Introduction to Political Science

Fictional sample for demonstration. Silver Oak University and Prof. Halloran are fictional, used to showcase thecoursemaker.com. No real institution, course, or person is implied or endorsed. The thinkers, documents, court cases, and data studied in the course are real and are treated factually — and evenhandedly.

Course Description

Introduction to Political Science is the survey of the whole discipline — the standard gateway course that introduces political science's five subfields: political theory and philosophy, comparative politics, international relations, American government, and political methodology. It follows a single coherent arc — what the discipline is and how it works → power, authority, legitimacy, and the state → the ideologies and theories people argue over → regime types and constitutions → the institutions (legislatures, executives, judiciaries) → the American case → participation, elections, and public opinion → the comparative method → international relations and global political economy — from the oldest questions (What makes authority legitimate? What is justice?) to this morning's headlines.

The emphasis throughout is on thinking like a political scientist, not memorizing a glossary. We lead with the plain-language concept, then turn to the texts and the data — because political science is built from evidence and argument. A weekly Political Analysis Workshop is where that craft gets practiced: each week you'll take either one real, well-documented primary text — Hobbes's Leviathan, Federalist No. 51, Marbury v. Madison, the U.S. Constitution, the U.N. Charter — or one real political dataset — actual election results, a real Pew poll with its margin of error, a democracy index — and work it the way political scientists do. A weekly AI-tutor tutorial gives you a low-stakes place to practice — and to catch the chatbot's political-science mistakes, a habit this course returns to every week, because chatbots routinely fabricate quotations, invent plausible-sounding court cases, misattribute ideas, and slant contested questions.

A word on how this course handles politics. Political science studies the most argued-about subjects there are, and this course takes a firm stand on exactly one thing: fairness. Ideologies are defined neutrally — what each values, fears, and argues — never ranked. Contested questions get the strongest case for each major position ("proponents argue… / critics respond…"), and you will be asked to weigh them yourself, not handed a verdict. The course never advocates a party or ideology, and neither your agreement nor your disagreement with any position is ever graded — only the quality of your evidence and reasoning. Two distinctions do a lot of work here: empirical claims (what is — testable against evidence) vs. normative claims (what ought to be — argued from values), and documented facts vs. open interpretations. Well-documented facts — what an institution's rules actually say, what a court actually held, what an election's counted result was, what a published index reports — are stated plainly. The genuine debates built on top of them are presented evenhandedly.

A note on scope. This is the broad survey of the discipline — not an American Government course (the U.S. case is one unit, Week 10), not an International Relations course, and not a Political Theory course. Those are the follow-on courses this survey prepares you for.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

1. Describe the subfields and methods of political science — political theory/philosophy, comparative politics, international relations, American government, and political methodology — and analyze political artifacts using the discipline's core tools: concept application, argument analysis, evidence evaluation, the comparative method, and the empirical/normative distinction.
2. Explain power, authority, legitimacy, and the state — including sovereignty and the social contract tradition (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) — and apply these concepts to real political cases.
3. Compare the major political ideologies and normative theories evenhandedly — liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and others; justice, liberty, equality, and rights — stating each position in its strongest form and distinguishing empirical from normative claims.
4. Compare regime types and constitutional structures — democracy (direct and representative), authoritarianism, and totalitarianism; democratization and backsliding; what constitutions do; and the rule of law, separation of powers, and checks and balances.
5. Analyze political institutions — legislatures, executives, and judiciaries — including the parliamentary/presidential/semi-presidential distinction, government formation and removal, judicial review, and judicial independence.
6. Explain American government and political participation — federalism, separation of powers, and the U.S. Constitution as a case of the survey's concepts; parties, elections, and voting systems and their effects; and public opinion, polling, political behavior, and the media.
7. Apply the comparative method to political systems and political development — most-similar and most-different designs, state capacity, competing explanations of democratization — and read comparative-governance indicators critically.
8. Explain the major theories of international relations — realism, liberalism, and constructivism — and the basics of the international system, international organizations and law, and global political economy, presenting competing theories and contested global questions evenhandedly.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

• SLO A — Political analysis & source/data evaluation. Source, contextualize, and closely read a political primary text — a document, theory excerpt, court case, treaty, or charter — and read and evaluate political data (polls, election results, governance indicators), distinguishing what the evidence shows from what it does not.
• SLO B — Evidence-based political argument. Construct and support a political thesis with relevant evidence and reasoning, distinguishing empirical from normative claims, while engaging the strongest opposing view with intellectual charity.

Required Materials

There is no required textbook, and you will pay nothing for course materials. Readings, videos, and every primary text, court opinion, and dataset are delivered as links to external resources posted in each weekly module — opened in your browser, nothing to buy or download. We link primary texts and cases at authoritative sources: the Avalon Project at Yale, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, un.org, supremecourt.gov / Oyez / Cornell LII, and classic-text archives (Project Gutenberg, MIT Classics, Perseus); and political data at Pew Research Center, Gallup, Freedom House / V-Dem, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, official election authorities, and Our World in Data. The reading load is intentionally light and is meant to support, not replace, the in-class work, the workshops, and the practice.

You will need:

• A device with a web browser and internet access.
• Access to the free external resources linked in each module (all free; some short videos are on YouTube — CrashCourse Government & Politics, Khan Academy; the OpenStax Introduction to Political Science text is linked as an optional reference).
• Access to one approved AI chatbot for the weekly Lecture Tutorials, adaptive activities, and the workshop AI-critique moment (see the AI-Use Policy below).

Grading

Your course grade is the weighted total of the groups below. Weights sum to 100%.

Attendance is tracked at every session but is not weighted (see the Attendance Policy).

Per-item points: quizzes 10 · discussions 20 · assignments 100 · Political Analysis Workshops 50 · midterm & final 100 each.

Letter-Grade Scale

Late & Make-Up Policy

• Late penalty: 10% per day. Submitted work loses 10 percentage points of its earned score for each day (or part of a day) it is late.
• Quizzes, the Midterm, and the Final are time-bound. Make-ups are arranged only for documented emergencies — contact Prof. Halloran as early as possible, ideally before the due date.
• Political Analysis Workshops build on the week's objective and are best done the same week; if you must miss one, contact Prof. Halloran.
• Practice exercises are ungraded and exist for your benefit; the late penalty does not apply to them.
• If something serious is getting in the way of your work, reach out early. It is almost always easier to arrange support before a deadline than to repair a grade after it.

AI-Use Policy

This course requires you to use AI as a learning partner on your coursework, and it draws a clear line for the closed assessments. Read this section carefully.

Approved chatbots

You must use one of these three approved AI chatbots:

• Gemini
• Claude
• ChatGPT

The free tier of any of these is sufficient. You may pick whichever you prefer.

AI in this course (adaptive-learning activities)

Your Lecture Tutorials, Discussions, Assignments, and the AI-critique step of each weekly Political Analysis Workshop are adaptive-learning activities you complete with the chatbot:

• Weekly Lecture Tutorials — work through the week's concepts and thinkers in conversation, then submit the conversation share link and your Completion Summary.
• Discussions — think a genuinely contested political question through in a real-time dialogue with the chatbot, then post the AI-generated summary plus your chat share link to the discussion board (and reply to peers).
• Assignments — build a short, thesis-driven political argument with a chatbot coach that grades and teaches you as you go, then submit the coach's self-scored report (the line beginning STUDENT'S SCORE:) plus your chat share link.
• Political Analysis Workshops — after working the text or the data yourself, you'll ask the chatbot to interpret it, then catch its mistakes — a standing habit in this course, because chatbots routinely fabricate quotations, invent plausible-sounding court cases and "sources," misattribute ideas to the wrong thinker, slant contested questions toward one side, and flatten complex debates.

For all of these, the share link is part of your submission — treat the conversation as your work, keep it on-topic, and do your own thinking.

Permitted vs. not permitted

• AI may be used on your coursework — the Lecture Tutorials, Discussions, Assignments, Political Analysis Workshops, and the ungraded Practice Exercises. (For the adaptive activities above, working with the chatbot is the activity.)
• AI may not be used on the Quizzes, the Midterm, or the Final — these are closed to AI and must be entirely your own work. Quizzes and exams are built from auto-gradable items and are meant to confirm that you know the material.

Disclosure

The adaptive activities (tutorials, discussions, assignments, workshops) need no separate disclosure — the share link already documents your AI use. If you use an AI tool to help you think about any other graded work, add a one-line note stating which tool you used and how.

A standing habit: verify what the AI tells you — and watch for slant

Chatbots are confident and often wrong about politics, in two ways this course trains you to catch. First, fabrication: a chatbot will hand you a quotation that was never written, a court case that never existed, or a statistic no source reports — check every quote, case, and number against the linked document or dataset. Second, slant and flattening: on contested questions a chatbot may favor one side or state a disputed claim as settled — your job is to ask what would the strongest opposing view say? and is this an empirical claim or a normative one? We practice both habits every week.

Alignment with academic integrity

Using AI as described here is encouraged and fully consistent with the integrity standard below. The violations are fabricating or doctoring a chat you submit, and using AI on the closed assessments (Quizzes, Midterm, Final). When in doubt, ask before you submit.

Attendance Policy

This is an in-person course, and the in-class work — the concept walkthroughs, the text and data workshops, the structured debates, and the AI-critique moments — is where much of the learning happens.

• Attendance is tracked at every session. It is not part of your weighted grade, but a strong attendance record is expected, and consistent absence will show in your performance.
• Arrive on time, stay for the full session, and engage professionally with your classmates and instructor.
• Classroom climate: we discuss contested political questions every week. Argue hard about ideas, never at people; state opposing views fairly before criticizing them; and expect your own views to be challenged respectfully. Every political perspective represented in this classroom gets the same fair hearing the course materials model.
• If you must miss a session, notify Prof. Halloran in advance when possible and review the module materials to catch up. You remain responsible for any content, announcements, and due dates from a missed class.

Academic Integrity

You are expected to do your own work and to represent it honestly. Cheating, plagiarism, unauthorized collaboration, and submitting another's work — human or AI — as your own are violations of academic integrity and will be handled according to university policy, which may include a failing grade on the work or in the course. In a political-science course, integrity includes representing sources honestly: quote accurately, attribute correctly, never invent or doctor a quotation, a case, or a statistic — and represent opposing arguments honestly (arguing against a strawman is a failure of scholarship, not a win). Collaboration is welcome where an assignment invites it; when in doubt about what is allowed, ask first.

Accessibility: Silver Oak University is committed to equal access. Students who need accommodations should contact the campus disability services office to arrange them; notify Prof. Halloran early in the term so supports can be in place. (Placeholder — institutions should insert their official accessibility, Title IX, and integrity statements here.)

Course Schedule — Fall 2026 (16 Weeks)

Term runs Aug 31 – Dec 18. Campus holidays: Labor Day (Sep 7), Veterans Day (Nov 11), Thanksgiving (Nov 26–27). Week 16 is reserved for finals. Dates are the Monday of each week.

Practice exercises and a Lecture Tutorial are part of every week's module; the table lists the graded touchpoints. Exam weeks (8 & 16) carry no weekly workshop. The schedule may be adjusted with advance notice; changes will be announced in the course.