Institutions, Policies and Politics of International Finance
Mark Copelovitch, UW-Madison Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science

The purpose of this seminar is to explore key issues in global financial governance.  The course will begin with an examination of the history and politics of international finance.  Using this background as a foundation, we will then focus on the institutions and key policy issues in the contemporary international financial system.  Topics will include the international financial institutions; international regulatory harmonization; the management and prevention of financial crises; and global imbalances.  The aim of this course is to provide an analytic background for students interested in government, private sector, or academic careers in international finance.

This course is a research seminar in international political economy (IPE).  Its purpose is to review recent research in IPE and gain insight into the international and domestic politics of foreign economy policymaking.  This is a specialized graduate seminar rather than a general survey course (although the range of issues we cover is quite broad).  The course is organized around recent research in three substantive areas: international trade, international monetary and financial relations; and special topics.  A central goal of the course is to identify the welfare effects and distributional consequences of governments’ foreign economic policy decisions, and to use the tools of political science to analyze how interest groups, voters, institutions, and power politics interact to shape policy outcomes.  The ultimate purpose of this course is to generate ideas for your own research, including papers and dissertation topics.

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Law and Modernization in the Developing World
John Ohnesorge, UW-Madison Professor of Law 
David Trubek, UW-Madison Professor of Law

The seminar will explore changing ideas about law's role in the economy and the development assistance practices these ideas have inspired. The idea that a “modern” legal system is central to economic development can be traced back to the 19th century. In the 1950s, this idea became the basis for organized development assistance. Today, agencies like the World Bank devote substantial resources to “law and development” and the “rule of law”. While billions are being spent, the enterprise rests upon a wealth of assumptions about the definition of law, the relationship of law to market activity, the role of the state in economic governance, the definition of modernity, and the efficacy of external intervention. These assumptions have changed over time and with them have come changes in the policies and practices of the agencies. This seminar examines these changing ideas and practices and explores contemporary experiences in Northeast Asia, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union.

The course is a limited survey of international macroeconomics. The topics that we cover should provide a foundation for going on to the frontiers of research in international macroeconomics. For further information, please see the syllabus below.

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Public Affairs, International Governance

This a core foundation course for the Masters in International Public Affairs (MIPA).  The course is intended to provide students with a conceptual and contextual framework for understanding international public affairs in an age of globalization. The first part looks comparatively at recent international transformations in governance at the national level, focusing primarily though not exclusively on the developed democracies.  In this section, we will examine topics such as the widespread movement away from Weberian bureaucracy and command-and-control regulation, the emergence of new forms of governance and public management, the sources and sustainability of institutional diversity, and the possibilities and limitations of policy transfer and cross-national learning.  The second part of the course looks at recent transformations of governance at the international level, focusing on the challenge of globalization.  In this section, we will examine the processes, practices, and prospects of global governance, analyzing the role of various types of public and private actors (such as states, international organizations, regional blocs, NGOs, multinational corporations, business associations, transgovernmental networks) across different international issue areas (such as finance, trade, development, environmental protection, and human rights), and assessing the effectiveness, accountability, and legitimacy of the ensuing governance arrangements.

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Seminar in Sociological Theory: Institutions, Actors, and Historical Change: Economy, Society, Politics
Jonathan Zeitlin, UW-Madison Professor of Sociology, Public Affairs, Political Science and History

Institutions and institutionalism are central to contemporary debates across the social sciences.  So too are concepts such as actors, action, and agency.  And there is widespread agreement that understanding historical change constitutes a key challenge for institutionalist and action theories of all types.  This course is intended to guide graduate students through the key debates in contemporary social science about the relationship between institutions, actors, and historical change. 

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The Cold War as World Histories
Jeremi Suri, UW-Madison Associate Professor of History

This is a graduate reading course designed to encourage and facilitate historical research across regions and methodological approaches. In this course we will treat the Cold War as both a multicultural and a multidimensional historical subject. This involves attention to the many diverse interactions among peoples, institutions, and cultures that pervaded the period. We will analyze the conjunctions and disjunctions between different historical voices: center and periphery, rich and poor, political and social.

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The aim of this course is to introduce advanced graduate students to the most important theoretical approaches to the study of international relations. The course is organized in two parts. The first and much longer part briefly addresses the history and historiography of international relations as a subfield, before turning to a ten-week survey of the most influential theories if IR. As we shall see, the intellectual history of international relations as a discipline is itself contested among its participants, but by most accounts the “grand debate” between realists (and more recently neorealists) and liberals (and their offspring, neoliberal institutionalists) occupies a central place in the discipline, and much of the first part of the course will be devoted to analyzing this old and ongoing debate. In addition, however, we will also examine other longstanding as well as recent approaches, including Marxism, constructivism, feminism, and critical theory, each of which questions the assumptions and in some cases the ontology of both realist and liberal theories. In the second and much shorter part of the course, we focus on four substantive issues –the democratic peace, the use of force and foreign policy, European integration, and economic globalization –in order to illustrate how competing theoretical approaches seek to analyze and explain concrete problems in four subfields of international relations.

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Trade Competition and Governance in a Global Economy
Menzie Chinn, UW-Madison Professor of Public Affairs and Economics

This course provides an introduction to international trade policy. Its purpose is to provide students with an understanding of international trade theory, rules, politics and institutions and the major policy issues facing the global trading system. The first part of the course presents a treatment of the theory of international trade. It explores the rationale for free trade, the distributional impact of trade, the impact of tariffs and quotas and the challenges presented by deeper international economic integration. The second part of the course deals with the World Trade Organization. It explores negotiation mechanisms and principles and the rules relating to market access, dispute settlement, fair trade, safeguards and trade-related intellectual property. (TRIPs). The third part considers major issues facing the trading system. These include regional trading arrangements, foreign investment, China’s entry into the WTO and the Doha Development Agenda.

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American Foreign Relations Before the 20th Century

Jeremi Suri,  UW-Madison Associate Professor of History

This is a history course designed to enrich our understanding of America’s place in the world since the years before the American Revolution. The course will touch on issues of national power, territorial acquisition, market penetration, warfare, racial subjugation, class conflict, and gender subordination. We will study how America’s foreign relations helped determine what it means to be “American.” Situating the history of the United States in an international context we will learn how American debates about identity and power reflected and influenced events in distant venues. This course will also highlight how contemporary assumptions about American society and foreign policy build, for better or for worse, on the past. The history of American foreign relations matters because we live with its consequences every day –at home and abroad. 

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Economic Growth and Development in Southeast Asia
Ian Coxhead, UW-Madison Professor of Agriculture and Applied Economics, Southeast Asian Studies

This course examines economic development through the lens of the Southeast Asian experience. Students learn theoretic essentials in the areas of economic growth, international trade and development, as well as acquiring specific knowledge of SE Asian economic development experience.

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For further information, please see syllabus below.

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In this course, we will use economic theory, computer simulations, and historical data to better understand the forces that shape the wealth and well-being of nations and people in the world around us. We will connect the conceptual and theoretical discussion with real experience drawn from around the globe. While the course is centered on economic models and thinking, we will do our best to make these things accessible.

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We will undertake an in-depth study of macroeconomic theory and policy. Macroeconomics studies how different markets work together in general equilibrium. Markets for labor, saving and investment, and financial assets interact to determine the economy’s long-run growth and its fluctuations. These markets also determine economic variables such as inflation, interest rates, foreign exchange rates, trade balances and unemployment. We will study the markets in isolation and together in equilibrium. We also put a strong emphasis on the role of monetary and fiscal policy in achieving better macroeconomic outcomes.

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For further information, please see syllabus below.

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In Political Science, international political economy (IPE) is studied as part of the field of international relations. IPE asks why certain polities become rich and powerful and others do not. It explores regions, eras, the role of the state, politically influential interests, and international organizations. With an eye to debates over and projections on where our globalized age is going, this course looks at IPE in historical, comparative and theoretical perspectives.

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