Duke University Political Science

Michael Munger write about universal basic income for The Hill

At a time when even the wealthiest nations face problems of poverty, many analysts are concerned about creating jobs in the “new” economy. Are traditional anti-poverty programs up to the task? I don’... Read more »

Trump's trade war is not going as planned - Grieco and Büthe write op ed for Newsday

President Donald Trump has told us that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” He seems to have thought that just threatening to impose tariffs would bring other countries to their knees, since... Read more »

Many Fear Erdogan's New Powers - Timur Kuran interviewed in The Jerusalem Post

The country has been under a state of emergency for almost two years since the failed 2016 coup, but Erdogan said he would end it after the election. Under the new system, a state of emergency lasts... Read more »

Chris Johnston won the 2018 David O. Sears Book Award

Christopher Johnston and his coauthors won the David O. Sears Book Award for 2018 for their work Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution. Announced at the 41st ... Read more »

U.S. Supreme Court Justice cites co-authored work by Arvind Krishnamurthy

On June 28, 2018, the US Supreme Court denied requests by two death row inmates from Mississippi to have their cases heard. Justice Stephen Breyer dissented from these decisions, citing a recent work... Read more »

What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us - Ruth Grant writes Wall Street Journal op ed

Thanks to Stormy Daniels, Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo, most of us are now familiar with agreements where one party purchases the other’s silence. But such nondisclosure agreements, also known as NDAs... Read more »

New York Times Opinion cites Ashley Jardina's research

"Kaufmann and Jardina’s work raises a crucial question: has traditional polling failed to capture the actual views of the public on immigration?" Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke, argues... Read more »

Trump foreign policy has reshaped GOP position? - Peter Feaver interviewed in The Atlantic

Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist, rejects the idea that changes in the GOP’s coalition have irreversibly shifted the party toward Trump-style isolationism and unilateralism. “The... Read more »

Michael Munger on NPR discusses the sharing economy

Michael Munger joins host Frank Stasio to talk about his new book: Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Shared Economy (Cambridge University Press/2018) which describes a movement that Munger says... Read more »

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Undergraduate Program

By completing an undergraduate major in political science, you will acquire a sophisticated understanding of political processes. Perhaps more importantly, our major is designed to develop critical and independent thinking, to hone your writing and communication skills, and to provide you with analytical tools. Upon graduation, our majors are highly successful and pursue careers in diverse fields, including non-governmental and public interest organizations, think tanks, consulting, journalism, communications, local, state, and federal government, polling firms, finance, and business management. Many also go on to pursue graduate study in law, political science, public administration, or business administration.

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Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Certificate

The Philosophy, Politics & Economics program is an interdisciplinary certificate at Duke and a minor at UNC that emerged to fill in some crucial gaps between the three disciplines, and to bring students a breadth of perspective they cannot get from a single discipline. Important issues ranging from health care allocation and global pandemics to nuclear weapons proliferation and climate change have moral, political, and economic dimensions. Economics and Political Science can help us understand these issues; Philosophy can help us evaluate different proposed solutions to them. PPE students learn to look at the world through different windows, and to think about the relative role of markets and political institutions in promoting human welfare.

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Graduate

The Political Science Department at Duke places graduate research and training at the core of its mission. Three features define our approach to graduate education: ambition, innovation, and rigor. You will explore questions ranging from the micro-political economy of development, to the origins of state capacity, the relationship between ethnicity and conflict, the interplay between religion, money, and politics, or the ability of voters to articulate preferences in complex issue spaces. Our graduates begin working with faculty from the very first day, to gain an appreciation of the challenges involved in producing innovative research. This paves the way to your own intellectual development, the first milestone of which is a solo-authored research paper to be presented to the department during your third year in the program. From that point on, until the completion of the dissertation in year five, the focus is primarily on independent research.

Graduate degrees: Ph.D. | M.A. | Joint J.D./M.A.

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Jan Vogler

Jan Vogler is a Ph.D. candidate with a specialization in comparative political economy and political methodology. His research is concerned with the organization of public bureaucracies and political competition. In his dissertation, he analyzes the historical determinants of bureaucratic characteristics. He primarily explores the role social groups played in shaping early bureaucratic systems and imperial legacies in public administration. Prior to his doctoral studies, he studied political science, economics, and international relations at Free University of Berlin, the University of... Read more »

Jeremy Spater

Jeremy Spater is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in Political Economy with a secondary focus in Methodology. His dissertation examines the relationship between collective identities and preferences for public goods, with applications to South Asia and Europe. He also studies international political economy, including the relationship between trade balance and protectionist preferences. His research utilizes formal theory, survey experiments, and natural experiments. He graduated magna cum laude from Kenyon College in 2007 with a double major in political science and physics, with a minor in... Read more »

Ündes Wen

Tusi (Ündes) Wen is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science from Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China. He specializes in the field of political economy and quantitative methodology, with a regional specialization in China and Inner Asia. His primary research interests include authoritarian institutions, collective action, and comparative democratization. He also researches the Inner Asian influences on China, such as the political economic legacies of the Qing Dynasty. His dissertation investigates the intended and unintended consequences of authoritarian control, and their implications for... Read more »

Libby Jenke

I am a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Duke University. I am also a member of Scott Huettel's neuroscience laboratory in Duke's Psychology and Neuroscience department (https://sites.duke.edu/huettellab/). My current research is focused on two areas. First, I study political preferences and choices. My work examines how voters employ heterogeneous models when choosing a candidate. Second, I have multiple projects on the role of identity in decision making that expand our conception of identity past simply party identification. In particular, my most recent work examines how identity... Read more »

Kaitlyn Webster

Katie Webster is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Security, Peace, and Conflict (international relations) and political methodology. Her primary research agenda focuses on questions about intrastate conflict onset and intensity, which she investigates using both theoretical and empirical models. Her dissertation is a book-length project that asks the question, “Why do some civil conflicts simmer at low-intensity, while others escalate to war?” Her secondary research agendas examine: 1) the relationship between gender and conflict; 2) collective action, mobilization, and state policy... Read more »

Juan Tellez

Juan Tellez is a PhD Candidate in Security, Peace and Conflict with a secondary focus in Methodology. His dissertation examines the relationship between the design of negotiated settlements and public support for conflict-termination. He also studies international relations, including sources of order in the international system. His research uses quasi-experimental designs, survey experiments, and network analysis.

Howard Liu

Howard Liu is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Security, Peace, and Conflict and Political Methodology. Substantively, his research focuses on protest and repression dynamics, the geography of rebel insurgencies in civil war, and networks in interstate conflicts. Methodologically, he is particularly interested in network analysis, automated event data, text as data, and computational modeling.

Our Research

Our department is recognized as one of the premier political science departments in the world, and our faculty are leaders in their fields. The intellectual life of the department is organized around six subfields that broadly reflect the conceptual and theoretical range of questions addressed in political science. Of course, there are significant areas of overlap between these fields, and as a result, many faculty work in multiple fields.

Learn more about our research