This course provides a critical overview of public policy, the policy process and policy analysis techniques. It places special emphasis on societal challenges at the intersection of technology and policy, including infrastructure, transportation, climate change, water and energy security, public health, and information and communications technology.

Engineers and public policy specialists in the course will draw from public policy and governance literature, examine problem scenarios, and complete policy analysis exercises to bridge theory and practice and learn from different disciplinary expertise and perspectives.

Instructor: Greig Mordue

This course examines the dynamics of global-national interaction in a variety of policy areas drawn from areas like the welfare state, economic management, trade and investment, privatization, un/employment, migration, and health.

Debates around the role of ideas, structures and institutions, and issues of policy continuity and change frame discussions around global governance, the re-focusing of the state, and its response to crises, including austerity policies and their alternatives.

Instructor: Stephen McBride

This course examines why and how people participate in politics, including how politics, media, elites, and psychology shape beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours, like voting and protest.

Special attention is given to understanding democratic values, tolerance, and extremism in contemporary global politics.

Instructor: Michelle Dion

For 2,500 years some political philosophers have called on us to think and act as cosmopolitans, ‘citizens of the world,’ and more than ever over the last 20 years.

While some regard cosmopolitanism as the necessary expression of the idea of moral universalism, others see it as concealing forms of world domination. In this course we explore some of the forms this call has taken, and the difficulties and ambiguities that have surrounded it.

Instructor: James Ingram

An exploration of the foundations and functioning of democracy in Canada through an examination of the institutions and institutional practices governing the Canadian state, with a particular emphasis on historic and current reform proposals and initiatives.

It will familiarize students with some of the scholarly literature and debates surrounding the core institutions of the Canadian state as well as examining neo-institutional, rational choice and critical theoretical explanations for the practice of politics in Canada.

Instructor: Peter Graefe

An exploration of the politics of the Third World/Global South from an International Relations perspective. We will situate the various issues, events, and topics within a global political and economic context.

Discussions will centre on global political and economic processes that have shaped the current contours of the Global South, such as colonialism, the Cold War, development narratives, foreign aid and humanitarian intervention, neoliberal globalization, and the rise of BRICs as a global challenge to the North.

Instructor: Alina Sajed

An investigation into the main currents in the growing range of theoretical approaches that characterize the contemporary field of International Relations.

Part of what fashions the concerns of this course is the way in which particular epistemological, methodological, and traditional norms inform expectations within International Relations about what sorts of questions it is appropriate to ask, how we ought to go about answering those questions, and whose voices speak with authority in theory and practice. The overall objective, however, is to give students a broad grounding in the wide (and widening) theoretical terrain of the field.

Instructor: Marshall Beier

This course surveys a range of theoretical approaches to comparative public policy. It seeks to impart a basic understanding of approaches used in comparative public policy in terms of their basic concepts and the sorts of explanation they seek to provide.

It also encourages course participants to situate the different approaches in relation to one another along a number of axes (e.g., assumptions, levels of analysis, ability to explain different phenomena). At the end of the course, participants should be capable of critically discussing the merits of the different approaches, and of situating their own research within this field of competing theories.

Most weeks’ readings include both s combination of purely theoretical pieces and applications of the theories to various policy fields. 783 is designed to prepare students for the MA and PhD comprehensive exams in comparative public policy, and should be taken by all students intending to write this exam.

Instructor: Katherine Boothe

This seminar introduces graduate students to basic issues in epistemology, research design and methodological choices we face in political science. The main objective is to heighten attention to the need for methodological rigour, and for reflection about the kinds of choices involved in doing research.

More specifically, the course asks students to reflect on what goes into a successful dissertation length study, and to begin working on the design of own future research projects. It also allows students gain to some familiarity with various qualitative methods that you might apply in carrying out that research.

Instructor: Karen Bird

This course examines political dynamics and public policy making within federal systems. The course will probe the relative “innovativeness” of federal systems, theories of policy diffusion, the impact of federalism on principles of shared citizenship.

The course will also explore the political dynamics that emerge in multi-level systems, including the opportunities or barriers for interest groups seeking to make change, as well as the distributional implications of federalism, exploring the inequalities that can emerge when some subnational jurisdictions lead while others lag behind.

The course will also explore the evolution of Indigenous multilevel governance in several jurisdictions, and the implications of placing Indigenous governance within theories of federalism. The course will draw heavily on the Canadian case, but will also draw in comparative experiences and literature from the United States, the European Union, and other federal states.

Instructor: Adrienne Davidson

An introduction to the main theoretical and conceptual issues in the field of Comparative Politics. It offers students a broad view of the selected themes, concepts and approaches that characterize the field, as well as an appreciation of how the field has evolved over time.

The scope of the material will range from comparative paradigms, dominant methodologies, theoretical approaches, key issues and debates in the understanding of politics and government in Western and non-Western, developed and developing areas.

Instructor: Netina Tan

This course is organized around key themes of political communities, including:

• Founding: Who are “the people,”? How is a polity founded? Can the political community be broken and/or re-constituted?
• Membership: Who is a citizen? How do you become a citizen? Can citizenship be reconstituted?
• Solidarity: What keeps the political project together? How should difference be managed? What political virtues are required?

It will also consider the ways that globalisation and diversity re-shapes these elements of political life.

Instructor: Catherine Frost

This course provides students with an opportunity to investigate the global political economy of climate change. Through a careful reading and discussion of key books and recent news articles or websites the course initiates a multidisciplinary exploration of the problem of climate change.

The topic will be pursued by considering contributions from climate science, economics, fiction, philosophy, political economy, political science and international relations.

Instructor: Thomas Marois

This course provides students with a graduate level introduction to global political economy. It examines approaches to the study of global political economy, the evolution of the global political economy, its economic structures and political institutions.

The course focuses upon several key issue areas: trade, production, the international monetary system, finance, the environment, gender and labour in the global political economy.

Instructor: Robert O’Brien

An introduction to quantitative methods of political and policy analysis. The focus is on inferential statistical methods from basic comparisons between groups through multivariate linear and logistic regression.

The emphasis is on successful application of statistical methods and understanding the uses of such methods for public policy and political science.

Instructor: TBD

In this seminar course students will consider major theoretical approaches and concepts involved in the analysis of foreign policy, focusing most heavily on critical approaches to the study of foreign policy in Canada and the United States.

We will also study the interplay between the fields of International Relations and Foreign Policy, thinking through some of the key themes and issues in the current literature. The course content will be primarily theoretical, but students will be expected to apply theories to relevant foreign policy cases.

Instructor: Lana Wylie