MESA POL 101 (Summer 2016)

Syllabus

First Writing Assignment (Due June 30th Now due July 5th!)

Second Writing Assignment (Due July 26th)

Midterm Review Guide (Test on July 7th)

Final Exam Review Guide (Test on July 28th)

Additional Readings

Plato, “Crito”

Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” chapter 2

Edmund Burke, selection from “Reflections on the French Revolution”

Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative”

Friedrich Engels, selections from “The Condition of the Working Class in England”

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”

Readings for Second Writing Assignment

1. David Brooks, “Why Partyism is Wrong”

2. Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”

3. Thomas Sander and Robert Putnam, “Still Bowling Alone?  The Post-9/11 Split”

4. Carles Boix and Daniel N. Posner, “Making Social Capital Work: A Review of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy”

5. The Constitution of the United States

6. Robert A. Dahl, “What Political Institutions Does Large-Scale Democracy Require?”

7. Francis Fukuyama, “25 Years After Tiananmen, Liberal Democracy Still Stands”

8. Timothy Stanley and Alexander Lee, “It’s Still Not the End of History”

9. Larry Diamond, “The Democratic Rollback”

10. Larry Diamond, “Chasing Away the Democracy Blues”

Lecture Slides
Lecture #1: Why Do We Obey the Law?  (No Slides This Day)
Lecture #2: Power and Authority
Lecture #3: Liberal Legitimacy
Lecture #4: Liberalism: Political and Economic

Lecture #5: Reactions to Liberalism: Conservatism and Socialism

Lecture #6: Debates over Liberty

Lecture #7: The State and Nationalism

Lecture #8: Policies of the State

Lecture #9: Economic Policies of the State

Lecture #10: What Lies Behind Policy?

Lecture #11: Democratic and Authoritarian Regimes

Lecture #12: Constitutions

Lecture #13: Elections

Lecture #14: Parties

Lecture #15: Interest Groups and Social Movements

Lecture #16: Parliamentary Systems