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Course Information

Students will be asked to complete the electronic registration for first term in early August. The electronic registration for second term courses will open in December. Graduate Students register for three graduate courses during these terms.

Methods courses must be taken in order - Methods 1, Methods 2, Methods 3.

Course Timetables & Instructors

Course

 Title

Instructor
9501A Research Design (MA) A. Friesen
9502A Advanced Research Design (PhD) A. Friesen
9511A  International Relations  A. Harmes
9531A Canadian Politics  C. Anderson
9537A Partisanship, Polarization and Populism L. Stephenson
9590A Intro to Quantitative Methods (Methods 1) M. Lebo
9592A  Maximum Likelihood Estimation (Methods 3)  D. Armstrong
Special Topic
4206F/9762A		 Theories of Global Justice C. Jones

Course

 Title

Instructor
9516B Survey Design I. Sener
9524B Urban Political Economy J. Lyons
9534B Public Opinion C. Anderson
9566B Comparative Politics  M. Turgeon
9591B Regression and Causal Inference (Methods 2) S. Vallejo Vera
9593B Qualitative Methods in Political Science M. Horak
9597B Social Norms and Sexual Politics E. Finneron-Burns

Course

 Title

Instructor
TBD TBD TBD
Will be posted as soon as this information is available.

Grad Courses Offerings

Please note that not all courses are offered each year. This list is intended as a general guide and tracker of possible course offerings.

This course introduces graduate students to critical approaches in political theory, and focuses on building familiarity with – and understanding of how to use – political theory and critically oriented methods in developing research.
This course provides an introductory overview of how political scientists study the politics of Canada. Rather than focusing solely on the nuts and bolts of institutions, actors, histories, or events, students will grapple with the main theoretical and methodological approaches used in the literature to analyze Canadian politics.

This course will explore the topic of public opinion. Through the analytical lens of a political behaviour approach, we will address definitional questions of public opinion and the relationship of public opinion and democracy. We then consider various sources of public opinion including the effects of biological and non-conscious factors, age and various group identities (such as gender, race, religion, class, partisanship and ideology). We next consider the relationship of traditional media and social media with public opinion. We close the course by exploring the topics of macro public opinion and the relationship of public opinion and public policy.

Political psychology is the use and application of psychological theories and methods to questions of political interest. This seminar examines research on political behaviour from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on literatures in political psychology, biopolitics, and the life sciences.  We will consider the implications of human psychology, biology, genetics, physiology, cognition, neuroscience, and evolution for understanding political attitudes, beliefs, ideology, identity, and behaviour.
This course offers a broad introduction to the field of comparative politics. Comparative politics, when taught in Canada, would encompass any study that is country specific but that is not Canada, or any study that compares two or more countries, including Canada or
not. Comparativists explore a wide range of topics and adopt a variety of methodological (qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods) and theoretical approaches (e.g., rational choice theory, historical and sociological institutionalisms, cultural and psychological approaches,
etc.). They are generally (although not exclusively) concerned with "big questions" shaping the world like democratization, democratic backsliding, group and racial inequalities, interest groups and social movements, electoral and party systems, executive-legislative relations, public policies, and, more broadly, how institutions (rules and norms) affect economic and political actors and outcomes.
This course introduces students to basic statistical techniques used to estimating and testing causal relationships. Evaluating causal claims is best done using an experimental design like randomized controlled trials, but most of the data available to political scientists, however, is observational in nature. Drawing causal inferences from observational data is a hard task but not an impossible one, given careful treatment of the data. A series of methodological tools are available to scholars to evaluate causal arguments and hypotheses using observational data and this course introduces the most commonly used ones for cross-sectional data structures—observations of subjects (like individuals, polities or countries) at one point or period of time. At the end of this course, students should be able to interpret most of the empirical analyses reported in political science journals and monographs and produce their own empirical analyses to estimate and test causal relationships of interest.
One of the most abundant sources of data available to social and political scientists today is text. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have spearheaded a text-as-data revolution, which has led social scientists to seek out new means of analyzing text data at scale. In this course, we will learn the intuition behind—and how to implement—different computational methods to process, analyze, and classify text. The course will cover Bag-of-Words (BoW) approaches, unsupervised methods, supervised and semi-supervised methods, and LLMs that use text as data, as well as how we can interpret the results obtained from applying these methods.
Content to be provided soon.
From Plato to John Rawls, justice has been a major theme in the history of political theory. But until the 1970s it was thought to be concerned only with the relations of co-citizens within a single state. The modern debates about global justice began with the questioning of this assumption: why shouldn’t justice focus on the relations of citizens of different states or relations between human beings regardless of citizenship? This political theory course surveys several topics in the
modern global justice debates, including global poverty, the idea of international distributive justice, global inequality, compatriot priority, distributive justice and state coercion, sovereignty and human rights, the law of peoples, crime against humanity, global gender justice, immigration, and trade.

Course Outline - information:

Scholastic Offences
Scholastic offences are taken seriously and students are directed to read the appropriate policy, specifically, the definition of what constitutes a Scholastic Offence. Scholastic Discipline Regulations for Graduate students can be found here.

Health/Wellness Services
Students who are in emotional/mental distress should refer to Mental health Support at Western for a complete list of options about how to obtain help.

Accessible Education (AE)
Western is committed to achieving barrier-free accessibility for all its members, including graduate students. As part of this commitment, Western provides a variety of services devoted to promoting, advocating, and accommodating persons with disabilities in their respective graduate program.

Gender-Based and Sexual Violence
Western is committed to reducing incidents of gender-based and sexual violence (GBSV) and providing compassionate support to anyone who is going through or has gone through these traumatic events. If you are experiencing or have experienced GBSV (either recently or in the past), you will fiind information about support services for survivors, including emergency contact on the Wellness and Wellbeing website. To connect with a case manager or set up an appointment, please contact support@uwo.ca.