Nine courses of political science, carded and cross-searchable — the methods sequence, the comparative surveys, the MENA reading pack and the theory readings, in one place.
Nine courses that were never designed to be read together, indexed as if they were.
Each of these existed as its own study app. Separately they are eight tabs; together they are a single body of material that repeats itself constantly — the same handful of concepts under different course codes.
Anderson's imagined community in DTS201 is doing the same work as Wedeen's cult of Asad in the MENA unit: a nation held together by something people perform rather than believe. Most Similar Systems is taught as an abstraction in POL243 and then used, unnamed, by Clark to compare Jordan and Morocco. The search above is the point of the exercise — it finds those collisions across all 830 cards at once.
The methods sequence is the key to every other course here.
POL243 and POL244 teach how to produce research; every other course asks you to read it. The transfer is the critical apparatus, not the statistics — import the regression vocabulary into an essay on Wedeen's ethnography and it reads as borrowed authority. These are the moves that travel intact.
| From | Concept | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
| POL243 wk 5 | Explanandum / explanans | Force every reading into two lines — what is being explained, and by what. Twenty-five MENA readings become twenty-five cards. |
| POL243 wk 4 | The ten puzzle types | Name the puzzle in one sentence. This syllabus runs on contra-expectations puzzles: Leber, Bogaert, Lust, Wedeen. |
| POL243 wk 10 | Most Similar Systems | Clark compares Jordan and Morocco this way explicitly. The design forces you to name the variable doing the work — party institutionalisation. |
| POL243 wk 10 | Most Different Systems | Hamzawy against Errazzouki: republic and monarchy, opposite technique, same post-2011 entrenchment. |
| POL243 wk 1 | Falsifiability | “Authoritarian resilience” accommodates both durability and collapse. Bank et al. concede the field missed 2011 — that is the standing critique. |
| POL243 wk 9 | Latent variables & indicators | Legitimacy and state capacity are unobservable. Endelman’s whole argument is how you operationalise ideological power — forts, uniforms, flags. |
| POL244 s6 | Confounder vs mediator | Mazur’s anti-primordialism is an omitted-variable argument. Identity is a mediator produced by state access, not the cause. |
| POL244 s1 | Necessary, sufficient, scope | Oil is neither necessary nor sufficient for authoritarianism. Richter’s own qualifier — rent plus large dynastic families — is a scope condition. |
| POL244 s2 | Selecting on the dependent variable | This literature studies regimes where authoritarianism survived. Tunisia is the variation that disciplines it. |
| POL244 s3 | Levels of measurement | Freedom House scores are ordinal — medians and ranks only, no means. Angrist’s 2010-vs-2017 table can then be critiqued precisely. |
| POL244 s7 | Reading a paper cold | The four-move scaffold ports to qualitative work: what kind of study, what counts as evidence, what comparison carries it, what would falsify it. |
Guide-to-graduation for the Political Science specialist: what counts, what is left, and the AGPA 2.30 annual route into the POSt.
Argument and essay training built around POL373, with THE DILEMMA — a state-building game that makes the trade-offs playable.
Study pack and annotated bibliography on media systems and democratic health. Web summaries were wrong in six places; the textbook is the source of truth.
A three-tier ladder for the MENA course: level-zero orientation, bite-sized reading cards, then three worked essays with an argument map.