Political Science (POLS)
Description: Introduction to American government and politics.
Description: Introduction to American government and politics.
Prerequisites: Declared major in Political Science
Description: Introduction to the wide world of political science, the areas of work, and the UNL experiences that will help you navigate your academic journey. Learn about your skills and strengths and how to apply these towards your academic work and career goals. Formulate a degree plan that encompasses your personal, academic, and career goals.
Description: Description and analysis of the principal types of modern political systems, including types of democracies and dictatorships found in Western systems, Eastern systems, and the Third World. Occasional comparison made with American institutions and political processes. Deals both with structures and major policy problems confronting these political systems: the politics of education, human rights, demands for regional autonomy, ethnic conflict and diversity, political violence, demand for welfare services, crises in agriculture, and other topics of relevance.
Description: Introduction to major political concepts and controversies that have developed in the Western world. Liberty, equality, democracy, human nature, among others. Readings come from leading political theorists, past and present.
Description: An introduction to the central theories, methods, and findings in the application of biological and psychological techniques to politics.
Description: How and why states act as they do in their contemporary international relations. Continuing factors, such as power, war, ideology, and governmental organizations, and recently emerging influences, including supranational organizations, multinational corporations, and natural resource allocation analyzed. Diverse approaches and theories examined.
Description: Survey of the traditional cultures and modern history of China and Japan. Emphasis on political systems, intellectual and religious history, and cultural developments.
Prerequisites: Good standing in the University Honors Program or by invitation.
University Honors Seminar 189H is required of all students in the University Honors Program.
Description: Topics vary.
Description: Introductory survey to the administrative arm of American national, state, and local government. Bureaucracy has become so important to the functioning of the federal system it has been termed "the fourth branch of government." Bureaucracy's role as a political institution of the first order, not just as an implementer of policy. Bureaucratic power, structure, and democratic control.
Description: Broad introduction to the political structure and operations of state and local governments. Role and power of state and local governments; government institutions; political parties and interest groups; public policy; state constitutions.
Description: Various aspects of Nebraska government and politics. Unicameral Legislature, the governor and executive branch, the courts, political parties in Nebraska politics, political participation, and current issues of concern to Nebraskans.
Description: Creation, development, structure, powers, and functions of the office of the President of the United States.
Description: Roles of political parties and interest groups in government and politics, focusing on their efforts of elections and lobbying.
Description: Major public issues in American politics. Government spending, civil rights; welfare and health care; poverty; education; urban problems; crime, violence and repression; defense policy; agricultural policy; environment/energy policy.
Description: Basic policy theories and the policy process, paying special attention to key events that create or prevent policy opportunities and problems that arise throughout the policy process. Substantive policy issues used to illustrate the various concepts and process models.
Description: Approaches to public policy analysis. The nature of politics and policy with emphasis on the role of the citizen, uses of information types in the formation of public policy, the analysis of policy content, and the problems of training for policy analysis. Basic policy analysis methods including interviewing participant observation, document analysis, and surveying.
Description: Role of the Blacks in the American political system, with emphasis on strategies used to gain political power and influence decision makers; problems faced in the southern and urban political settings.
Description: Role of genes, neural activity, and physiology in shaping human behavior, especially political behavior.
Description: Selected current or otherwise important problems in international relations. Content varies but may include such subjects as weapons and security policies, human rights, multinational corporations, ideologies, etc.
Description: Introduction to the study of the biological, economic, political-historical, and cultural bases of war and group conflict.
Description: Leading theories on war and peace, highlighting the causes and consequences of WWI, WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Gulf War.
Description: Variety of global crises and challenges that pose threats to world order. Population growth; scarcities of food, energy, and non-fuel minerals; vulnerability of industrial states to resource scarcities; nuclear proliferation; arms racing; and terrorism.
Description: Provide a solid understanding of the historical and theoretical debates related to security studies within the sub field of international relations. Traditional and 'new threats' to security as it relates to world order. How nation-states are responding to these threats - namely through multilateral, multi-level strategies based on certain assumptions of governance.
Description: Constitutional and political development of selected Latin American countries; contemporary problems and institutions. Latin America in world affairs with special reference to the inter-American relations and the United States.
Description: Challenges to the state related to human rights and gender issues. How growth of non-state actors affects individuals and groups and their rights. Gendered notions of the state, national security, women's rights, and humanitarian intervention.
Description: Ways of studying politics and social situations. Rather than asking what political systems "should" do, the primary questions are what political systems actually do and how we know what they do. Whether the application of the scientific process to social questions is valid? Problems in carrying out proper scientific research. The wide variety of techniques that have been applied to analyze politics.
Description: Topics vary.
Prerequisites: Permission.
Requires serving as page with the Nebraska Unicameral.
Description: The development and workings of the Nebraska legislature.
Description: Sources of political attitudes and preferences, and how to change them. Agenda-setting and recognizing opportunities for policy change. Strategies for optimal design and targeting of persuasive efforts. Role of lobbyists and other professional advocates in the policy process. Focus on practical application of persuasion and advocacy techniques on politicized and partisan issues.
Description: Legislature's role in the American arrangement of legislative-executive-judicial responsibilities. Attention to the internal operation of the Congress with focus on the standing committee stage. State legislative experiences and proposals to reform the legislative system emphasized.
Description: Examines how the impacts of climate change are evaluated and used to motivate policy; analyzes proposals and policies aimed at mitigating climate change at both the federal and the international level; and identifies stakeholders and assesses their impacts on climate change dialogue and policy.
Description: Immigration as a multifaceted sociopolitical phenomenon. The history of different waves of immigration to the United States. Emphasis on the diversity within every immigrant group, as well as differences and similarities regarding their acculturation process. Public attitudes towards immigration in historical perspective. The American political system's capacity to incorporate newcomers into civic life.
Description: Attitudes and behavior of citizens with respect to politics, how these attitudes and behaviors are shaped, how they are measured, and what influence they have on government.
Description: Survey of women as political actors: participation in political life, barriers to participation, political attitudes, issues of special concern to women, and issues of particular concern to women of color.
Description: Role of courts, judges, and lawyers in the American legal system and political process. Covers all federal and state courts but emphasizes the US Supreme Court.
Description: American criminal justice system from arrest through sentencing. How the system appears to operate. How the system actually operates.
Description: A consideration of special issues in the study of biology, psychology, and politics, including emotions, behavioral genetics, neuroimaging, decision-making, and research on human subjects.
Description: Analysis of the role and influence of the United Nations in international relations. Comparison of the UN with the League of Nations and with regional international organizations such as the Organization of American States and NATO. Attention to UN programs concerning security, human rights, economic development, and environmental protection.
Description: Sources of globalization, its various forms, and how it triggers resistance from those who wish to preserve the local and particular from globalizing influences.
Description: Major domestic factors affecting how US foreign policy is made and the resulting patterns of policy. US foreign policy in four issue-areas: security, human rights, economics, and ecology.
Description: An introduction to the United Nations system and the Model United Nations program, including research, debate and resolution writing.
Description: Uses knowledge, theories, methods, and historical perspectives appropriate to the social sciences to understand the causes of conflict and development in Africa. Pays attention to the diversity of conflict and development-related experiences on the continent.
Description: Causes, consequences and aftermath of drugs and thugs (war criminals, drugs/arms traffickers and modern-day caudillos, among others) and their role in contemporary international and human security.
Description: A multidimensional survey of the history of local and global antisemitism, look at the calamity of the Holocaust, the creation and challenges of Israel, and current antisemitic attitudes in Nebraska, the US, and the world.
Description: The questions of how we ought to live our lives via the study of classic texts in political thought. Debate what makes our actions - and, indeed our lives - just, choice-worthy, and even heroic.
Description: The core ideas of liberal political thought. Critiques from both the Left and the Right to shed list on why the American experiment in governance - with it intellectual roots in the Enlightenment of 17th and 18th Century Europe - turned out as it did and how it might have been changed or improved.
Description: Surveys the landscape of contemporary political theory, addressing some of the major debates of the past twenty years about reason, right action, human nature, good government, and truth.
Description: Topics vary.
Prerequisites: Junior standing; 12 hours of POLS; and permission.
Pass/No Pass only. Requires the assignment of and the supervision by a faculty member.
Description: Internship in government agencies, public-interest groups, political parties, or other organizations.
Prerequisites: Permission.
Description: Independent reading or research under direction of a faculty member.
Prerequisites: POLS 286 with a grade of C or higher. Political science major.
Description: Democracy as a form of government. Types of democracy, alternatives to democracy, and the history and consequences of democracy. Democratic citizenship, what makes a good democratic citizen, whether and how democratic citizenship can be promoted.
Description: The policy making role of the Congress including the institutionalization of the House and the Senate, an analysis of congressional behavior, the committee process, and the policy responsiveness of Congress.
Description: A significant public policy in American politics. Topics: science, technology, and public policy; or health politics.
Description: Role of communication in the political process, with emphasis on communication strategies in political campaigns. Includes communication variables important in the political process, an application of communication theory and principles to political rhetoric, and analysis and criticism of selected political communication events.
Description: Supreme Court doctrine determining the distribution of powers within the national government and between the national government and the state governments.
Description: Supreme Court doctrine interpreting the First Amendment, covering freedom of speech, assembly, and association; freedom of the press; and freedom of religion.
Description: Supreme Court doctrine covering the rights of the accused, the right to privacy and the right to racial and sexual equality.
Prerequisites: POLS 286 with a grade of C or higher.
Description: Advanced consideration of the theories, methods, and findings in the application of biological and psychological techniques to politics. Focus on experimental and survey research design, quantitative data analysis using statistical software (R/RStudio), and written and oral presentation of research findings.
Description: Interface of politics and economics in the international arena. Political dimension of international economic issues emphasized. Includes: liberal, mercantile, and radical approaches; theories of imperialism; dependency and interdependency; distribution of the global product; the global division of labor; the political aspects of markets; the politics of trade, aid, investment, multinational corporations, food, and energy.
Description: Military action as an instrument of American foreign policy. Constitutional basis of the president's and Congress's war powers; assessments of the role of the White House, Congress, CIA, senior pentagon officials, the American public, and military alliances - NATO and coalitions of the willing - in supporting and directing the use of military action abroad; and the political and strategic consequences of various American applications of military force.
Prerequisites: Senior standing and permission.
Open to students with an interest in international relations.
Description: Topic varies.
Prerequisites: Junior or Senior Standing
Description: Rules and principles accepted by the members of the community of nations as defining their rights and duties, and the procedure employed in protecting their rights and performing their duties.
Description: Development of international norms on human rights and attempts to implement those standards. Emphasis on political process, with attention to law, philosophy, economics, and culture. Coverage of the United Nations, regional organizations, private agencies, and national foreign policies.
Description: Use of terror as an instrument of state policy. A series of case studies of large scale politically based killings. Why and which states use terror and politicide against their own citizens.
Description: Selected issues in international law and organization. Content varies. Includes: US Senate's treatment of treaties, use of customary law by US courts, current cases before the World Court, leading legal issues handled by the UN Security Council and General Assembly, etc.
Prerequisites: Senior standing.
Capstone course.
Description: Holistic approach to the selection and analysis of planning strategies for protecting water quality from nonpoint sources of contamination. Introduction to the use of methods of analyzing the impact of strategies on whole systems and subsystems; for selecting strategies; and for evaluating present strategies.
Description: Theories of natinalism and ethnic conflict. Case studies of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The post-Cold War era as multi-polar and multi-cilizational. The states and different cultures that compete for influence and authority to dominate the "New World order." The division of the world along ethnic, religious, and class lines rather than by ideology. The future of international politics and the reassessment of the causes of "conflicts of culture" and their containment.
Description: Israeli politics, society, and relations with its neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. Rise of Zionism and the Palestinian response to it; wars between Israel and Arab neighbors, and the eventual peace agreements between the two; the internal dynamics of Israeli political life; and state of Zionism today.
Prerequisites: Junior standing and permission.
Description: An interdisciplinary analysis of topical issues in Latin American Studies.
Description: Nature, strategies, and mechanics of insurgency, guerrilla warfare and terrorism, where they fit in the spectrum of conflict, and various techniques and methods for analyzing them.
Description: Examine the theory of restorative justice and critically evaluate the restorative processes. Discuss if restorative justice works, how it compares to retributive justice, and to what extent a restorative approach can work in the aftermath of extreme societal violence.
Description: Arguments in favor of and opposed to Marxism, both in theory and practice.
Description: Topics vary.
Prerequisites: Permission.
Description: Independent research leading to a thesis.
Prerequisites: Permission.
Description: Independent research leading to a thesis.