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Introduction to Political Science

15 instructional weeks + finals week (Week 1–Week 16) Free sample edition

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This is a complete course: fifteen instructional weeks and a finals week, every student component, built with The Course Maker and ready to import. Weeks are relative (Week 1 to Week 16); you set the dates when you import it. Browse the whole thing below. Click any piece to read it in full, then click back to return here.

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Free sample edition. No instructor, institution, or term identity appears anywhere in this edition, by design. The syllabus carries fill-in slots (instructor name, contact, office hours, institution policies) for the adopting instructor to make it their own. (Original objectives written from the standard Introduction to Political Science body of knowledge; not copied from any school's course outline.)

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Every date set to your term and your breaks, and re-paced to a second campus calendar at no extra charge.
Your syllabus, your policies, and your outline of record in the build, with an alignment report that shows which component addresses each objective and SLO, and a Universal design for learning section drawn from the course's own data.
Your name on every page as the course's creator.
Kept current every term: fresh assessment variants, every link re-checked and the dead ones replaced, and the subject brought up to date where it has moved.
The full instructor pack: answer keys and worked solutions, the alignment report, and the UDL map.
A record for your college's file: the design attestation, a disclosure statement for every edition, and what changed at the end of each term.

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Included in every course

ChapterRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.
Slide deck with speaker notesRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a slide deck with speaker notes, a chapter to read, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.
Captioned video linksRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — captioned videos, a chapter to read, and a slide deck with speaker notes — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee. We link videos only when a caption track exists (from the creator or generated automatically), and we never host them.

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The syllabus

Policies, schedule, and grading

Read the full course syllabusPolicies, the week-by-week schedule, grading, and the bring-your-own-AI rules, with fill-in slots for the adopting instructor.→

Weighted gradebook

Assignment groups & weights

Configured in the export — the gradebook is set the moment the course is imported.

Assignment group	Weight	Notes
Tutorials & Practice	10%
Quizzes	10%
Workshops	20%
Assignments	25%
Discussions	15%
Exams	20%
Total	100%	Letter Standard

Objectives & outcomes

What students will be able to do

Objective 1

Describe the subfields and methods of political science — political theory and philosophy, comparative politics, international relations, American government, and political methodology — and analyze a political text or dataset with the discipline's core tools: concept application, argument analysis, evidence evaluation, the comparative method, and the empirical/normative distinction.

Objective 2

Explain power, authority, legitimacy, and the state — Weber's types of authority, the criteria of statehood, sovereignty, and the social-contract answers of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau — and apply these concepts to real and hypothetical cases.

Objective 3

Compare the major political ideologies and normative theories evenhandedly — liberalism, conservatism, socialism and its family, and the smaller families; justice, liberty, equality, and rights; the harm principle; Rawls and Nozick — stating each position in its strongest form and distinguishing empirical from normative claims.

Objective 4

Compare regime types and constitutional structures — direct and representative, electoral and liberal democracy; authoritarian and totalitarian rule; democratization and backsliding; what constitutions do; the rule of law, separation of powers, and checks and balances.

Objective 5

Analyze political institutions — legislatures, executives, and judiciaries — including the parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential designs, government formation and removal, judicial review and judicial independence, and the counter-majoritarian debate.

Objective 6

Explain American government and political participation — federalism, separation of powers, and the U.S. Constitution as one case of the survey's concepts; parties, elections, and voting systems and their effects; public opinion, polling, political behavior, and the media — reading election and polling data for what it documents and what it does not settle.

Objective 7

Apply the comparative method to political systems and political development — most-similar and most-different designs, state capacity, and the competing explanations of democratization — and read comparative-governance indices critically, with their edition and year.

Objective 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 and reading global data for what a measure and a line mean.

SLO A

Political analysis and source/data evaluation — source, place in its setting, close-read, and cross-check a political text (a founding document, theory excerpt, court case, treaty, or charter) and read and evaluate political data (polls, election results, governance indices), 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.

How this course is built — read this first

Every teaching module carries the same set, in the order a student meets it: a Start Here overview, the chapter (the primary reading), the lecture (titled “Lecture: <module title>”), the slide deck with speaker notes, readings & resources (links only), the lecture tutorial and practice exercises worked with an AI tutor, the quiz, the discussion and the assignment, and the weekly Political Analysis Workshop. Exams: the midterm in Week 8 and the final in Week 16, a finals week with no module.

The discussion and the assignment each ship in both formats: the adaptive version is the published, graded item, and its traditional alternative (no AI) is a separate item that ships unpublished beside it. An instructor who prefers the traditional format publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one.

What you see here is every student page. The instructor pack (answer keys and worked solutions, rubric calibration, image prompts, audio-brief scripts, and the alignment report) ships only in the download, never on this site.

Adaptive and traditional

Discussions & assignments: both formats in every module

Same learning objective either way; what changes is how the work happens.

Adaptive · published

Work it through with an approved chatbot

The student does the work in a guided conversation with an approved chatbot, using a copy-paste prompt the course provides. For a discussion, the AI is a Socratic partner that challenges their thinking and never writes the post. For an assignment, the AI is a coach: it asks questions, checks the reasoning shown, and waits for the student to revise. The student submits the chat link with the required summary or report.

Traditional alternative (no AI) · unpublished

The familiar way, one click away

The student does the work themselves and submits it, and the instructor grades it against the rubric. No AI required. It ships unpublished, opening with a one-line note to the instructor; publish it instead of the adaptive version if you prefer.

All 16 weeks

Every week, every component

Each week is a heading; every component under it links to the full student page. Week 8 is a teaching module that also carries the midterm bundle; Week 16 is the finals week, with the final exam bundle and no module.

Week 1

What Is Political Science? Subfields, Concepts & Methods

politics as collective, binding decision-making wherever scarcity and disagreement meet, and political science as its systematic study; the discipline's shorthand definitions taught in words with year and title (Lasswell, 1936; Easton, 1953)the five subfields — political theory and philosophy, comparative politics, international relations, American government, political methodology — as lenses on one event, not wallsthe toolkit: concept application; argument analysis (claim, premises, assumptions); evidence evaluation; the comparative methodempirical vs. normative claims, the two failure modes (smuggling and shrugging), and the pinned Declaration of Independence (1776) fragments worked through the four moves; is political science a science, presented evenhandedly

Week 2

Power, Authority, Legitimacy & the State

power vs. authority vs. legitimacy, built from the armed-robber case; Weber's three types of legitimate authority (1919) as ideal typesthe state by its four conventional criteria; state vs. nation vs. government; internal vs. external sovereignty; the Peace of Westphalia (1648) as a conventional marker taught as a simplificationthe social contract as three answers to 'why obey?': Hobbes, Leviathan (1651); Locke, Second Treatise (1689); Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), each pinned to a fragment of its own textthe new-country case run through all three lenses evenhandedly; the Hobbes/Locke swap as the week's signature AI-critique catch

Week 3

Political Ideologies

ideology defined; ideologies studied descriptively — what each values, fears, and argues — and never rankedliberalism's classical and modern wings sharing one core; the U.S.-usage trap; conservatism (the Burkean case); socialism as a family with communism (revolutionary, Marxist) and social democracy (electoral, within a market economy) sorted as its two main branchesanarchism, fascism, nationalism (distinguished from patriotism), and environmentalism at one-slide depth, each defined by what its adherents holdthe left-right spectrum: what it captures and what it flattens, presented evenhandedly; the paired excerpts — Marx and Engels (1848) and Burke (1790) — each read charitably

Week 4

Political Theory & Philosophy

justice, liberty (Berlin's negative and positive senses, 1958), equality (opportunity, outcome, moral equality), rights, and the common goodMill's harm principle from On Liberty (1859), pinned exactly, applied to hard cases; the harm-or-offense misreading as the AI-critique catchRawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), and Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), each taught in words at full strength; where they splitanalyzing a normative argument — claim, premises, assumptions — and the running analysis's first appearance with its premises labelled by kind

Week 5

Forms of Government & Regime Types

democracy: direct vs. representative (a mechanism) and electoral (minimal) vs. liberal; hybrid regimes; republic vs. democracyauthoritarianism vs. totalitarianism as a difference of scope, taught with Linz's formulation and Arendt's 1951 title in wordsmeasuring democracy previewed; Huntington's third wave (1991) as his periodization; democratic backsliding as a gradual comparative pattern distinct from a coupPericles' funeral oration (Thucydides, Crawley translation) and Churchill's 'it has been said' (Hansard, 11 November 1947) as two data points in one long argument; is democracy always best, presented evenhandedly

Week 6

Constitutions, Constitutionalism & the Rule of Law

what constitutions do — create, empower, limit — and constitution vs. constitutionalismwritten vs. unwritten constitutions (the U.S. and U.K. models); entrenchment and Article V's thresholds; unwritten does not mean unconstrainedthe rule of law by its elements vs. rule by law; separation of powers (horizontal) distinguished from federalism (vertical); checks and balancesFederalist No. 51 (1788) and No. 10 (1787) close-read from the pinned fragments, with the Avalon header's old No. 51 authorship dispute taught as settled in Madison's favor; can paper constrain power, presented evenhandedly

Week 7

Political Institutions I: Legislatures & Executives

what legislatures do; unicameral vs. bicameral with the pinned IPU count (81 bicameral, 107 unicameral of 188) and the debate presented evenhandedlywhat executives do; head of state vs. head of government, taught by office and never by officeholderparliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential designs — how the executive is chosen, whether the term is fixed, how a failing government is removed (no-confidence vote vs. impeachment); coalition government as a normal modeBagehot's 'efficient secret' (1867) beside Article I, Section 1 and Article II, Section 1; Linz's worries and the identifiability and checks replies, no verdict

Week 8 Midterm

Midterm Review & Exam

cumulative review of Weeks 1 to 7 organized by the one distinction and the one text each topic asks for: empirical vs. normative and the Declaration; power vs. authority vs. legitimacy and Hobbes against Locke; the ideologies by values, fears, argues; the harm principle exactly; electoral vs. liberal democracy; constitution vs. constitutionalism and Federalist No. 51; fused vs. separatethe three-layer read — design (what the rules say), practice (what actually happens), verdict (what ought to happen) — as light new material that bridges to the institutions, elections, and comparative weeksthe midterm exam

The midterm exam bundle

Week 9

Political Institutions II: Judiciaries, Courts & Judicial Review

the judicial function; judicial review vs. judicial independence vs. jurisdictionMarbury v. Madison (1803) pinned as name, year, and holding in the opinion's own words; Article III's text; judicial review as the Court's own establishment, not the Constitution'sdiffuse review vs. concentrated (Kelsen-model) review; judicial independence's supports (tenure, selection, compliance)the counter-majoritarian difficulty (Bickel, 1962) presented evenhandedly; Federalist No. 78's pinned fragments; the pinned three-case sort (Marbury, McCulloch, Brown); the invented-court-case AI-critique catch

Week 10

American Government & Politics: the U.S. Case

federalism among unitary, confederal, and federal arrangements; the U.S. choice as one unit inside the surveyenumerated, implied, and reserved powers in the Constitution's own pinned text; the supremacy clause as a tie-breaker, not a grant of powerseparation of powers and checks and balances attached to the real branches; the structural design facts stated plainlyMcCulloch v. Maryland (1819) rebuilt from the text, with the broad-vs-narrow reading of 'necessary' as a contested question and the holding as fact; the Danbury-letter 'wall of separation' catch; is federalism a strength or a weakness, presented evenhandedly

Week 11

Political Participation: Parties, Elections & Voting Systems

political parties and their functions; party systems as descriptions of an equilibrium, not verdictsthe four electoral-system families by mechanism — plurality/first-past-the-post, majority-runoff, proportional representation, mixed-member proportional — each with its strongest case and its costDuverger's law (1951) as a tendency with a mechanism and named exceptions; the D'Hondt method worked on the pinned illustrative table (4 / 3 / 1 / 0 seats) and the plurality contrastreading the pinned UK general election of 4 July 2024 (33.7 percent of the vote, 411 of 650 seats; 14.3 percent, 5 seats) for what it documents and what it does not settle; FPTP or PR, presented evenhandedly

Week 12

Public Opinion, Political Behavior & the Media

public opinion as a distribution; why a random sample works and why a self-selected one carries no margin of error; the four facts a trustworthy poll reportsthe margin of error as the approximation 'about one over the square root of the sample size, at the 95 percent level' (n = 1,000 gives about 3 points; n = 400 about 5); wording and non-response are not in the margin; bigger fixes precision, not biasthe pinned Pew Research Center release (Americans and AI 2026: 5,119 U.S. adults, February 17-23, 2026, stated margin of 1.6 points) read through the data scaffold; political socialization and turnout as documented patternsmedia effects — agenda-setting, framing, echo chambers — each with its critics; delegate or trustee, presented evenhandedly

Week 13

Comparative Politics

the comparative method: most-similar and most-different systems designs (Przeworski and Teune, 1970) as tools, not proof machines; 'many variables, small N' (Lijphart, 1971) and its partial fixesstate capacity vs. regime type as two separate dimensions with all four combinations realexplanations of democratization — modernization (Lipset, 1959, a correlation with an open mechanism), institutions (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012), political culture, the resource curse (Ross, 2001) — each with proponents and critics and no winnerreading the pinned governance indices — Freedom in the World 2026 (88 of 195 Free; the twentieth consecutive year of decline; four pinned country scores) and V-Dem's Democracy Report 2026 (31 / 56 / 57 / 35 regimes; 74 percent of the world's population in autocracies) — for what an index measures and does not

Week 14

International Relations

anarchy as the absence of a world government, not chaos; the security dilemma as a structural argumentrealism, liberalism, and constructivism presented evenhandedly with correct attributions (Morgenthau, Waltz; Keohane and Nye, Doyle, Russett and the democratic-peace finding stated precisely; Wendt, 1992); liberalism the IR theory vs. the ideology vs. U.S. usagethe U.N. in outline; balance of power; collective security vs. an alliance; why states mostly comply with international law without a sheriff, one explanation per paradigmthe U.N. Charter's pinned Article 2(1) and 2(4) and the Universal Declaration's pinned Articles 1 and 21(3) run through all three lenses; the Melian Dialogue's line attributed to the Athenian envoys as Thucydides rendered them; realism or liberalism, presented evenhandedly

Week 15

Political Economy & Global Issues

political economy at the seam of the subfields; every real economy as a mix of markets and states; Hall and Soskice's varieties of capitalism (2001) as description, not rankingcomparative advantage (Ricardo, 1817) as a descriptive claim kept apart from trade policy, where documented aggregate gains and documented distributional costs are weighed differently by the two sidespoverty vs. inequality; between-country vs. within-country inequality; climate change as a collective-action problem with the physical basics stated plainly and the policy responses presented with proponents and critics; migration patterns plainly, policy evenhandedlyreading the pinned global-poverty data — the World Bank's 3.00-dollar line in 2021 international prices (set June 2025 in place of 2.15 dollars), around 831 million people below it in 2025, about 44 percent of the world in 1990 and about 10 percent in 2025 — for what a line is and is not; has globalization been a net good, presented evenhandedly

Week 16 · finals week Final

Finals week

No module this week: the final exam bundle