BA Political Science

The field consists of four substantive subfields: American politics, which covers such topics as national and local politics, elections, and constitutional law; comparative politics, which aims at understanding the political systems of other countries, both by studying individual states and by engaging in cross-national comparisons; international relations, which deals with the ways that states and other political actors behave in the international arena, including such topics as security, foreign policies, international organizations, and international economic relations; and political theory, which analyzes the history of normative political thought as well as of analytic concepts such as the nature of justice or liberty.