Political Science

Political science is best defined in comparison to political philosophy: one attempts to understand politics from first principles, reasoned outward, in a coherent and consistent theory; the other attempts to understand politics from observations and theories of what explains the variance therein. This page addresses the latter.

Comparative Politics

Pretty much everything where states are the unit of analysis.

• City Politics

• Democratization

• International Development

Political Parties and Movements

Comparative politics methods applied to non-states. There is some overlap with public choice theory (esp. institutional design).

• Critical elections theory

• Issues evolution model

• Party polarization

Public Choice and Social Choice Theory

Public choice and social choice are highly interconnected. In general, public choice seeks to be strictly positive, while social choice leans into philosophy and normative study. Like, 'given a voting system, which agent has most control' vs. 'what is the most fair voting system'. But the theorists fundamentally speak the same language, and it's more coherent to group them together by field of study.

• Institutional design

• Median voter theorem

• Pivotal politics model

• Rational choice voting

Political Economy

• CAGE distance framework

• Outbidding

• Regulatory economics

• Wilson-Lowi matrix

International Relations

• Bargaining model of war

• Conflict theory

• Constructivism

• Institutionalism

• Rally around the flag effect

• Rationalism

• Realism

Miscellany

• Affective Polarization

• Gini coefficient

• Southern exceptionalism

• Some resources on this wiki:

  • listings of states and city-states

  • listings of empires (including de facto empires)

Reading Notes

Note: reading notes for the above topics are listed on the respective pages, not here.

• England in the Age of the American Revolution, Lewis Namier, 1931

• The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod and William D. Hamilton, 1981

• Japan in 1994: Out with the Old, in with the New?, Michael Blaker, 1995

• What Has Economics to Say About Racial Discrimination?, Kenneth J. Arrow. 1998

• Hard and Soft Law in International Governance, Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal, 2000

• Twilight of impunity for Africa's presidential criminals, Bruce Baker, 2004

• Statistical Backwards Induction: A Simple Method for Estimating Strategic Models; Muhammet Ali Bas, Curtis S. Signorino, and Robert W. Walker; 2006

• Marvin Frankel's Mistakes and the Need to Rethink Federal Sentencing, Lynn Adelman and Jon Deitrich, 2008

• Improving the Guidelines Through Critical Evaluation: An Important New Role for District Courts, Lynn Adelman and Jon Deitrich, 2009

• Aloofness or Dirty Hands? Administrative Culpability in the Making of the Second Ghetto, Mohamad G. Alkadry and Brandi Blessett, 2010

• What the Sentencing Commission Ought to Be Doing: Reducing Mass Incarceration, Lynn Adelman, 2013

• Measuring Internal Political Efficacy in the 1988 National Election Study; Richard G. Niemi, Stephen C. Craig, and Franco Mattei; 2014

• Racial Conflict in Global Society, John Stone and Polly Rizova, 2014

• Detecting Grouped Local Average Treatment Effects and Selecting True Instruments With an Application to Estimating the Effect of Prison on Recidivism; Nicolas Apfel, Helmut Farbmacher, Rebecca Groh, Martin Huber, and Henrika Langen; 2023

• Politicians’ Theories of Voting Behavior; Jack Lucas, Lior Sheffer, Peter John Loewen, Stefaan Walgrave, Karolin Soontjens, Eran Amsalem, Stefanie Bailer, Nathalie Brack, Christian Breunig, Pirmin Bundi, Linda Coufal, Patrick Dumont, Sarah Lachance, Miguel M. Pereira, Mikael Persson, Jean-benoit Pilet, Anne Rasmussen, Maj-britt Sterba, and Frédéric Varone; 2024

• Increasing intergovernmental coordination to fight crime: evidence from Mexico, Marco Alcocer, 2024

• All Politics Is Local: Studying Women’s Representation in Local Politics in Authoritarian Regimes, Carolyn Barnett and Marwa Shalaby, 2024

• The Generalizability of IR Experiments Beyond the U.S.; Lotem Bassan-Nygate, Jonathan Renshon, Jessica L.P. Weeks, and Chagai M. Weiss; 2024

• Widening the gap of political inequality? The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on political engagement, Ana Maria Belchior, 2024

• Democracy and the Epistemic Problems of Political Polarization, Jonathan Benson, 2024

• Autocratic Policy and the Accumulation of Social Capital: The Moscow Housing Renovation Program; Ekaterina Borisova, Regina Smyth, and Alexei Zakharov; 2024

• Unconditional Loyalty: The Survival of Minority Autocracies, Salam Alsaadi, 2025

• Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System, Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman, 2025

• Are Firms Gerrymandered?; Joaquín Artés, Aaron R. Kaufman, Brian K. Richter, and Jeffrey F. Timmons; 2025

• Efficacy of Congressional Oversight, Pamela Ban and Seth J. Hill, 2025

• How Does Shaming Human Rights Violators Abroad Shape Attitudes at Home?, Lotem Bassan-Nygate, 2025

• Criminal fragmentation in Mexico, Jane Esberg, 2026

Data Notes

• Relevant government agencies, which link to many data notes:

  • BJS

  • BLS

  • Census Bureau

  • NCES

  • HUD

• see UMich's ISR

• ALICE Project

• ANES

• CIA World Factbook

• CSES

• EES

• ESS

• Freedom House's Freedom in the World

• GSS

• ISSP

• MIPD

• Polity

• V-Dem

• WGI

• WVS

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