Teaching

There is no country in the world in which foreign policy is made in a hermetically sealed environment. Leaders make decisions based not only on the national interest, but on their beliefs, political interests, and competing policy priorities. Other actors – the public, advisors, politicians, bureaucrats, and societal interest groups – also constrain or otherwise impact decision-making. Peering inside the state at these numerous domestic actors is critical to understanding why states behave the way they do in international politics. This undergraduate seminar unpacks the influence of various domestic political actors on a country’s international behavior. Each week, we will survey a subset of the International Relations (IR) literature on one of these kinds of actors, starting with leaders and the masses and concluding with bureaucracies and interest groups. Throughout the course students will learn about and discuss the implications of this research on longstanding debates in the study of IR, including democratic peace theory and audience cost theory. Due to time constraints, the course will focus on democratic regimes, although we will conclude with one class on domestic political actors in non-democracies.

The primary aim of the course is to help students reflect critically on the systemic explanations for international political behavior that are so often examined in courses at the University of Chicago, particularly with regard to international conflict outcomes. A secondary aim of the course is to help students develop an active research agenda to the emerging generation of scholarship on political regimes and IR. To this end, a special focus will be paid to the methodological approaches of the research we discuss in class. Students will complete a response paper that critically evaluates the literature assigned in a week of their choice and write a prospectus for a research project that they could plausibly complete.