Master of Arts in Political Science- Law, Politics and Society

LAW. POLITICS & SOCIETY is the study of the relationship between law, politics, and society.At UMass Amherst, we are interdisciplinary. In addition to gaining knowledge of the key debates in the field from a political science perspective, our faculty incorporate a wide range of approaches into their research and teaching, including those from anthropology, computational social science, criminology, economics, gender studies, history, law, linguistics, sociology, and technology.We are both domestic and global in scope. Faculty study core questions at the local, state, national, and international levels. This includes addressing questions central to the role of courts in American democracy, how formal and informal legal systems operate throughout the world, and the role that law plays on the international stage.And we are methodologically pluralistic, with faculty whose work embraces qualitative and quantitative approaches, including case studies, content analysis, ethnography, experimental survey methods, field research, interpretive research, network analysis, quantitative modeling, and textual analysis. Several of us are faculty affiliates with the Computational Social Science Institute.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 across diverse subfields and methodological orientations.

Graduate School application, Three letters of recommendationOfficial transcript(s) Personal Statement of InterestWriting sample GRE requirement is waived.