POL S 335 A: Topics in Political Economy

In this class we explore interesting puzzles and questions about contemporary politics and political history by drawing on anthropology, sociology, and economics.

Here are some of those puzzles:

• Why are most contemporary human societies sedentary, and what effect did the transition from nomadism have on politics and development?
• Why do some societies adopt sexist cultural practices like foot binding and female genital mutilation that hurt both women and most men and retard their economies?
• Why do individuals organize themselves politically around ethnicity, language, religion, and ideology, and not around their hair color, their height, or their hobbies? When are these differences politicized and polarized? When do these differences explode into violent conflict?
• Why do political revolutionaries who espouse utopian visions about a better society end up engaging in massive repression and impose illiberal institutions and scorched earth campaigns to destroy cultural practices they don’t approve of?

To address these questions, in this class we look at how human beings construct institutions and cultural practices collectively as they pursue their individual interests. We therefore focus on coordination problems and other dilemmas of collective action. We assume that individuals are rational and engage in optimizing behavior in the face of constraints. We also look at how power is universally exercised to shape and control political, cultural, and economic institutions and, in turn, how these institutions generate policies that affect what we learn, what we earn, how long we live, and even who we are.