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.
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.
