This seminar on comparative politics is designed to help graduate students understand how
comparativists formulate theoretical arguments, collect data, and test hypotheses by reading major works in the field. The philosophy of this class is that good research starts from improving upon the established scholarship. However, this course is by no means a comprehensive survey of all major elds in comparative politics. It looks for depth instead of breadth. I selectively choose four topics of great importance in the field,
1. Methodologies and Research Designs in Comparative Politics
2. Authoritarianism Institutions
3. Inequality and Demand for Redistribution
4. International Context
Among them, the rst topic, methodologies and research designs, lays the very foundation for any serious endeavors to explain politics in either developed or developing countries, and therefore we spend four weeks in discussing the basic framework for causal analysis and major methodological approaches in the literature. As for the rest of the three topics, we will devote three weeks to each of them. In the rst of which, we examine major theoretical approaches in the literature. In the week that follows, we then read empirical works that test the hypotheses derived from the principal theoretical models in the eld by quantitative methods. In the nal week, we scrutinize alternatively over the empirical works that use qualitative methods. Together, they have demonstrated how critical issues in the field of comparative politics are addressed theoretically and empirically.

Keep such questions in mind as you read articles and books listed in the syllabus:
 What are the central issues at stake in this literature?
 What are the major arguments of the works under study?
 How do they relate to the debates in the field?
 How valuable and viable is the theory or argument that each puts forth?
 How eectively is evidence marshaled in support of the argument?
 Which scholarly disputes have been resolved?
 What good further work lies ahead?