy, citizen commissions and assemblies, vote administration problems, transparency, and open meeting laws.

Topics include the historical conceptualization of race; whether and how racial animus reveals itself and the forms it might take; its role in the creation and maintenance of economic stratification; its effect on contemporary U.S. partisan and electoral politics; and policy making consequences.

America's public schools are government agencies, and virtually everything about them is subject to political authority--and thus to decision through the political process. This seminar is an effort to understand the politics of education and its impacts on the nation's schools. Our focus is on the modern era of reform, with special attention to the most prominent efforts to bring about fundamental change through accountability (including No Child Left Behind), school choice (charter schools, vouchers), pay for performance, and more and more to the politics of blocking that has made genuine reform so difficult to achieve.

Legal history, once primarily devoted to exploring legal doctrines and key judicial opinions and thus of interest mainly to legal scholars and lawyers,now resembles historical writing more generally; the study of legal ideas and practices is increasingly integrated with social, intellectual, cultural, and political history. Recent writings in American legal history; how the field reflects developments in historical writing; and how the use of legal materials affects understanding of American history.

This course presents an overview of immigration in the United States. We will focus on current policies, U.S. immigration history, individual immigrant groups, economic causes and consequences of immigration, attitudes toward immigrants, U.S. national identity, immigrant political behavior, undocumented immigration, immigrants and public education, language barriers and policies, and immigration reform. Although the course is crafted with a focus on the U.S. as a whole, we will also spend a little time at the end of the quarter narrowing in on the California context, before taking a broader look at immigration in Western Europe to gain a comparative prospective on immigration. Finally, while we will discuss immigrant groups beyond Latinos, the course will disproportionately focus on Latino immigrants, as this is by far the largest immigrant group in the United States.

Political scientists have now accumulated evidence over more than fifty years documenting the limits of ordinary citizens ¿ their minimal levels of information about public affairs; their minimal capacity for thinking coherently about political choices; their limited understanding of and commitment to core democratic values; their susceptibility to racism and intolerance of many forms. These findings, taken all in all, seem to add up to a conclusion that citizens are incapable of discharging the duties of democratic citizenship. It seems, these results suggest, that the best contribution that they can make to a democratic politics is to stay out of the way. The aim of this course to examine a paradox: how can it simultaneously be true that findings of citizen incompetence and intolerance are valid and that citizens nonetheless can be capable of discharging the duties of democratic citizenship. In particular, this course will concentrate on three main topics: racism in contemporary politics; commitment to civil liberties and civil rights, and multiculturalism. The course will require intensive reading and analysis of quantitative research on public opinion surveys and experiments.