Courses tagged with "Kadenze" (42)
Videos about how government works in the United States. PPACA or "Obamacare". The Fiscal Cliff. More Fiscal Cliff Analysis. Electoral College. Primaries and Caucuses. Deficit and Debt Ceiling. Government's Financial Condition. Social Security Intro. FICA Tax. Medicare Sustainability. SOPA and PIPA. Pension obligations. Illinois pension obligations. PPACA or "Obamacare". The Fiscal Cliff. More Fiscal Cliff Analysis. Electoral College. Primaries and Caucuses. Deficit and Debt Ceiling. Government's Financial Condition. Social Security Intro. FICA Tax. Medicare Sustainability. SOPA and PIPA. Pension obligations. Illinois pension obligations.
This course examines the problems and issues confronting American national security policymakers and the many factors that influence the policies that emerge. But this is not a course about "threats," military strategies, or the exercise of military power.
What threatens those interests? How should the U.S. defend those interests? What kind of military should we build? Should the U.S. enter into alliances with other countries? Do we need a larger Navy? How much should we spend on weapons procurement?
The course has four broad goals:
- to demonstrate that definitions of national security and the specification of vital interests are subjective and fluid and that they are as much functions of domestic politics as they are responses to international politics and "objective threats";
- to demonstrate that policy decisions involve complex tradeoffs among political, social, economic, military, legal, and ethical goals and values;
- to explore how the many organizations, institutions, and individuals that participate in American national security policymaking affect policy formulation, implementation, and outcomes; and
- to better understand the historical context, evolution, and linkages of national security problems and solutions.
The course is organized along an historical time line. Beginning with the final days of World War II we follow American national security policy from the first stirrings of confrontation with the Soviet Union and China, into two hot wars in Asia that cost over 100,000 American lives and spawned social upheavals, through a close encounter with nuclear war, stumbling into the era of arms control, and conclude with the collapse of the communism. Selective case studies, memoirs, and original documents act as windows into each period. What were US national security decision makers thinking? What were they worried about? How did they see their options?
This course examines the causes and consequences of American foreign policy since 1898. Course readings cover both substantive and methods topics. Four substantive topics are covered:
- major theories of American foreign policy;
- major episodes in the history of American foreign policy and historical/interpretive controversies about them;
- the evaluation of major past American foreign policies--were their results good or bad? and
- current policy controversies, including means of evaluating proposed policies.
Three methods topics are covered:
- basic social scientific inference--what are theories? what are good theories? how should theories be framed and tested?
- historical investigative methodology, including archival research, and, most importantly,
- case study methodology.
Historical episodes covered in the course are used as raw material for case studies, asking "if these episodes were the subject of case studies, how should those studies be performed, and what could be learned from them?"
This course analyzes the development of the United States Congress by focusing on the competing theoretical lenses through which legislatures have been studied. In particular, it compares sociological and economic models of legislative behavior, applying those models to floor decision-making, committee behavior, political parties, relations with other branches of the Federal government, and elections. Graduate students are expected to pursue the subject in greater depth through reading and individual research.
The United States Congress is the most open of the national branches of government, and therefore the most closely studied. This course aims to find ways to deal with the vast array of information we have about Congress by asking two basic questions: What does Congress do (and why), and what are the various ways of studying congressional behavior? This course focuses on both the internal processes of the House and Senate, and on the place of Congress in the American political system.
This course will serve as both an introduction to contemporary political philosophy and a way to explore issues of pluralism and multiculturalism. Racial and ethnic groups, national minorities, aboriginals, women, sexual minorities, and other groups have organized to highlight injustice and demand recognition and accommodation on the basis of their differences. In practice, democratic states have granted a variety of group-differentiated rights, such as exemptions from generally applicable laws, special representation rights, language rights, or limited self-government rights, to different types of groups. This course will examine how different theories of citizenship address the challenges raised by different forms of pluralism. We will focus in particular on the following questions:
- Does justice require granting group-differentiated rights?
- Do group-differentiated rights conflict with liberal and democratic commitments to equality and justice for all citizens?
- What, if anything, can hold a multi-religious, multicultural society together? Why should the citizens of such a society want to hold together?