COMPARATIVE POLITICS at UMass Amherst embodies an exciting and distinctive approach to understanding and explaining the organization, exercise, and contestation of power across time and space. Whether studying activism and protest in Latin America, the meaning of the word “democracy” in the Philippines, the history of electoral systems in Western Europe, the creation of order in Central Asian bazaars, dependency and clientelism in the Caribbean, or the division of labor and space on the kill floor of an industrialized slaughterhouse in the Great Plains of the United States, our faculty showcase the theoretical and analytical promise of bringing enduring political questions into conversation with rigorous, close-to-the ground empirical research.The Department's approach to the discipline of political science is consciously eclectic, based on an assumption that the study of politics cannot be reduced to any one theory or a single set of methods. Mutual appreciation among faculty members with diverse interests and approaches characterizes the intellectual atmosphere of the Department. With more than 30 faculty members, the department covers a wide array of methodologies and research interests, including the study of theory, institutions, political behavior, and political development. UMass-Amherst offers PhD and accelerated MA degrees in six fields of political inquiry: American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Law. In addition, while each field is its own thriving research community, your studies can involve multiple research clusters whose work crosses subfields, including Conflict, Violence and Security, Political Economy, Global Forces, Computational Social Science, and Ambiguities of Democracy. You’ll also choose methods training appropriate to the questions you are asking—from statistical modeling and network analysis to ethnography and textual analysis—and enjoy mentorship by scholars often across diverse subfields and methodological orientations.
