Political Science (BA)

About this programme

Political science addresses how individuals and groups organize, allocate, and challenge the power to make collective decisions involving public issues. The goal of the major is to enable students to think critically and analytically about the agents, incentives, and institutions that shape political phenomena within human society. The subfields of political philosophy and analytical political theory (which includes the study of both qualitative and quantitative methodology) support the acquisition of the lenses through which such thought skills can be enriched. The subfields of American government, comparative politics, and international relations, in turn, allow students to reinforce and refine those skills, while also promoting their application to a wide variety of contexts, whether contemporary or historical. Students may also construct interdisciplinary curricula, which allows them to apply the approaches of the discipline to a topic for which a more complete understanding also involves approaches gleaned from other disciplines.