匹兹堡大学

The political science department offers a large number of courses in four substantive fields: American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Political Theory. Core courses provide a survey of each field and with the methods employed in the contemporary study of politics. The field courses, at 1000-level, provide students with advanced coursework in each of these areas of specialization. The combination of core and field courses provides students with a comprehensive overview of political science as a discipline while permitting students to concentrate in a particular field or fields.

Core Courses

Students take all five of the core courses, which provide first and second year students with a survey of each of these fields and with the methods employed in the contemporary study of politics.

• PS 0200 American Political Process: An introduction to the institutions and political processes in the United States. The course surveys the presidency, Congress, and the judicial system as well as political behavior, public opinion, political attitudes, and the party system.
• PS 0300 Comparative Politics: An introduction to political systems outside the United States. The course surveys a variety of theoretical approaches to the comparison of political systems and an examination of the political processes, institutions, and current political developments in a variety of political systems in all of the major regions of the world.
• PS 0500 World Politics: An introduction to the study of foreign policy, covering the international political environment in which nation-states and other actors operate, as well as the specific policies adopted by particular states.
• PS 0600 Political Theory and Analysis: An introduction to the history of Western political ideas, including the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Mill, and Marx.
• PS 0700 Research Methods in Political Science: An introduction to the methods used in political science research, covering the logic of social scientific inquiry, the basics of research design, and the quantitative and qualitative methods that are commonly used by political scientists to investigate important questions about the political world.