Policy-Making in a Global Age examines challenges to the global policy process and the ways that policymakers and their staffs choose and implement policy. The course focuses on the roles of the president, Congress, political partisans, civil servants, experts, and interest groups in shaping policies. Because decision-making is so complex, we need to learn to understand motivations piece-by-piece and to consider how the various pressures add up differently in different decision-making environments – sometimes comparing the U.S. to other countries, sometimes comparing across different issue areas and policy tools, and sometimes comparing governmental decisions to those made by private companies and non-governmental organizations. Overall, this course should help students understand the complexity of contemporary global policy-making. Grading will be based on class participation (15%), discussion board participation (15%), a ten-minute in-class presentation (20%), a five-page paper assignment (20%), and a final exam (30%). The class uses two required texts, available at the Co-op East and elsewhere: Harvey M. Sapolsky, Eugene Gholz, and Caitlin Talmadge, US Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy, 3rd edition, and James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. Other readings will be available via the course’s Canvas site. While the reading load will vary somewhat week-to-week, students should expect an average of about 100 pages per week.
