Democracy in Comparative Perspective

Catalog description

This graduate seminar focuses on issues of political regime change and democratization, as studied in the comparative politics literature. The course is structured in three parts. In the first part, we scrutinize conceptualizations and measurements of democracy that are used in comparative politics. In the second part, we study political economy and comparative historical theories about the causes of democratization. We assess the relative strength of theories that focus on economic development, inequality (whether of income, land, or labor), social class actors, insurgency, institutions, and/or strategic choices and interactions. In the final part of the course, political regimes in action, we study different aspects of democratization as they relate to current and salient issues of comparative politics.