The Science of Politics

POLISCI 1 is Stanford’s introduction to political science: a one-quarter undergraduate lecture course that builds the conceptual vocabulary of the discipline from the ground up. Across the term, students move from the elementary building blocks of political life — power, institutions, collective action, representation — to the major substantive domains of democratic politics, comparative government, and international order. The course is designed for students with no prior background in the field, and assumes none.

Co-taught with Emilee Chapman in Fall 2025, the course pairs lectures with weekly sections in which students apply concepts to a rotating set of contemporary cases. The aim is not to survey the discipline so much as to give students a working sense of how political scientists pose questions and weigh evidence — a foundation they can carry into any subsequent course in the major, or into adjacent fields where political reasoning matters.