Political science studies how people who disagree, and who cannot all get what they want, make binding collective decisions — and who wins. Every subfield is a specialisation of that sentence.
Two registers, and marks are lost by mixing them: normative (what ought to be — political theory) and positive/empirical (what is, and why — comparative, IR, domestic). A normative essay that smuggles in a causal claim, or an empirical essay that ends in moral assertion, is the single most common genre failure.
Three faces (Lukes): 1 winning the open contest · 2 keeping issues off the agenda · 3 shaping what people want. The third face is where most upper-year critique lives.
Power accepted as rightful. Weber's three sources: traditional · charismatic · legal-rational.
The belief that rule ought to be obeyed. It makes governing cheap; without it you pay in coercion, continuously. Regime durability arguments almost always run through this.
Weber: the organisation claiming a monopoly on legitimate violence in a territory. Keep four apart — state (apparatus) · nation (identity group) · government (current occupants) · regime (the rules for occupying it). Also: infrastructural power (reach into society) vs despotic power (acting without negotiation) — Mann.
Rules, formal and informal, that make outcomes predictable. North: institutions are the rules of the game, organisations are the players.
Olson: shared interest does not produce shared action. Free-riding explains why parties, unions, revolutions and treaties need selective incentives, coercion, or small numbers. The default answer to "why didn't they just organise?"
Sovereignty = final authority, internal and external. Representation = who may speak for whom, and on what mandate. Citizenship = the membership that converts a person into a bearer of claims. Each has a critical literature attacking it as historically particular rather than universal.
| Thinker | The move | Answering whom |
|---|---|---|
| Hobbes | Without a common power, life is intolerable; authorise an absolute sovereign. Order is the first political good. | civil war; classical/scholastic teleology |
| Locke | Natural rights precede the state; government is a trust, revocable when it breaks. Property by labour. | Hobbes's absolutism |
| Rousseau | Obedience to a law you gave yourself is freedom; the general will, not the sum of private wills. Inequality is made, not natural. | Hobbes and Locke's contract as a swindle for the rich |
| Kant | Autonomy and the moral law; right as the condition for freedoms to coexist; perpetual peace among republics. | Hume, and Rousseau's radicalism |
| Hegel | Freedom realised through institutions (family, civil society, state), not against them; history as a rational process. | Kant's formalism |
| Marx | Politics is a surface over material relations; the state secures class rule; critique of rights as bourgeois abstraction. | Hegel, and the liberal contract tradition |
| Mill | Liberty, the harm principle, the argument from fallibility for free discussion; representative government. | tyranny of the majority |
| Rawls | Justice as fairness: original position + veil of ignorance → equal liberties, then inequality only if it helps the worst off. | utilitarianism |
| Nozick | Only a minimal state is justifiable; justice is historical (how you got it), not patterned. | Rawls's difference principle |
| Communitarians (Sandel, Taylor, Walzer) | The unencumbered self is a fiction; justice is internal to shared meanings. | Rawls's abstraction |
| Feminist theory (Pateman, Okin, Young) | The public/private line is itself political; the contract has a sexual contract underneath it. | the whole contract tradition |
| Foucault | Power is productive and capillary, not just prohibitive; genealogy of the subject; discipline, biopolitics, governmentality. | sovereignty-centred accounts of power |
| Postcolonial / decolonial (Fanon, Said, Mills, Dussel) | The universal was written from somewhere; racial and colonial exclusion is constitutive, not an oversight. | the Euro-canon's self-description |
POL320 filing Place each text on two axes before anything else. Method (how it fights): genealogy · immanent critique · institutional design · reading the silence · materialism · defending the tacit · testimony · re-framing. Lens (what it thinks matters): reason · collective will · tradition · feeling & body · material life · power & knowledge. Then name the relation: real disagreement (same method, different lens) · talking past (different methods) · friendly radicalisation (an ally extended until it cuts).
Selectorate theory (Bueno de Mesquita): leaders do whatever keeps their winning coalition paid. Small coalition → private goods, patronage, repression. Large coalition → public goods. Acemoglu & Robinson: inclusive vs extractive institutions, and why elites block growth that would cost them power.
Modernisation theory (Lipset: wealth → democracy) vs Przeworski's amendment (wealth doesn't cause transitions, it prevents reversals). Transitions as elite pacts (O'Donnell & Schmitter). Class-coalition accounts (Moore: no bourgeoisie, no democracy).
Democracies now die legally, from inside — incumbents capturing courts, referees and media (Levitsky & Ziblatt; Bermeo on the change in form). Competitive authoritarianism: real elections on a tilted field.
Duverger: single-member plurality → two-party; PR → multiparty. Lijphart: majoritarian vs consensus democracy. Veto players (Tsebelis): count the actors whose consent is needed and how far apart they are — that predicts policy stability better than ideology. Presidential vs parliamentary (Linz's perils: duelling mandates, fixed terms, no exit from deadlock). Federalism as both accommodation and veto-multiplier.
Rentier state: revenue from resources or aid rather than taxation breaks the tax-for-representation bargain (no taxation, no representation). Resource curse and its critics. Tilly: war made the state and the state made war — extraction capacity as the origin of European statehood.
Ethnicity as constructed and instrumentalised, not primordial. Lipset & Rokkan's frozen cleavages. Clientelism as a contingent-exchange machine, not simply corruption.
Anarchy (no ruler above states) forces self-help. Classical realism roots it in human nature (Morgenthau); neorealism in structure (Waltz) — balancing, relative gains, the security dilemma (defensive arming reads as threat). Offensive realism (Mearsheimer): maximise power, seek hegemony.
Institutions lower transaction costs and lengthen the shadow of the future (Keohane); interdependence raises the cost of war; the democratic peace — democracies rarely fight each other (mechanism disputed: norms vs audience costs vs institutional constraint).
"Anarchy is what states make of it" (Wendt). Interests are produced by identity, norms and practice; norm cascades and norm entrepreneurs (Finnemore & Sikkink). Critical, feminist and postcolonial IR press further: whose order, secured by whose insecurity.
From your own POL243/244 decks. Import the design logic, never the statistics vocabulary — regression talk in a qualitative essay reads as borrowed authority. Every "critically evaluate" objective is a validity + measurement + effect-size exercise in a substantive costume.
| Genre | Spine | How it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Text-interpretive | A passage does something. State the move, then walk the text line by line to show it. Stay inside the text. | Summarising the argument instead of reading the passage; importing secondary literature. |
| Comparative | One shared question, then the split, then why the split matters. The comparison must be a claim, not a layout. | Two mini-essays stapled together; "both thinkers discuss…". |
| Critical analysis | Target is the secondary literature or conventional wisdom, not a primary text. Reconstruct the strongest version, find the load-bearing premise, strike that. | Attacking the conclusion rather than the premise; strawmanning. |
| Research proposal | Argument · why the intervention is needed · state of the literature · structure. It sells a gap. | Describing a topic instead of naming a gap and a payoff. |
| Research paper | Thesis that could be false · evidence that could disconfirm it · the strongest objection answered in the body, not the conclusion. | Literature review with an opinion at the end. |
Paragraph test — every body paragraph needs a claim in its first sentence that is contestable, and its last sentence must move the argument forward rather than restate. Introduction test — a stranger should be able to name your thesis, your opponent, and your evidence after reading one paragraph.
Publisher → Crossref/OpenAlex → author CV → library catalogue. A resolving DOI does not prove a citation is real — the resolved record's title must match. Evidence from your own audit: 9 of 25 citations on the POL373 syllabus were bibliographically wrong. Assume every reading list has errors until audited.
Never invent a page number, quotation or attribution. Mark unknown pages ??. Never a pirate mirror — report the paywall instead. Distinguish the assigned edition/translation from whatever copy is on disk; pagination differs.
Per source: full text read · abstract + extracts · not read. Per claim: READ IN FULL · HIGH CONFIDENCE · VERIFY AT SOURCE. Never blur "I read this" into "I read about this" — that slip is where fabricated attributions come from.
Ask the course which: Chicago author-date, Chicago notes-bibliography, or APA. Political theory courses often want notes; empirical courses usually want author-date.
| What | Where | For |
|---|---|---|
| Contract + router | ~/.claude/polisci/KNOWLEDGE.md · /polisci | every poli-sci turn; resolves the course first |
| Foundations toolkit | ~/.claude/polisci/foundations/FOUNDATIONS.md | POL243/244 apparatus, with deck locators |
| POL320 — theory | courses/POL320.md · ~/Desktop/modernity-helix · Six Lenses · Médaillier | 5 essays, 3 with passages assigned a week out — rehearse the form |
| POL373 — MENA | courses/POL373.md · ~/Desktop/pol373-assay (330 cards) | two tests + essay; weights still ?? in the file |
| Cross-course search | ~/Desktop/armillary (8 courses, 730 cards) | finding a concept across every course at once |
| Program map | ~/Desktop/pol-specialist-atlas · ~/Desktop/pol-atlas | degree requirements and course-by-course pages |