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American Politics includes the study of American national institutions, political behavior, and sub-national politics. American national institutions include the constitutionally specified institutions (the presidency, Congress, and the courts) and the interactions among institutions such as the president and Congress; constitutional, statutory, and administrative law; and extra-constitutional institutions such as political parties. (Students interested primarily in bureaucratic institutions should see the public administration/public policy field statement.) Political behavior is concerned with mass political behavior (public opinion, voting behavior, and general political participation), the relationship between mass behavior and political institutions such as in representation, and organized behaviors represented by interest groups and the mass media. Sub-national politics includes the study of political institutions and mass political behavior at the state and local levels and the federal relationships between sub-national governments and the national government.
The Texas A&M University Political Science faculty has considerable expertise in all aspects of American politics and offers a wide range of courses. The predominant orientation of the American politics faculty is to advance theoretical understanding of important substantive questions. As a consequence, students selecting American politics as a major field must develop methodological skills sufficient to pursue mainstream empirical research in the field. The Program in American Politics regularly brings prominent scholars to campus as individual speakers or as part of department-sponsored conferences.
Comparative Politics covers the study of political experience within more than one nation-state for the purpose of making systematic comparisons. Within comparative politics, there are two main approaches, the cross-national approach and the area studies approach. The cross-national approach involves the simultaneous study of a large number of nation-states to address particular theoretical questions of broad applicability, and the tools normally involve quantitative analysis of empirical data. The area studies approach emphasizes in-depth analysis within a particular country or region of the world, and the necessary tools normally involve emersion in the language and culture of the geographical region being studied. Although the comparative politics faculty of the department includes experts on the politics of several specific countries and geographical regions of the world, the approach emphasized in this program is cross-national study, usually involving quantitative analysis. Hence, although some courses deal with the particular features of political experience in a given country or region, the greater emphasis in the graduate curriculum is upon topically-oriented courses and research projects, and all students are prepared in quantitative methods.
Students choosing comparative politics as a major or supporting field will become familiar with the broad-ranging literature of the field, with its methods and tools of research, and with available data sources covering a broad range of countries and topics. A student in this program is likely to concentrate his or her studies in a topical area such as comparative governmental institutions, comparative political organizations, comparative political economies, or comparative political behavior. Within those broader areas, students may focus upon such topics as executive cabinets, legislatures, decentralization/federalism, democratization, political parties, politics of national/ethnic identity, and voting behavior. Students may, within these contexts, also develop area expertise in European or Latin American Politics.
Work and visibility of faculty and graduate students in comparative politics are enhanced by projects of the Program in the Cross-National Study of Politics, including annual workshops on topics of special interest.
A major expansion of the International Relations program has increased the faculty in this area to eight members. Substantively, the program is strong in security studies, international political economy, and international organizations, with research interests of the faculty including crisis bargaining, diplomacy, environmental politics, foreign policy decision making, international institutions, international bargaining, signaling, alliances, sanctions, and the domestic sources of international behavior. The program’s primary methodological strengths are in formal theory, statistical methods, and experimental methods. Shuhei Kurizaki and Ahmer Tarar employ formal theory as their primary methodological tool. Michael Koch and Christopher Sprecher specialize in quantitative analysis, and Hyeran Jo, Elena McLean, and Taehee Whang use both modeling and statistical methods in their research. Experimental methods have long been a strength of the IR program at Texas A&M, with a state-of-the-art experimental lab led by Nehemia Geva. The program is oriented towards providing graduate training along the lines of the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) program, with strong training in using game theory to develop hypotheses that are tested using statistical as well as experimental methods.
The methods faculty of Texas A&M is nationally acclaimed, and active in developing, publishing, and teaching cutting edge techniques of political analysis. The breadth of methods covered by the faculty is wide, including traditional econometric and time series analysis, limited dependent variables, maximum likelihood, mathematical modeling, game theory, experimental design, and Bayesian analysis. Besides the various special topics courses in methods offered by the Department, faculty are regularly asked to teach at the University of Essex and University of Michigan Summer Programs. The political science discipline widely expects that graduate students coming from the Texas A&M program will have had strong methods training.
Political Theory offers students opportunities to engage in the rational scrutiny and moral assessment of political behavior, expectations, and experience from a broad variety of perspectives. Faculty members have teaching and research strengths in global and comparative political theory, the history of political thought, democratic theory, feminist theory, the philosophy of social science, contemporary political philosophy, the history and theory of tolerance, and the enlightenment. They offer an exciting array of seminars covering historical, topical, and interdisciplinary approaches to political theory, and they encourage students to develop both an expertise in their areas of specialization and a broad understanding of the practice of the discipline of political science. As graduate research assistants, our students work with faculty on books and articles for conference presentation and publication as early as their first year of study.
Political theory students and faculty, colleagues from other subfields, and members of many other departments attend regular meetings of the Theory Convocation, an informal setting for the presentation of work in progress by local and visiting scholars. The Theory program also sponsors an annual conference on topics in political theory, and is presently the administrative home of the Texas Chapter of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought. The work of students of political theory receives assistance not only from the Department of Political Science, but also from the Center for Humanities Research, the College of Liberal Arts, and other related departments and research groups.
Public Policy and Public Administration are two distinct but closely related fields. The study of public policy focuses on the description, analysis, and explanation of governmental responses (policies) to public problems and the consequences of those responses. It seeks to explain how public polices are developed, why they take the form they do, and their various societal effects. Policy courses often provide a more comprehensive view of the governmental process than do courses which focus upon particular institutions of governance. Public administration is concerned with the organization, activities, and behavior of administrative agencies and officials in the day-to-day conduct of government and, more broadly, in the development and implementation of public policies. The political and legal context of administration is also a matter of concern to this field.
The Department of Political Science at Texas A&M has many faculty members with interests in public policy and public administration. Policy-oriented courses are also available in the comparative, international, and American fields and involve both traditional, descriptive explanations of policy processes and systematic theoretical ones.
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