Political Economy

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2021
The Freshman Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small seminar setting. Freshman seminars are offered in all campus departments, and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment is limited to 15 freshmen.
Freshman Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024
This course focuses on the history of global interaction, with a particular emphasis on the relationships between states and societies. Though it begins with a brief exploration of antiquity, it emphasizes world developments since the 15th century. The purpose of the course is to gain a better understanding of the rise and decline of states, empires, and international trading systems. Taking a panoramic view of the last 500 years, it explores the ways in which disparate places came closer together, even while it seeks to explain how those places maintained their own trajectories in the face of outside intervention.
Survey of World History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Sophomore seminars are small interactive courses offered by faculty members in departments all across the campus. Sophomore seminars offer opportunity for close, regular intellectual contact between faculty members and students in the crucial second year. The topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to 15 sophomores.
Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024
This course is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on history, philosophy and the social sciences to answer the question “What is political economy and how should we do it?” We will examine the relationships between political economy, liberal democracy, the nation-state and empire, explore the influence of institutions, ideas and identities on political economy, and analyze different topics, methodologies and mediums of communication. In doing so we will ask whether political economy is an empirical subject that seeks to describe the world, a normative endeavor that seeks to change it for the better, or something else entirely.
What Is Political Economy and How Should We Do It?: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
Student-directed course under the supervision of a faculty member. Subject matter to change from semester to semester.
Directed Group Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
One-semester lecture course offered each semester. In-depth analysis of the classical political economy literature, including such authors as Locke, Smith, Marx, Mills, and Weber to Veblen and Polanyi. Strong emphasis is placed on providing appropriate background for understanding the evolution of the literature that has emanated from the various social science disciplines which forms the basis of modern political economy.
Classical Theories of Political Economy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2025 8 Week Session, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2023 8 Week Session
In-depth analysis of the classical political economy literature, including such authors as Locke, Smith, Marx, Mills, and Weber to Veblen and Polanyi. Strong emphasis is placed on providing appropriate background for understanding the evolution of the literature that has emanated from the various social science disciplines which forms the basis of modern political economy.
Classical Theories of Political Economy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
This course introduces students to theoretical works from prominent intellectual debates in 20th and 21st century political economy. It explores the dynamic relationships among politics, society, and markets, with a focus on how markets are politically and socially embedded. It applies theoretical frameworks to current policy issues, drawing from influential works in sociology, political science, economics, and history. It asks: What is the relationship between markets and societies, and what role should the government play in constructing this relationship?
Contemporary Theories of Political Economy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2025 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2024 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2023 First 6 Week Session
This course is designed to introduce students to modern theoretical works of central intellectual debates on 20th century international political economy. The course explores alternative explanations for inequality in economic development among nations and economic declines of of the dominate powers. It will also examine tensions between the increasing "globalization" of that economy and continued fragmentation of the international political system in nation-states.
Contemporary Theories of Political Economy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course is designed as a comprehensive overview of intermediate microeconomic theory. It covers the basic supply and demand model. Topics include consumer choice, choice under uncertainty and information, demand theory, firm, production and cost theory, competitive market theory, imperfect competition, and market failure. The course is structured for majors in Political Economy and other non-economic social science majors.
Intermediate Microeconomic Theory: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
This course is designed as a comprehensive overview of intermediate macroeconomic theory focusing on economic growth and international economics. It covers a number of topics including history of economic growth, industrial revolution, post-industrial revolution divergence, flexible-price and sticky-price macroeconomics, and macroeconomic policy. Course is structured for majors in Political Economy and other non-economic social science majors.
Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2020 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2019 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2018
This course investigates the nature, extent, and persistence of poverty and inequality, and examines the effects of program and policy responses. Throughout the course we will look at proposed explanations for the causes of poverty and will observe how underlying values and assumptions have influenced the development of policies aimed at poverty alleviation. While emphasizing poverty and policy responses in the United States, we will examine poverty and related policies in other countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as points of comparison.
Poverty and Social Policy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course is designed to accommodate cross-listed courses offered through other departments, the content of which is applicable to PE majors. Content and unit values vary from course to course.
Cross-Listed Topics: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2015, Fall 2014, Spring 2014
These small research and writing seminars will focus on the research area of the faculty member teaching the course and will provide students the opportunity to engage in conversation, research, and writing in greater depth than is possible in a larger class.
Junior Seminar in Political Economy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021, Spring 2020
The 21st century has seen powerful critiques of both growing economic inequality and the troubling persistence of domination based on gender, race and other categorical differences. Gender has a distinctive role here for many reasons: the centrality of gender to social reproduction; the historical coproduction of male domination and capitalism; and the way gender operates in the constitution of selves. Insofar as capitalism is organized and distributes power and profits through gendered structures, and gendered meanings and identities are shaped by their emergence within capitalist logics, it behooves us to think gender and capitalism in tandem. Figuring out how to do that, and sorting out the consequences, is our project in this class.
Gender and Capitalism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
A short course designed to provide a vehicle to take advantage of short-term visitors coming to campus who have considerable expertise in areas of interest to political economy of industrial societies. Topics will vary from semester to semester.
Special Topics: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2025 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2025
Advanced multidisciplinary research in current issues of political economy and industrialization. Seminars will focus on specific geographical areas or topics with appropriate comparative material included. A major research project is required as well as class presentations. Topics change each semester.
Advanced Study in Political Economy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024
This is an interdisciplinary course in international trade and finance focused on the dynamic interaction between economics and politics in the global arena. The course provides students a systematic method of evaluating international economic policies, while developing critical thinking skills through case studies and critical analysis. More specifically, the course focuses on the impact of flows of trade, capital, and people across borders and the role played by: (1) states and their political actors, (2) non-governmental groups, e.g., multinational corporations and labor unions, and (3) domestic and international institutions that all establish the “rules of the game”, in shaping the global economy.
Global Trade and Finance: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course focuses on the relationship of politics and economics in modern societies. Special attention is given to problems and issues in social science or public policy best examined from an interdisciplinary perspective with an eye toward building students' knowledge of recently developed analytical tools in political economy.
Developments in Modern Political Economy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
This course investigates the historical origins and institutional ecosystem of Silicon Valley by identifying key factors in the development of Silicon Valley, as well as political circumstances and cultural conditions that have sustained its important role in the global economy. Questions like these will be addressed: Will Silicon Valley and artificial intelligence render workers irrelevant? Have the region’s tech giants like Google, Apple and Facebook become the monopolists of the new Gilded Age, and should they be broken up? Has Silicon Valley peaked? Is the “Silicon Valley model” unique or can it be replicated elsewhere? Lectures are discussion-driven, interactive, and will be complemented by films, debate, and group work.
Silicon Valley and the Global Economy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
This course examines the history, theory, and operation of the American financial system. Key questions we will consider include: What is money? What is finance? How did the financial system evolve historically in the American context? To answer these questions, we will first look to histories and then canonical theorizations before turning to the operation of money and the nuts-and-bolts of American financial markets. Finally, we examine the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath in light of these considerations. The goal of this course is for students to develop a basic understanding of the historical development, theoretical underpinnings, and actual practice of the American financial system.
The Political Economy of Finance: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2020
This course will examine how government and industry interact to govern markets by surveying debates over specific substantive issues in the advanced industrial countries, especially the United States and Japan. Topics include labor regulation, antitrust policy, financial regulation, intellectual property rights, and the digital economy.
Market Governance and the Digital Economy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2023
How can we understand the role of digital technology in our lives and in society today? In this course we will investigate the political economy of digital technologies. In doing so, we will consider how the rapid rise of digital technologies is simultaneously reinforcing past structures of power while also forging new terrains of contestation. Throughout this process, we will consider how injustice is exacerbated or justice is achieved through the proliferation of these new technologies. Finally, we will examine the creative forms of resistance that have emerged alongside these technologies.
Digital Technology, Political Economy, and Justice: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2021
This course focuses specifically on the historical context and perspective of the relationship of politics and economics in modern societies. Students are guided through an interdisciplinary survey of the historical experience of peoples and places who have participated in the ongoing great transformation away from argricultural societies to the rise of the industrial state and onto post-industrialism. Each term provides a different perspective of this transformation.
Political Economy in Historical Context: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024
This is a survey of the economic and social origins and development of the modern economy, beginning in early modern Europe and extending until the construction of the global capitalist system in the late nineteenth century. It attends to scholarly disputes over the origins of the distinctive economic features of capitalism: private property, the international monetary system, free wage labor and slavery, commodification and cultures of consumption, credit and banking, crises and inequality, as well as industrialization and economic growth. This course is a companion to the ideas studied in History 159B and is intended to lead in to the material covered in History 160. No prior quantitative methods training is required, or assumed.
Origins of Capitalism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023
This course will examine the relationship between pandemic disease and political shifts over the past five centuries, centuries in which pandemics influenced economic and political trends including the rise and decline of states, the expansion and contraction of trade, innovation, diplomatic relations, land use and land tenure, labor relations and labor markets, and other core themes relevant to the study of political economy. After grounding in some of the basic history, we will focus on how pandemic and epidemic diseases affect the political economy – i.e. the structures of wealth and power – of the countries and world regions through which they swept.
Pandemics and Politics: Infectious Disease in Historical Perspective: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2018
This course is designed to provide a vehicle for undergraduate students interested in writing a major paper on a political economy topic. The paper should be approximately thirty pages in length; the topic should be agreed upon in advance by both the student and faculty sponsor.
Senior Thesis: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Interdisciplinary research seminar for Political Economy majors. Intensive writing on research questions in social science and public policy best approached from an interdisciplinary perspective. Course assumes intermediate to advanced knowledge of central focus or topic of course. Weekly discussions and critiques of readings and assignments. Final paper or project required. Topic must be approved by instructor. Topics vary from term to term.
Senior Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Honors students are required to research and write a thesis based on the prospectus developed in International and Area Studies 102. The thesis work is reviewed by the honors instructor and a second reader to be selected based on the thesis topic. Weekly progress reports required.
Senior Honors Thesis Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Students to work in selected internship programs approved in advance by the faculty coordinator and for which written contracts have been established between the sponsoring organization and the student. Students will be expected to produce two progress reports for their faculty coordinator during the course of the internship, as well as produce a final paper for the course consisting of no fewer than 35 pages. Other restrictions apply; see faculty adviser.
Special Field Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2020, Fall 2019, Spring 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014, Spring 2013, Fall 2012, Spring 2012
This course is the UCDC letter-graded core seminar for 4 units that complements the P/NP credited internship course UGIS C196B. Core seminars are designed to enhance the experience of and provide an intellectual framework for the student's internship. UCDC core seminars are taught in sections that cover various tracks such as the Congress, media, bureaucratic organizations and the Executive Branch, international relations, public policy and general un-themed original research.
UCDC Core Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2020, Fall 2019, Spring 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014, Spring 2013
This course provides a credited internship for all students enrolled in the UCDC and Cal in the Capital Programs. It must be taken in conjunction with the required academic core course C196A. C196B requires that students work 3-4 days per week as interns in settings selected to provide them with exposure to and experienc in government, public policy, international affairs, media, the arts or other areas or relevance to their major fields of study.
UCDC Internship: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015, Fall 2014, Spring 2014, Spring 2013
Students work in selected internship programs approved in advance by the faculty coordinator and for which written contracts have been established between the sponsoring organization and the student. Students will be expected to produce two progress reports for their faculty coordinator during the course of the internship, as well as a final paper for the course consisting of at least 35 pages. Other restrictions apply; see faculty adviser.
Special Field Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Fall 2015, Spring 2012
Supervised experience relevant to specific aspects of Political Economy of Industrial Societies in off-campus organizations. Regular individual meetings with faculty sponsor and written reports required.
Field Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023

Directed Group Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2018
Enrollment restricted by regulations of the college.
Supervised Independent Study and Research for Undergraduates: Read More [+]