GLOB 3200 Seminario de problemas en Estudios Globales
Seminario de Problemas: Regime Types in Global Studies
This seminar concludes the training of Global Studies and Political Science students, allowing them to utilize theories and methodological tools developed during their degrees to analyze important, contemporary political phenomena from a global perspective and ultimately enabling them to produce a final research project which reflects their academic interests and intellectual development.
Over the coming semester, we will be discussing issues related to the study of regime types in Political Science and Global Studies. Such debates about the analytical utility of these regime typologies have been reanimated recently by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the early months of the outbreak, political commentators immediately argued that democratic countries deal better with pandemics than their authoritarian counterparts. These arguments were the latest in a longer pattern in the discipline of political science. For more than six decades, political scientists have sought to demonstrate the superiority of democratic regimes for, say, economic development or environmental regulation vis-à-vis authoritarian regimes. In practice, however, as the pandemic has demonstrated, it is not always clear that democracies perform better than their authoritarian counterparts. Moreover, even when this appears to be the case, it can be difficult to decipher whether democracy is a cause or an effect of the positive outcomes that are often attributed to it. In this seminar, we therefore interrogate the analytical utility of these regime typologies, asking how useful such variables in explaining political outcomes in global politics?
To answer this question, we begin in the first half of the semester, by asking what is democracy? In exploring different definitions of this concept, we will try to better understand what, if any, are the necessary prerequisites for the creation of democratic political systems? What are democracy’s key attributes? How is it best institutionalized? And what explains the current crisis of democracy that we are living through?
In the second half of the semester, we shift our focus to a critical interrogation of the category of authoritarianism. We ask how useful is this category in explaining political outcomes? What key insights does it offer? What are the main limitations of this approach to understanding global politics? Does this category obscure more than it reveals in practice? Finally, we conclude the course by examining the relationship between regime types and key questions in political science and global studies related to economic development, pandemic response, development assistance, and environmental governance.
The seminar will be mainly driven by student participation and discussion. Emphasis during the seminar will be placed on critical interpretation of assigned readings through the active participation of students in classroom dialogue and debate. Useful participation will be informed by knowledge of the readings and a willingness to share doubts as well as insights and certainties.
Periodo en el que se ofrece el curso
202220
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