The Politics of AI

POLISCI 157 takes artificial intelligence as a political subject. The course treats AI not as a technology to be evaluated on its own terms, but as a force that reorganizes the institutions political science has traditionally studied: states, markets, labor, public opinion, the production of expertise. Students work through readings that situate current AI development inside longer arguments about technological change, regulation, and political economy.

A second strand of the course is methodological. AI is also reshaping how political scientists do their work — what counts as data, what kinds of inference are tractable, what the discipline’s craft norms permit. The course gives students space to think critically about that shift, and connects to my parallel research on AI in social-science research practice.

First offered in Summer 2026, with a planned Spring 2027 iteration at the regular department cadence.