POLS UN3911

A lot of interesting things about the subject matter, really loved it.

I learned a great deal when it came to the political theories of various great thinkers, especially the ideas of the Italian School of Elitism, such as Mosca, Michels, and Pareto. Seeing the ways that they described democracy in contrast to how it is broadly spoken about today was probably most interesting to me. Understanding the patterns they identified with regard to organized minorities and their influence on the unorganized majorities as the basic mechanism by which most governments tend to operate (regardless of professed constitution), as well as the social and bureaucratic nature of political parties and the role they play, or feign to play, were amongst the most prominent points of knowledge that I took away from this course.

A perspective on populism within the context of contemporary political thought.

Professor Choi led an excellent course and knew a lot about the topic of comms, liberalism, and culture

We learned various political theory perspectives on how to interpret citizenship.

I mostly learned some frameworks regarding political environmental theory, more than knowledge per say. My skills in developing ideas during discussions were also improved

This class was literally a 13 week slow read of Democracy in America. Occasionally students chimed in to answer questions, but for the most part it was just him talking and referencing his book about Tocqueville. The only required reading for the class was Democracy in America. Then there was a paper at the end. No work outside of that. I can't recommend this class unless you are sincerely interested in Tocqueville. I highly doubt he knew more than 2 students' names in the whole class. Half the class wouldn't show up for more than a month at a time and it didn't really seem like he cared. Overall, the impression I got was that 90% of the class didn't want to be there, including Elster himself. It's an easy 4 credit class, but there are plenty of other classes where that is also true that don't seem like a huge waste of time.

I learned about the various competing legal and political ideologies and theories at play during the Weimar period. This was complimented by contextual historical knowledge through brief lectures at the start of class before an open discussion with all of the students. Likewise, we attempted to draw lessons from this period and apply them to our own political and legal contexts today.

If you’ve ever wondered “How on earth do the most incompetent politicians keep winning?”, you need to take this course. Firstly, Professor Ragazzoni is one of the most understanding and engaging professors I have had at Columbia. While he uses political science lexicon, he breaks it down in a way anyone can understand. As a class, we examined and dissected a variety of classical and contemporary political theory works. With each reading, we assessed how theory may explain (or deviate altogether from) political power praxis. We focused mainly on European and American literature from the late 1800s to now. HIGHLY recommend for anyone, political science major or otherwise, to take this course if you’re interested in how polarized politics happens, how parties consolidate power, and how bad politicians have historically risen to power, take this course.

This course intends to explore populism by examining it definitionally, and exploring how it interacts with democracy and constitutionalism.