Declaratory Statements

Lower-Division Declaratory Statement

100-level courses in Political Science are designed and administered around two principles:

  1. Our faculty are committed to collectively offering common foundations to students of political science. We want each 100-level course to have broadly-similar content across its offerings over time, and encourage regular faculty discussion of this content.
  2. We are also committed to academic freedom and encouraging faculty to teach in ways that draw on their individual strengths and perspectives. In any single offering of these courses, we expect to see the instructor choosing variations in emphasis and pedagogy.

The department expresses its commitment to integrating political theory courses across all career paths.

Graduate Methods Declaratory Statement

  1. Qualitative Methods Statement:

The department offers two qualitative methods courses (PS612 and PS613) once every two years, rotating so that one is offered each year. The two courses cover distinct methodologies so that there is not significant overlap. There is no sequence to these courses and they could be taken in any order since they do not build on one another but simply cover different methodologies for doing qualitative research.

PS 612 trains graduate students in several common data analysis methodologies, including single case studies, controlled case comparisons, historical comparative analysis, and process-tracing. Faculty have discretion to also cover other methodologies (e.g., qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), network analysis, etc.). The course also addresses practical techniques for collecting data through archival research, expert interviews, and field research.

PS 613 trains graduate students in the philosophy, theory and practice of interpretive methods by engaging three core methods: discourse analysis, political ethnography, and interpretive interviewing. Faculty have discretion to also cover other interpretive methodologies (e.g., genealogy, decoloniality, etc.). The course also addresses how interpretive methods raise challenging questions about social science foundations, which bind social scientists together, regardless of how those questions are answered or which methods are chosen.

To ensure that these two courses have minimal overlap, the Director of Graduate Studies will convene a meeting every Spring term of all faculty who have taught in the past year or will teach in the coming year the two qualitative methods courses as well as PS 620 State of the Discipline and the PS 614 Research Design. The main goal of this meeting will be to discuss complementary coverage for all qualitative methods courses.

  1. Research Design Statement:

All graduate students are required to take PS614 Research Design during the Spring term of their first year. The course addresses research design issues for all methods (experimental, quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method) and epistemological approaches (e.g., positivist and interpretivist). The premise of the course is that there is no single “correct” way to structure a research design. Rather, the process of constructing a research design involves a series of choices that must be made (e.g., how to frame the research question, what cases to examine, what kind of information to collect, how to analyze or interpret the information collected, etc.). Each choice involves pros and cons, tradeoffs, and implications for what kinds of answers the research can produce. The purpose of the course is to give students the practical skills needed to navigate these choices, understand the implications of making one choice versus another, and develop criteria for evaluating which choices would be “better” for their particular research objectives. Consequently, the course is designed and administered to meet three goals:

  • To provide students the practical skills necessary to craft a well-designed research project for any type of research question (once students develop a research question they are interested in pursuing, the course will be used to workshop ideas about how to put together a research design to answer it). The course will also help students recognize the need to choose research methods that are appropriate to and capable of answering the research question selected.
  • To prepare students to write a second-year paper, and subsequently a dissertation prospectus; and
  • To introduce students to ethical considerations involved in doing research.

Coordination Statements