Spring 2013 - 62705 - PA383G - Policy Making in a Global Age

Policy-Making in a Global Age examines challenges to the global policy process and policy tools that leaders use to implement global policy. The course focuses on the role of the president, congress, political partisans, and interest groups in shaping policies.  The policy-making process is changing as globalization, innovation, the changing balance of power, and other factors bring new technologies, groups, and tools into the policy mix. The contemporary process potentially has access to more information and more channels for communicating, cooperating, and coercing across borders, but those features also make decision-making more complex and perhaps indeterminate.  At the same time, more actors of more types may buffet policy-makers, perhaps constraining their ability to figure out their interests and to implement their decisions.  Our in-class assessments of the global policy challenges and instruments will consciously consider the extent to which past evidence and judgments should be modified for the "global age." Overall, this course should help students understand the complexity of contemporary global policy-making.