Duke University Political Science

Warning: You are Entering a Magical Place - Matthew King's Senior Class Day Speech

Sometimes I think Duke should have come with a warning label: WARNING: YOU ARE ENTERING A MAGICAL PLACE! Here, beneath the spires of West Campus, on a still night, when the fog rolls in, it’s not... Read more »

Ruth Grant retires after a career at Duke Political Science & Kenan

After 32 years as a Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute, Professor Ruth Grant is stepping down and into retirement. Since its creation 23 years ago, Ruth has been... Read more »

"Groundbreaking" - a review of Herbert Kitschelt's research on political preference formation

A developing strand of sociological research studies the relationships between occupations and political outlooks and preferences, following groundbreaking work by Herbert Kitschelt and Philippe Rehm... Read more »

"Mediation, Peacekeeping, and the Severity of Civil War" - Kyle Beardsley coauthors

Kyle Beardsley, Associate Professor of Political Science recently coauthored "Mediation, Peacekeeping, and the Severity of Civil War" with David Cunningham and Peter White. While all civil wars... Read more »

White Identity Politics book cover photo

Ashley Jardina podcasts on The New Books Network

From the New Books Network: One of the themes of the era of Donald Trump is whiteness and white identity. From his first steps into the public eye, Trump used race to frame his positions and... Read more »

The Seattle Times interviews Peter Feaver about Pat Shanahan's qualifications

On Nov. 10, 2016, Pat Shanahan, chair of the University of Washington’s board of regents, delivered a message to students and faculty shaken by the election of President Donald Trump two days before... Read more »

New York Times Op-Ed analysis of Ashley Jardina's new research

Thomas Edsall, New York Times opinion author, received advanced copy of Ashley Jardina's new book, White Identity Politics. His recent article, "White Identity Politics Aren't Going Anywhere,"... Read more »

Will Reducing Transaction Costs Be the End of Retail? - Michael Munger writes for AIER

Those empty Sears, Penny’s, and other large retailer stores at your local mall may soon be repurposed as flexible retail platforms where online sellers can let people interact with their products at... Read more »

Mediation, Peacekeeping, and the Severity of Civil War - Kyle Beardsley coauthors

One of the proposed benefits of third-party involvement that has been offered to justify its use is that it helps reduce the severity of conflict. Existing work finding that peacekeeping operations... 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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Ündes Wen

Tusi (Ündes) Wen is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in political economy and methodology, with regional expertise in China, East Asia, and Inner Asia. Situated at the intersection of political economy, comparative politics, and international relations, his research focuses on authoritarian regimes and their transformations. At the center of his research agenda is his dissertation, which investigates the strategies, consequences, and limitations of authoritarian control - including its potential implications for revolution and democratization. Highlighting the limitations of authoritarian... Read more »

Jan Vogler

Jan Vogler is a Ph.D. candidate with a specialization in political economy and political methodology. His research covers a wide range of topics, including the organization of public bureaucracies, various forms of political and economic competition (in domestic and international settings), the legacies of imperial rule, and structures and perceptions of the European Union. In his dissertation, he analyzes the determinants of cross-national and cross-regional variation in the institutions of public administration by considering the impact of historical events. More details on various research... Read more »

Chris Kennedy

Chris Kennedy is a PhD candidate in Political Science, specializing in political theory. He is interested the political significance of the advent of the internet, especially with respect to controversies over the use or abuse of information technology. His dissertation examines three political conflicts over the use of the internet in a liberal democratic society. Each controversy reflects a basic disagreement about the appropriate domain of the public sphere: whether to accommodate electronic forms of civil disobedience, to treat digital information as intellectual property, or to sanction... Read more »

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.

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