Our students are trained to tackle the greatest political questions of our time. Politics permeate every aspect of our life, from local funding for public education to global challenges such as poverty and terrorism. When you study political science you gain practical knowledge and conceptual tools to pursue careers in law, business, journalism, public service, and education.
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.
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.
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.
Sophie Lee is a PhD candidate in the field of Security, Peace and Conflict, with expertise in international relations, comparative politics and political methodology. Her primary research interests include strategic differences and dynamics of violent and nonviolent political resistance around the world. She also researches statistical applications in political science, such as text analysis in data building and probabilistic solutions for the missing data problem.
Dissertation: The Politics of Latina/o Faith: Exploring Religion as a Potential Political Cleavage among Latinas/os
As the fastest growing minority population in the U.S., Latinos are an ever-changing demographic group with the potential of altering the electoral landscape in significant ways. Religious diversity could present a challenge to Latino group cohesion, however, particularly given the growth of Evangelicalism, among both Protestants and Catholics, in the Latino community. Reyes-Barriéntez proposes a theory of Latino ethno religious identity politics,... Read more »
Michael Hawley is a Ph.D. candidate, specializing in political theory with a minor focus on religion and politics. His work has been published in the European Journal of Political Theory and Philosophy and Theology. His dissertation focuses on the political thought of Cicero, its role in shaping the subsequent development of liberal republicanism, and the conceptual resources it offers to contemporary theory. He also has research interests in Catholic political thought and comparative political theory, especially the relationship between the political philosophy of the... Read more »
Samuel Bagg is a PhD candidate in political theory. His dissertation develops a normative framework for thinking about democracy which is compatible with our best empirical understandings of actually existing democratic systems and the human agents who compose them. Rather than resting on unsustainable conceptions of individual freedom and/or popular sovereignty, it adopts the dispersion of power as its motivating ideal. He has broad teaching interests, including democratic theory, critical theories of power (especially race and gender), history of political thought, political psychology,... Read more »
Alexandra Oprea is a 5th year PhD student in Political Science from Ploiesti, Romania. Her main field is Political Theory with a secondary specialization in Political Economy. Her research primarily addresses the place of children within liberal and democratic political theory. Her dissertation traces the history of two conceptions of children’s political status in European liberal political thought from the 17th century through the 19th and their effects on liberal theorizing of education. She contrasts the Lockean vision of children as belonging to a non-political private sphere with the... Read more »
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.
